Gesture
The surface area of contact between player and videogame system.
What Gesture Is
A Gesture is not necessarily a single action like you may initially imagine. It could be a singular moment or action, but we can also investigate gestures that are a series of actions, a period of play, a second of something silly or spooky occurring, or an entire arc of a character for hundreds of hours. A gesture is just to identify a unit of investigation. A boundary box to the most often elusive experience that is playing videogames.
So a Gesture can be a micro-moment: the split-second of pressing jump and feeling the character move from the ground. Or it can be the entire videogame: the full story plot and mechanics through a hundred hour RPG.
Do not conflate Gesture with "action" or "mechanic." Gesture contains these things but is not reducible to them. Gesture is the whole experience at whatever scale the Gesture is being experienced/performed.
The 4 A's
A Gesture is composed of four elements, experienced as one thing:
- Action: What the videogame has the player do in that Gesture, including the Action of nothing at all!
- Art: Art direction, lighting, level design, camera grammar, music, sound design, etc.
- Arc: The amount of time. A moment, a minute, an entire videogame's length.
- Atmosphere: The feeling and ambiance experienced with the videogame
When playing a videogame we do not aim to parse out all of these separate portions to process them. When analyzing, we attempt to identify how each portion contributes to that singular Gesture being looked at.
Analyzing Gesture
When you analyze a Gesture, ask:
- What is the Action? What are the things I can do (or not do)?
- What is the Art? What am I seeing and hearing? What traditions or ideas is the videogame drawing from?
- What is the Arc? How long does this last? What is its shape over time?
- What is the Atmosphere? What does it feel like? What vibe does it create?
Then ask: Where does each of these come from? What is the Aesthetic Heritage?
Exercise
Play any videogame for 10 minutes. Pause. Identify one Gesture you just experienced. Write down each of the 4 A's. Don't worry about being "right." The goal is to practice seeing.
Why Start Here
Gesture is the entry point to VG101 because it centers player experience rather than designer abstractions. Most frameworks start with mechanics, systems, or rules. These are useful, but we feel like they can miss what players actually feel.
By starting with "what did you experience?" rather than "what are the rules/permissions/affordances?", students develop the habit of attending to feel before structure. This prevents the common trap of designing systems before they are needed, or creating something seemingly logical but ends up being vestigial or feeling not right.
Teaching Sequence
Introduce Gesture before the 4 A's. Let students sit with the holistic concept before giving them analytical tools.
- Play a short videogame together (5-10 min)
- Ask: "Describe one moment that stuck with you"
- Ask: "What do you think made up that moment? What were its parts?"
- Introduce "Gesture" as a name for that moment
- Only then introduce the 4 A's as a way to analyze Gesture
Common Misconceptions
"Gesture = one button press"
Students often want to equate Gesture with a single input. Bring up early that it can be a multitude of things dependent on the situation: Gesture is about experience, not input. A Gesture can span seconds, hours, days, even years.
"The 4 A's are separate things"
Students may try to analyze each A in isolation. In such a situation emphasize that the 4 A's are experienced as one thing. Analysis separates what is unified in play.
Assessment
For the Gesture concept, assess through discussion. Look for: Can the student identify a Gesture? Can they articulate what makes it a Gesture rather than just "a mechanic" or "an action"?
Why "Gesture"
The term "gesture" draws from many sources of inspiration, one of the most prominent is Andre Bazin's film theory, where he identified gesture as an important unit and facet of painting, film, acting, and other creative forms. Gesture is a meaningful unit that communicates through form rather than (or in addition to) explicit content.
Videogame Gesture extends Bazin's insight: it's not just what's in the frame, but what the player does within and in response to that frame. It is the surface area of contact between the system and the player's action. There are even Gesture readings in which occurrences from outside a videogame's rendered space can affect the Gesture.
Relation to Other Frameworks
MDA (Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics): MDA moves from designer-facing (mechanics) to player-facing (aesthetics). Gesture inverts this: we start with player experience and work backward to understand what produced it.
Game Feel (Steve Swink): Swink's work on game feel is a major inspiration in Gesture, and its particular bridge of aesthetic and mechanic is of great use. However, Gesture extends beyond the integration of game feel. Gestures also encompass longer arcs of play and atmospheric qualities as well as narrative experience in both its implicated and explicit uses.
Common Questions
Can there be nested gestures? (A gesture in a gesture?)
Yes, of course - you can multiply your analysis however you find useful and informative. But please, do not over-complicate things. Gestures and their interrelationships are essential to the reading of a videogame, however perceiving gestures inside of gestures is most commonly counter-productive.
Can Gestures fail?
Yes and no! There will always be a gap between the intended affect and materialized affect in any creative form.
Is an unintentional experience still a Gesture?
Absolutely! The experience a player has is the only experience they have at that moment. The systems and what contact looks like with the player to that player is the experience of the gesture.
References
- Swink, Steve. Game Feel (2009)
- Keogh, Brendan. A Play of Bodies (2018)
- Anthropy, Anna & Clark, Naomi. A Game Design Vocabulary (2014)
- Koster, Raph. A Theory of Fun for Game Design (2004)