Mise-en-scène Applied to Level Design: Adapting a Holistic Approach to Level Design

Mise-en-scène is a term from film studies which means "the use of space within the frame: the placement of actors and props, the relationship of the camera to the space in front of it, camera movement, the use of color or black and white, lighting, the size of the screen frame itself"(Kolker, 1999). It is a French term that literally translates, "put in the scene". The mise-en-scène informs everything about the film and gives filmmakers a rich palette to induce emotions in their audience. By arranging elements on screen in a certain way, directors can create mood, atmosphere, tension and conflict in the filmic space that is not achievable through any other means. Obviously, games are not movies. The difference between games and movies is that a movie projects its images in an immutable sequence, while a game presents a branching tree of sequences and allows the player to develop his/her own story by making choices at each branch point. The audience of a linear story must infer causal relationships from a sequence of facts; the player of a game is encouraged to explore alternatives, contra positives, and inversions. The game player is free to explore the causal relationship from many different angles. Indeed, the player expects to play the game many times, trying different strategies each time (this is the whole point of a game like Fable). A game's representational value increases with each playing until the player has explored a representative subset of all of the branches in the game net. Several game theorists, from Henry Jenkins to Lev Manovich have written on game narratives unfolding through the course of the player navigating through the game space. Game designers don't simply tell stories; they design worlds and sculpt spaces. It is no accident, for example, that game design documents have historically been more interested in issues of level design than plotting or character motivation. A prehistory of video and computer games takes us through the evolution of paper mazes and board games, both preoccupied with the design of spaces, even where they also provided narrative context. When a company adopts a film into a game, the process typically involves translating events in the film into environments within the game. When gamer magazines want to describe the experience of gameplay, they are more likely to reproduce maps of the game world than to recount their narratives. When game designers draw story elements from existing film or literary genres, they are most apt to tap those genres ñ fantasy, adventure, science fiction, horror, war ñ which are most invested in world making and spatial storytelling. Games, in turn, may more fully realize the spatiality of these stories, giving a much more immersive and compelling representation of their narrative worlds. (Jenkins, 2002) In contrast to modern literature, theater, and cinema which are built around the psychological tensions between the characters and the movement in psychological space, these computer games return us to the ancient forms of narrative where the plot is driven by the spatial movement of the main hero, traveling through distant lands to save the princess, to find the treasure, to defeat the dragon, and so on. If we make the assumption that the narrative of the game is revealed through the game characters' traversal of in-game spaces, then it becomes clear that the level designer is the game's key storyteller. Mise-en-scène can be applied equally to games as it can to cinema. Just as the film director controls the mise-en-scène of a movie to immerse his audience in a fictional narrative, the level designer (knowingly or not) controls the mise-en-scène by building game spaces that will immerse the player in an alternate world to be explored. However, the use of mise-en-scène in games is underdeveloped and still in its infancy. There are examples of games where level design is used very effectively to evoke a certain mood in the player. Henry Jenkins and Kurt Squire site the example of Yu Suzuki's Shenmue: "Grey skies and snowy streets contribute to the game's sad, contemplative mood, expressing Ryo's (the game's adolescent protagonist) experience of mourning and loss." Survival horror games particularly tend to use the elements of the level to achieve a sense of immersive horror in the player, such as in the Silent Hill series. In pursuing a more emotional experience in games, level design can be leveraged to reinforce not only emotion, but hint at psychological factors of the computer-controlled characters and reveal the intricacies of the narrative. Studying the techniques of mise-en-scene and taking a holistic approach to level design may help game and level designers tap even deeper into the player and allow for communication at a sub-conscious level. This will lead to more interesting and compelling games that will enrich the game experience for the player. Our paper will explore the connections between mise-en-scène in film and level design in games. We will look at the components that make up mise-en-scène in film and how these components relate to the design of games. We will investigate current uses of mise-en-scène and level design to evoke emotion in their respective media, and finally what techniques of mise-en-scène can be adapted to gaming to grant the player a deeper involvement in the emotions, characters, story and spaces that make up a game world.