Filed: Bayonetta, Community, Games, PlatinumGames
Hello everyone. I’m Hiroshi Shibata, a game designer on Bayonetta. A game designer’s job is to think about a structure of fun, and illustrate it in concrete and tangible ways.
So how did we establish fun in Bayonetta? That’s what I would like to tell you about. Actually, this is something that I should really be doing after you have decided the game is fun for yourself. Since I am writing before the release of the game, I feel a bit out of line.
By the way, the first thing I should set up for you is that, just like everyone draws differently, everyone creates fun differently. This blog is more about what I think about fun, and not me trying to write as if I have some sort of understanding of what Mr. Kamiya thinks is fun.
Before we get started, I think I should first give a simple explanation of the basic flow of human feelings.
Feelings are split into emotions and urges. Urges are born from emotions, and these urges bring forth new emotions as a result. So the flow of human feelings would be:
Emotions -> Urges -> Emotions
For instance, this would be an example flow:
Anger (Emotion) -> Hit (Urge) -> Exhilaration (Emotion)
The important part is recognizing that the emotion that follows the urge is the opposite of what came before. Please keep this in mind.
1. Urges Are At The Core Of Fun
On this project, the first thing that Mr. Kamiya explained to us was how the main character would be in battle. What he made clear was his vision of it based around the “urge to destroy” that exists within the human heart. (This is when we created the prototype that was previously shown on the blog.)
Destruction is one of the strongest urges that exist within the human heart. Even though we live in nature, the only thing that makes us hesitate to destroy is that it will make obtaining food or shelter more difficult.
However, humans bunched into packs of their own creation and called it society, meaning they must repress this urge. If the urge to destroy was let loose on one another, it would end up being self-destruction. That is to say, everyday humans are living their lives while repressing one of the strongest urges within them.
Causing the release this urge that we are normally suppressing is likened to a kind of fun that we can not normally experience in everyday life. This strong urge of destruction becomes a core component of fun.
However, this is not enough to create a true, well-defined sense of fun. Urges are only one part of our feelings. Even though the urge of destruction is awesome, there are tons of uninteresting games, movies, and books that are uninteresting precisely because they have left out the other steps in the flow of emotions.
2. The Emotions That Give Rise To Urges Are The Birthplace Of Fun
So why can’t we make something fun just with urges alone? That is because urges aren’t always present within us. For instance, when we have no urge to destroy, no matter how much we shatter, it will not be linked to fun. It is just like eating when full; you are unable able to appreciate the taste. We need the emotions that trigger the urge to be the catalyst.
What then becomes important is the strength of the emotional stimuli. I’ve rated the common emotions by the strength of the stimulus they incur.
1. Sadness
2. Love/Fear
3. Anger
4. Hate
5. Humor
The emotions with the strongest stimuli are the emotions that trigger the strongest urges.
The emotion that gives rise to the urge to destroy is basically anger. However, this emotion is not a particularly stimulating one, and that causes a problem. It may prove helpful in triggering an urge, but by itself, it is not strong enough to be the main emotion.
The most stimulating of the emotions is sadness, yet this emotion seems to kill urges. This is because when a human being is truly sad, they have little will to do anything at all.
By combining these two emotions, you can link sadness with anger, and give rise to tragic revenge. Since you have sadness, you have a strong stimuli, and the urges that come forth are very strong. There are elements of this in the scenarios that Mr. Kamiya has written. However, if you make sadness the main emotion in triggering the urge to destroy, you will find it actually becomes a hindrance to fun. (I will explain this later.)
If I get into an explanation of all of the emotions, this will become quite long, so I will get to the point. The best emotion to use when trying to trigger a strong urge to destroy is actually fear.
Why? Fear makes humans aggressive. You can’t run away to rid yourself of fear. To purge the emotion, you must stand and destroy. Humans seek physical strength and continue to make increasingly powerful weapons precisely because they are afraid. The urge to destroy borne from fear is much stronger than the same urge born of anger.
