I have a son who’s nearing 3 years of age and doesn’t talk yet. No – don’t worry, this won’t be a daddyblog, I’m just putting down a basepoint here. He’s facing the challenge of picking up 2 languages at once, and to make matters more interesting, the two languages sound really similar, yet are completely different beasts. Does he communicate, then? Oh hell yes. He understands bloody everything told, and in a way, he talks back with clearly understandable feedback towards us. I had no idea kids could reach such levels of empathy and living-along and whatever terms you might want to coin here. Body language is on such textbook-case level it’s almost bordering on eerie. There’s clearly a communicative level of emotions and empathic level of emotions, and they mesh together perfectly. So, while his brain is figuring out the very basics concepts of spoken communication, he’s developed an interim way of communication, and it just now opened my eyes to something quite curious. It might be yet another textbook example for some people, but I’m not educated on that field. My cherry just got popped on this field, an hour or so ago.

The basic eye-opening moment required an additional “ooh..” moment stemming from thinking up an example from polar opposite. I know people who are highly educated and use their brain on levels of analytical depth that’s alien to me, and on daily basis, they use vocabulary no “ordinary” person has to ever face. They are also somewhat detached on personal level of communication. Everything is questioned and referred and quoted for wise words of masters of relevant field. Everything said is important, not mundane. To me, something feels missing when I listen to them.

Maybe lack of words does not mean lack of communicative abilities, it just drives the communication through emotional and empathic pathways. Body language. Slightest twitch of some hidden muscle somewhere which is registered by an ever-observant lizard brain hidden under our clever superbrain capable of analyzing things down to quantum levels.

Using and knowing too many words leads to reduced level of empathy and that curious “automatic” communication. Go even further with words that are inherently “too sophisticated” and “out of my league” and you end up emotionally distant from the ones who are listening to you. You become an alien most people can’t connect with anymore.

Now, games.

First, games that draw you in and make you ooh and aah on the vague feeling of intimacy of the world itself. ICO and Shadow of Colossus come to mind as first examples. They connect with you, which means they’re able to communicate with you even though they are not something you’d talk and converse with. Yet, they manage to deliver the very feeling of soul of the gameworld in a way you accept with open arms, with your defenses down. They pull your walls down, fullstop. Does this remind you of other such games? Which ones are they? Do they have lots of dialogue, or do they have a distinct lack of it? ICO has minimal dialogue, and even then it’s fictional language..

Second, games that feel deeply interesting and urges you to dig deeper. Clear notion of a traditional story, lots of little details, carefully constructed world and everything connects with everything else. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow Of Chernobyl comes to mind. Half-Life. Witcher. Bioshock. Fallout 1 through 3. Tinkering with things, objective-based gameplay with new dialogue, diary notes and events presented along the way. They tell you things through words coming out of NPC mouth, or by text. Possibly lots of it. Depth of the world is achieved by presenting you with a barrage of information your brain begins to click through, creating coherent forms and shapes that define the world. World is couraged to observed as realistic, open for literal interpretation. Very, very much like reading a book, except you have to fight and solve your way through the pages of it. No “automatic” flow as such.

So, there’s two different ways of communicating to the player what world he or she is in, and how he or she should take it in. They’re very probably better kept separate, and not mixed up. Further from the middlegrounds, better the impact. Mixing them up might tickle up an irrecoverable “that’s not right, dunno why but it’s just not right.” -reaction one can’t justify even if asked. It’s the automatic bits of our brain that dictate how we feel about things, and games should always feel just right with no apparent reason. Apparent reasons come through analytical thinking, feeling of just right comes from clicking with the game, and that’s empathy.