Size Does Matter

I have been collecting my thoughts recently on matters regarding scale within game environments. Most will have experienced playing at least one game that never felt quite right or was so obviously out of proportion that it just felt wrong. I’m going to use that word again, immersion. It may not seem like a serious issue at first, we know that we are playing within a virtual space, don’t we?  We do, but our brains are still being somewhat tricked and it’s that hint of realism that allows us to feel as though we are a part of the game world.

This subconscious deception however requires fine balance and if the scene doesn’t feel as though its dimensions are accurate then those levels of immersion are lost. I’d like to note that I’ve used words relating to feeling for determining whether or not the scale of an environment is correct. This is due to the fact that a game world scaled to real world measurements would actually feel incorrect. The importance of scale surpasses that of graphical fidelity even, as older games still had the ability to feel immersive despite their primitive nature.

One possible reason that we find virtual spaces of true scale incorrect has to do with the way in which we perceive depth and what we consider to be average, particularly in regard to people. When we look at an object with both of our eyes, our brain is able to determinate the depth from the slight differences in eye position as opposed to viewing an object on a two dimensional screen. We therefore rely on the scale of an environment to adequately compensate for these differences in order for us to perceive them as correct.

I found a good rule of thumb to keep in mind after reading a Gamasutra article, for sufficiently and consistently scaling an environment so that it feels and looks right. The method consists of using a character representing a person of average height, as a base unit of measurement for all other entities. This means that two separate objects of the wrong size in comparison to each other, will still feel and look right providing that they appear to be scaled correctly in contrast to the character being used. Here is a link to the article.