Furthermore, fear is better at getting someone’s attention than any other emotion. This is because to defend oneself, we need to identify what causes our fear as quickly as possible and we must identify where we must face it. This is why you see so many rubberneckers, or why reports of crimes have such high viewership ratings.
Thus, if we can create something that will cause fear, humans will automatically take notice of it, and to protect themselves, they will have a strong urge to destroy. We can follow the natural flow of human feelings from emotion to urge. As fear is a strong emotion, it triggers a strong urge, and it becomes the birthplace of fun.
Once you’ve been able to arrive at this main emotion, you must consider how you can make it stronger. In the case of fear, one of the most common ways is via the presence of enemies. To make that fear even stronger, you could make the enemies even bigger, or put even more enemies into the situation. But as this becomes common, without a more dramatic scheme, you will not be able to get people these days feel strong emotions of fear.
So in Bayonetta, we decided to really focus on adding an overarching calamity caused Bayonetta’s foes to appear, and that could stand up to the sort of fear emotions caused by these enemies. As the disasters unfold, if we could make you fight with enemies in real-time, it would intensify the feelings of fear, and cause even greater urges to destroy.
This is the definition of Bayonetta’s theme – “Climax Action.”
Yet, even with this in place, we have no arrived at what we have defined as fun. We need to determine how emotions will change as a result. The final, important piece of the puzzle.
3. The Guts Of Fun Are The Change In Emotions
So with an emotion triggering the urge, the ultimate goal is to change that emotional trigger into something favorable. It is the same thing as when you are hungry. You want to eat because you want to change you feeling of hunger to a feeling of being full.
The way you end up feeling good from that point is when the emotional trigger flips to something favorable. If you are terribly hungry, once you are full, you feel incredibly satisfied. If you are incredibly scared, once you feel safe, it is like the best feeling in the world.
The good feelings that come from this emotional flip are the guts of fun. The birthplace of the sequence, emotions, as well as the urges they create, are steps in a process that exist solely to flip the emotion.
Furthermore, the bigger this flip, or change, the more fun things are going to become. The stronger the fear, the larger the gap when you feel relieved, and thus, the greater sense of enjoyment you feel as a result.
However, this method of creating fun has one important pitfall you must be careful of. No matter how stimulating an emotion you select as your base, unless you can flip it, it will never cause feelings of fun.
For instance, you cannot allow sadness to return to sadness after destruction. Even if revenge takes place as a response to sadness, you are still left with a feeling of emptiness after. This represents a failure to flip the emotional state, and it will not become fun. This is the reason we did not chose sadness as our emotional trigger for the urge to destroy.
Ultimately, to create fun, this emotional flip has to be the number one priority.
In Bayonetta, as we made calamity the object of fear in the game, we were able to make this emotional flip even more dramatic.
By all rights, a disaster is not something a human can really stand up and face. Humans can just sit around and wait for things to pass, especially in the case of large-scale natural disasters like tornados or eruptions. However, in Bayonetta, as you eliminate the enemies at the root of these disasters, you can stop them from occurring. With her power of destruction, you can stop even an eruption or tornado.
In Bayonetta’s case, we don’t just make the sun shine for some reason or another, like the storm seems to pass by chance after you’ve defeated an enemy. When you blow away the enemy who caused the storm to begin with, you are also blowing away the storm itself with your very own hands. Once the grand battle is over and the skies clear revealing deep blue, that great feeling is something that you cannot experience in the real world.
The positive feelings that come from the destruction triggered emotional flip are the core of fun in Bayonetta’s Climax Action. This is how we finally arrived at a full-on feeling of fun in our game.
This blog has become more of an essay, so I will take this opportunity to end here. However, I have really only touched upon the simple framework of fun. With Bayonetta, there is a true variety to its depth, with various kinds of funs contained within. (Most of them are a result of Mr. Kamiya’s genius.) I hope you enjoy experiencing them once the game is finally on-sale and in your hands.
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