Moved by Physics
Posted on | October 19, 2008 |
“Action and reaction” is one of the few things that I remember from my school physics lessons, but while recently playing a physics-centric game I found it wasn’t just the objects that were reacting to actions, so was I. Forget your interactive-narrative, character-focussed, multiple-storylined experiments; I’m going to tell you why a game about physics moved me more than any professionally penned ‘narrative driven game’.
Books and movies have a tradition of being able to tug on the heart strings, of being able to illicit emotional responses. Meanwhile game designers, with their illogical urge to match the attributes of other media rather than trying to create new states of user-media interaction, have clumsily tried to ape the way that older, more passive forms of communication manipulate their audience.
And just when I thought that games were always going to struggle to provoke a real and intense emotion pull, along comes a game that does exactly that, without even trying.
Fantastic Contraption by Colin Northway, is part sandbox (toy) and part game. If you’re following the instructions, then you’d be busy assembling a mechanical devices, made from combinations of 8 in an effort to move an object to a predefined target. That all sounds fairly straight forward - if a little cold and hard. However, once I started to flex my mechanical muscles something unexpected, but wonderful started to happen.
With each iteration of machine that I built I found myself becoming more and more driven and determined. Each failure to hit the target pained me, while perfection had me punching the air with joy.
As is the norm, each level got progressively more difficulty, demanding me to build ever more elaborate devices to overcome what had initially seemed an impossible challenge. Like life itself; sometimes the margin between success and failure was excruciatingly close - I’d lean eye-wateringly close to my monitor and plead for more effort from my creation, somehow convinced that my supportive voice would give my baby the impetus to overcome the pixel between it and the goal. And therein lies the hook; ‘my baby’. I had created it and despite, or more likely because of, its lack of eyes, arms, legs or face, it’s personality was the one that I had given it.
Some of my machines were brutes, able to bully any obstacle that was put in their way. Many were like Forrest Gump - stupidly (but endearingly) determined to keep on jogging towards the goal taking every knock-back on the chin and rising above it. And others, if you’ll excuse my lack of modesty, were consummate professionals - they were born to win; they were intelligent and sleek, and could not be denied their quarry.
These were my creations, and I, the proud father, was able to share every high and low of their existence, from cradle to grave. I wasn’t, as is the case with interactive narrative driven games, given a fleshed out character and then expected to believe that they would behave in a way that I want them to - surely they’d have a determination of their own?
And that’s the problem with games that try to build up an emotional connection - you end up with an uncomfortable ménage-a-troit. I want to build a relationship with the characters, but they already have a relationship with the designer. I’m always going to be the ‘bit on the side’; someone that offers an occasional distraction. Before I ever meet them, the character and the designer have already developed an unbreakable bond that I can only ever flirt with.
Take the infamous Star Wars re-edit. All of us thirty-somethings know that Han Solo shot Greedo first, yet when George Lucas rereleased the special edition of the film, the scene had been re-engineered so that Han was now protecting himself, and responding to a first shot from Greedo.
I don’t know anyone that thought any less of Han for originally shooting first. The Han I grew up with was a bit of a scoundrel, and being pursued by bounty hunters around a kill-or-be-killed galaxy. In other words, shooting first was ‘in character’. Han had his faults, but that’s why we loved him.
In games, when we are given a character to manipulate, we have the same issues. We are given a character - we are given a being with characteristics - and if this character is to be believable, then it’s behaviours are already determined. In other words, they should be ‘predictable’ (and that allows for them being predictably unpredictable).
Game designers that want to provide us with an emotionally charged interactive narrative could do much worse than playing Fantastic Contraption. If they can understand the mechanics, not just the physics, that have given what could have been a cold game a soul, then maybe they can engineer the experiences they’ve promised for so long.
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