Game Mechanics: Sometimes Realism is Unrealistic

Huh? – I think that, in some cases, trying to make game mechanics more realistic actually makes them less realistic, and that many ostensibly unrealistic mechanics of video games actually enhance a game's over all realism. This is because games are fundamentally imperfect approximations of reality. Perhaps unblemished virtual reality will be possible in the future, but it is not currently possible. Consequently, just like other art and entertainment, video games must work within the limits of their medium to simulate reality in a way that is specifically suitable to those limits. I do not think this is radically different from painting, for example. Many paintings seek to display three-dimensional reality on a two-dimensional canvas. This is accomplished through a variety of perspectival tricks, including the placement of distant objects closer together to simulate distance. It is, in a certain sense, not realistic to do this. After all, distant objects are not really closer together, but this is the best way in which a two-dimensional representation can capture distance. Similarly, I think that games can sometimes compensate for the unrealism inherent in their medium by including mechanics which, taken in isolation, seem unrealistic.

What are Game Mechanics? – They are not, as might be thought, clever folk who tinker with the under-bellies of video games. Those are game developers or perhaps coders. “Game mechanics” are the rules of a video game. More precisely, the mechanics are the ways in which the game's simulated reality responds to the player's input. It is a common game mechanic that when you press 'a,' your character will jump. It is a mechanic in Halo that when a player positions her character near a number of moving enemies, those enemies show up as dots in a 'radar' image on the heads-up display. When a player casts as a spell in Guild Wars, a certain period of time must elapse before another spell is cast; this is also a game mechanic.

“Mechanics” refers specifically to the functional ways in which the game responds to input, which lead the player to execute commands in one way or another in order to more effectively manipulate the simulated reality. So, the appearance of a shadow cast by the character when the player jumps would normally not be considered a mechanic, but an aspect of the game's graphics. Other aspects of a game are the story, dialogue, themes, world, and so on. The distinctions may sometimes be blurry. If the appearance of the player's jumping shadow indicated something about the player-character's functional status, then the shadow would be part of both mechanics and graphics. However, I think the definition of “game mechanics” I have given is sufficiently serviceable to continue with.

Realism – Some mechanics will lead a game to resemble the real world, while others will not. If your character jumps up a foot when you press 'a,' that is an ostensibly realistic game mechanic. If your character jumps five hundred yards, it is unrealistic. If, as is rather common, eating food causes your character to instantly  recover from injuries, this is also not realistic. Conversely, if the game requires you to feed your character regularly lest the character die, this is realistic.

I am not discussing, in the main, whether it is good or bad for a game to be realistic. There are obvious reasons why most games are not realistic with regard to food. It would be boring to spend an hour cooking dinner for your character, making sure the meal contains an adequate balance of calories, fiber, fats, and protein. Perhaps if your character ate too much cheese and steak, she would suffer indigestion. This is not fun, or at least it is not the kind of fun most players are looking for when they play a video game. But I am not primarily interested in whether it is fun to play realistic games. I am interested in what makes them realistic.

Unrealism mitigates Unrealism – I think there are some cases in video games where ostensibly unrealistic mechanics actually enhance the realism of the game by accounting for problems of realism that inhere in the medium. Again, I do not find this dissimilar to perspectival techniques used in painting, such as the simulation of distance. For another example from the traditional arts, when a stage-actor is struck with a blunt sword, the stage actor simulates death. In a certain sense, this response is unrealistic, since a blunt sword cannot cause death (at least not in the same way as a real sword). Yet, given the conventions and limitations of stage-acting, the realism of the scene is maintained by the actor's response to the blunt sword as if it were sharp.

Let me examine a couple of examples in detail. I contend that both enhanced jumping and the possession of HUD radar ultimately enhances, rather than detracts from, the realism of some games in which they appear.

Mario Jumpman Master Chief – In many games the characters' jumping ability far exceeds that of a normal human. In Mario platformers, the titular red plumber is able to vault many time his own height. Of course, the Mario series is is not particularly striving for realism. Halo's Master Chief, while not as impressive a jumper as Mario, can jump a good deal higher than you or I. However, Master Chief's enhanced strength and agility are explained in the plot; he is a super-soldier in cyborgized armor.

