Idea

Context in Game Design is the idea that you are only present in a game if there are things in the game to represent the world. If there are no sprite, audio, or movement, then you won’t know something is happening.

Consider the Mario example from Steve Swink’s [[Game Feel by Steve Swink]] book. Specifically chapter 8.

High-Level Context: The Impression of Space

In all games there is the experience of the sensation of space. Moving through a world gives us the mental experience of moving through a world.

![[Spatial Learning|clean]] This is the highest level at which context affects feel: the general sense of space. When a space is large is asks players to go forth and explore. To look outside themselves and realize how small they are in the vastness of the game. When the space is small, it causes more introspection, because the world they are in is more constrained.

![[Impressions of Speed and Motion|clean]] ![[Impression of Size|clean]]

Medium-Level Context

This references the feeling of moving through a space that is crowded, and having to leverage immediate object avoidance. It’s the feeling of moving through a room at a crowded party, wandering an empty street, or playing in a basketball game. This level of context is specifically about steering your car around a track - but the track creates this mid-level context. Whether or not there is something on the track is what we’re tuning here.

Consider this the number, the size, the nature, the layout, and the distance between objects. ![[Figure 8.2 from Game Feel by Steve Swink.png]] Another example given in the book describes highway hypnosis, which is the concept that while driving you zone out and drive for hours at a time, with little to no perception of it being that long.

Low Level Context

This is the nitty gritty of collisions and how we interact with them in the space. They can make us feel the things in the space. Games with floaty collisions like arcade racers are far different from intense solid racers like Forza. Forza’s intense and precise control scheme means that it asks a lot of the player to control and operate the car.

However even in Forza the collisions are modified from what their real world counterparts would act like. Most racing game subscribe to the water slide methodology, which says that they will bounce and slide off of everything in their path to keep the car in question moving down the track.

This kind of modified movement allows for a nicer feeling game, and gives us low level context into how the game and it’s collisions work. Using this kind of low level interaction we can shape larger world interactions.

In the example of World of Warcraft when you move through a large open space there is not much High level context. This means that it’s a large space with a lot of emptiness. When hiking in real life we much constantly feel the earth beneath our feet, the rocks in our hands, and see the details of our world. It is this low level interaction, this context difference, which sets our high and low level experiences up to feel more or less gritty, smooth, bouncy, or crunchy.