While many jumped in bed anticipating Christmas, I stayed up on December 24th watching "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," one of my favorite alien movies. The movie is more than 20 years old, focuses on one man's midlife crisis and assumes aliens are cool, but watching it is still a great experience.

The main reason I stayed up to watch it was to see the ending sequence, which lasts roughly a half an hour. The conclusion is beautiful, scary and haunting. Most of all, however, the ending is amazing because there is a maximum of about three dozen words spoken during the last half an hour. The cinematography, music and facial expressions told the story. They didn't need to say anything.

As game developers it is important to take advantage of non-verbal communication as much as possible. Whether we want to admit it or not, computer games are in a non-verbal medium. We must find other ways to communicate to the player besides giving pages of text - no matter how fascinating the story is, it won't compel the player as much as watching and hearing the story unfold.

One of my favorite examples of this is the Mega Man series, a LONG line of Capcom games on various systems. Midway through the series the robot hero Mega Man encounters his match, a robot named Zero. Every time Zero is about to come onscreen a distinct series of whistle notes plays, warning the player of the upcoming ambush. Capcom wasn't trying to be nice - they want the player to, for that second, get excited and anticipate the fight.

The game designers could have easily replaced the whistle with "Look out! Zero's coming!" or could have just removed the warning all together. However, the game would seem less complete and a great opportunity to engage the player would have been missed.

Colors provide the same assistance.

I recently played an imported version of Super Bomberman 5 for the Super Nintendo. It had more than a dozen gameplay variations, 10 characters to choose from, tons of secrets. It also was almost all in Japanese.

I already knew how to play the game, but was initially intimidated by the extensive menus and options. However, colors were used extensively in the game to show the meaning of the options. For instance, the medium difficulty level option is shown in blue, while the hard difficulty level is shown in red.

Another instance, the beeping/flashing power meter, is common in fighting games. When the character is low on energy, there is a repeating beeping sound or the power meter flashes rapidly. This makes the player aware of the current condition, not to mention increasing the urgent nature of the situation.

Simple touches like these are actually the voice of the game designer guiding the player. They are a designer's best friend: it allows us to touch, guide and direct the player with a gentle hand, as opposed to outright manhandling them and saying exactly what we want them to do. To paraphrase what a designer once said, "You want to guide and move the player forward while keeping them under the impression that they are in control."

In the games you play, note the subtle aspects that help guide you along. As many have noted, God is in the details.

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Written by Damon Brown.