But there are other games which do not explain the ludicrous leaping laurels earned by their characters. Borderlands and its sequels are like this. All of player-characters are able to jump Olympic distances. This might be explained by the gonzo and cartoonish style of the series. But I think that the enhanced jumping mechanics actually contribute more to the games' realism than to the games' (deliberate) absurdity.

This is because, as with numerous other titles, Borderlands's characters can be blocked by fairly modest physical barriers and are unable to climb. It is possible for a shin-high rock or a waist-high fence to block one's path, and the obstacles cannot be scaled. There are, I think, at least two good reasons why such obstacles are not climbable.

(1) I gather that it is fairly difficult and time-intensive to program a simulated environment to make climbing possible. The majority of games that include climbing at all allow it only in very specific, controlled circumstances. Games which include many climbable surfaces, such as Assassin's Creed, usually make climbing and maneuvering in three dimensions into a major component of gameplay. Developers for games that do not require climbing as a central aspect of gameplay simply do not put in the resources to develop a climbing system. They presumably have more important systems to fine-tune for realism and entertainment, given their limited timed and budget. 

(2) Another reason why climbing mechanics are often not included, I suspect, is to allow the game-designers to control the environment. If the player could climb anywhere, it would be possible to climb out of the levels and areas created by the game developers, so the designers would then be obligated to introduce some other game mechanic which would allow the player to climb most places but which would prevent her from climbing out of the intended play-areas.

For these reasons, and perhaps for others, most games do not enable the player to surmount obstacles by climbing them. This has the potential to become quite silly, immersion-breaking, and unrealistic. If a three foot fence or medium-sized boulder can stop your character in her tracks, you are reminded suddenly that you are in a simulation which differs from reality in some fairly basic ways. I think this is why so many games include enhanced jumping abilities for player-characters. Other normal actions, such as climbing, scrambling, and gently hopping, which would otherwise have to be laboriously programmed, can be folded into this one action (jumping). The player is not forced into silly scenarios where she is trapped by a two-foot fence. It is true that a normal person would have difficulty jumping over a fence from a standstill, but video game characters are not normal people and currently cannot be, given the practical limitations of the medium.

Hunt for the Red Lekgolo – I think that radar, which alerts the player to the approximate location of nearby enemies, also enhances the realism of the games it appears in, all things considered. If you are unfamiliar with “radar” in combat-oriented games, you can take a look at this footage from the Halo series; the circle in the bottom left, dotted with red and yellow, is the player's HUD radar. It indicates the relative locations of both enemies and allies.

Human beings do not have radar (in case you were unaware). Halo's radar-system, like it's super-jumping, is explained via sci-fi macguffins. Other games, however, do not attempt to explain why the player possesses radar. (N64's GoldenEye comes to mind.) I am not bothered, however, by this lack of explanation. In the same way as enhanced jumping compensates for the inability to climb, HUD radar compensates for normal human abilities that are more difficult to simulate in contemporary video games. I'll focus on two abilities that most people possess when they navigate their daily lives, but not when they play games.

(1) We can detect nearby objects and movements using senses other than sight. If a monstrous alien walked up behind you in real life, you might well hear it or smell it. It's tromping might shake the floor. At present, video games do not simulate smell, and they simulate tactile and audio information only to a degree. Rumble packs built into controllers convey certain information, but not all platforms use controllers like this, and the information conveyed by the controller's vibrations isn't always clear. There have been cases where an enemy was standing behind my character hitting her, and it wasn't clear that this was happening. This seemed quite silly, and it was an immersion-breaking way to have my character die. It's true that, if a game has very good sound design and the player has a very good stereo or surround-sound system, some audio information will be available. But even if both of these criteria are met, the amount of information will still be limited when compared with real life.

(2) Real people also have an intuitive sense of the direction in which they are facing and of the motions of their body. This is called kinesthesis, and from what I understand of the relevant science, it is not reducible to the five senses. If you were to cover your eyes thoroughly and spin in a circle, it would take quite a lot of spinning before you could no longer tell which direction you were facing. (If you don't believe me, go try it. Don't fall over.) This extra sense is absent completely in video games. Relative to real life, it is quite easy to become disoriented when turning your character. Now, this may be a desirable challenge; it may be a mark of skill at a particular game if one is able to avoid such disorientation. But I am not talking about whether the feature is fun, challenging, or desirable. My point is that this added challenge subtracts from the game's realism.

