In Japanese, there's a word called 'Ma'.
It is space or rest.
It can be seen in noh dramas, Japanese calligraphy or in the long white expanses of a zen garden.
It's built into Japanese architecture and inherent in Japanese poetry.
It can even be found in the long slope and shots of anime.
But it's something that many games are missing, and it's something which a great many might benefit from.
[Intro Music]
Ma is a nearly impossible concept to translate
because it's not exactly how we think of a musical rest or a blank space on a painting in the Western tradition.
It's not just about having the negative space help define the foreground...
...rather It's about the negative space being one continuous piece with the image itself.
Neither the blank space nor the filled space is the point of the piece but rather together
they simply form the experience the piece provides.
So what does this have to do with video games? Well...
MA is about using the rhythm of emptiness or inaction to create uncluttered experiences. Think of it this way
Clutter isn't about the amount of things in a space
but rather how they're arranged. A room can feel cluttered if everything's just littered on the floor
but the same room with the exact same things in it can feel wide open and liberating if
everything is put away on shelves or nicely arranged. And this is
Important for modern entertainment. In the film world you can think of Michael Bay as the ultimate in anti-Ma.
More often than not there's too much stuff happening to continuously in his films, and when there are rests they feel... awkward.
Like they're all in the wrong places.
At times they feel almost stiflingly cluttered and that's unfortunately the direction we've gone with Triple A games
But instead I would like to see these games fury roading it up, for lack of a better term.
There's no less action and no less stuff going on in Mad Max fury road than any transformers film...
...but it is filled with Ma; with the pervading sense of slowness, that makes the action something you can really appreciate, and...
something that's stays with you long after you've got out of your chair.
That's because all experiences have two components: The objective component [What is actually happening in the moment], and...
...the subjective experience [the thing that the experiencer feels].
Take for example a sunset.
Two people can watch the same sunset (that is to say have the same objective experience) and yet to one it can be a
celebration of the wonders of life, and to the other it can be a sorrowful reminder of the ebbing away of time.
But without Ma; Without space; that second bit (the subjective part of the experience) is impossible.
Without Ma we don't notice the sunset at all.
We rush through our busy day and don't give it a second glance. Much less have the internal space to process and create our own
personal and subjective experience of that sunset. And the internal rhythm of arts rests and blank spaces; that internal Ma...
...can help give us the capacity to have that subjective experience.
A Michael Bay film or the Call of Duty Infinite Warfare campaign throws things at us so fast that we're pushed through the experience.
We get through it because it doesn't give us time to realize we might want to stop, but at the end of it we actually
remember very little vividly. Now compare this with something like The Witcher 3,
Prey, or even the most recent God of War.
The ability of the designers to trust the player to handle a few moments with nothing, where they're simply riding across a beautiful landscape or
stalking through haunted halls, sets the player up to be able to process what they're experiencing.
This allows the game (even if just on a subconscious level) to take on meaning or to create some feeling in them,
even if that feeling might simply be awe [surprised face].
But Ma doesn't simply take the form of time without action
Games are complex things with many types of rhythms and spaces within them. If we think about Ma as the
transformational power of emptiness, rests or blank space.
Then we can see that any aspect of a game that has the possibility to be cluttered can be devoid of the minimalism Ma brings.
Detroit is at its best in the one moment where it doesn't rush all over itself to tell you its narrative and
instead just sets you down in a hellish graveyard. And in that moment. It's also the best at getting its narrative across.
Destiny 2 is best when it focuses on simple shooting and doesn't whiplash between trying to be a
serious space opera and a comedic sci-fi romp.
When we talk about Ma part of what we're talking about is stripping away all that's unnecessary to make room for that blank space.
That blank space will then transform what's left into something to remember, as we craft our games we must
continuously ask ourselves:
"Why?" with every decision we make, and unless we can really justify each thing we build
there are definitely still pieces to be stripped away and replaced with an absence.
Flower, Shadow of the Colossus, Nier Automata. These are all games about Ma.
They're games about Ma for radically different reasons, but they're all games where the things left unsaid, the mechanics left out,
the system's never implemented; make room for the player to fully experience them.
But since Ma is about space, about a rest rather than action. It's difficult to completely define.
The best definition that I've heard was one man
who said that extravagance is complete silence, not a riot of color,
not the gaudy gold's we sometimes associate with extravagance, but a moment of simple silence between the noise.
And that's a lesson that many games, [cat mews, "Hey, there"]
And apparently Zoe [the cat], could benefit from today. We'll see you next time.
[Zoe, the cat, purring]
[Outro Music]