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Mother Nature was deliberately designed to exploit the affordances that scholarly
research reveals inhere in gesture to give the player a richer play experience, by employing
more and different pathways in the brain, than that provided by games that employ either
traditional button or standard, more literal gestural controls. In what follows, the reader
will find descriptions of the method by which Mother Nature’s gestural vocabulary was
designed, the motivation for that design, and the method by which I intend to test the
effectiveness of that design strategy in the coming weeks. I have opted both to provide this
extended description and to investigate whether or not that design strategy did, in fact,
improve the play experience to see whether this gestural design method could or should
extend beyond this project. Indeed, I wonder whether it might serve as a model method for
designing a gestural vocabulary that develops and fosters emotionally compelling game-play.
Call it a modest stab at developing a Unified Theory of Gestural Vocabulary
Design…
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Mother Nature: The Theory
Embodied Cognition: Its Meaning, Scope and Power
Mother Nature is a game that brings the fundamental components of nature into
one place and uses the players’ own body to make the verbs of nature – grow, hunt, eat,
dodge, repel, smell – into the tools of play. Mother Nature’s objects and those objects’
interactions are based on the logics of the real world. This makes the player a literal mover
and shaker – a god both participating in and affecting the processes of nature.