Adding some kind of radar to a game fixes both of these realism problems. The information normally garnered through one's senses of hearing, smell, touch, and kinesthesis is simulated with visual information. Although it would be unrealistic for a work in some other medium (such as painting or film) to display radar, radar often adds to the realism of a video game by allowing the player to respond to the interactive, simulated world in a way that better resembles how the player interacts with the real world.

Wrapping Up – So, I think what actually enhances realism is particular to the medium of video games, and may indeed be peculiar to specific games. This is why I am skeptical of some games which claim to feature realistic gameplay. I am not convinced that the absence of radar and high-jumping in, for example, Call of Duty adds to the realism of the game. Playing without these features may make for a worthwhile challenge, but I'm not sure it is correct to call the game more realistic on this basis.

Mount and Blade also touts its own realism. It provides an option, when you start a new game, to make it impossible to quite the game without saving. This feature prevents the player from saving before a battle, then re-loading and replaying if the fight doesn't go well. I don't dislike M&B; in fact, it's one of my favorite games, but I have found that this particular feature often generates results that strike me as unrealistic. I have seen my character captured or my army wiped out for reasons including: clicked the wrong part of the map; cat jumped on my keyboard; clicked the wrong menu option. These kinds of results are not realistic. It is not possible to accidentally sneak into a hostile castle because you hit the wrong button. Being able to re-load the game after losing because of that kind of silliness strikes me as preserving realism, over all. 

With all this in mind, I think it is worth considering not just whether realism is an especially important feature in games, but also what mechanics actually function to enhance realism, because it is not a simple as imposing on the player-character the same limitations that nature imposes on human bodies.  

Euron Greyjoy is Captain Jack Sparrow, Mate? [Spoilers]

In which I gripe about Season 7, Episode 2, on the World Wide Web, rather than talking off my friends' and family's ear about it. This is for the greater good.

How did Euron Get Here and Why Should I Care?  – There were a number of things that struck me as ill-conceived about last night's episode of Game of Thrones: Most of the dramatic tension in the North stems from Jon and Sansa's inexplicably terrible communication skills. It was never previously established that Arya was unaware of the Bolton's defeat, nor that her belief to the contrary was a driving motivation for her revenge spree. Allying Randal Tarly with the Lannisters puts all of the most dislikable characters on one side, which further erodes the moral grayness and nuance that the show at least pretended to in the past.

However, it was the sea battle at the end of the episode that struck me as the most preposterous cluster of shark-jumping. The first question, which passed through my mind as soon as the battle began, was how did Euron's fleet find Yara's ships on the open ocean, in the middle of the night, without being seen themselves? The most plausible answer I can think of is that Yara was using a standard sea-route toward Dorne, and Euron knew where to wait for her. But this doesn't really make sense, since Euron had no established way of knowing Daenery's plan. It's not impossible that he had a spy, or that he split his enormous fleet to cover the various routes that Yara might take from Dragonstone, but no such thing is established.

This continues a general problem with Euron Greyjoy – The writers have him show up to advance the plot without establishing anything about him or his abilities, and without placing any realistic limits on him. How did Euron build the greatest armada in Westeros in the time it took Yara to cross the Narrow Sea? Presumably he made the sails out of human hair, from his back. How did he find Yara's fleet? He has a compass that doesn't point north. How did he become so good at fighting that he handily defeated the Sand Snakes, who at least drew even with Bronn and Jamie? He's Captain Euron Greyjoy, mate. The difference is that the Pirates films know Jack Sparrow is absurd.

With Euron functioning as a MacGuffin, it's hard to build dramatic tension around him, because it's not clear what constrains or guides his actions; the audience cannot worry meaningfully about what he will do next and whether he will succeed, because his actions abide by no identified logic. This brings us to the next problem. It's not clear what motivates Euron, if anything, except the desire for power and revenge. Although this character choice is not an inherent travesty, it also doesn't make for a terribly interesting villain, especially since we don't know why he has these malign desires. Compare Euron to Cersei, who similarly covets power and revenge, but whose underlying motivations have been established over several seasons. Cersei wants power and revenge, because the power to guarantee her own safety, autonomy, and dignity have been dangled just out of her reach since she was married to Robert Baratheon.

Euron's motivation, an ill-defined lust for power and vengeance, is especially a problem in the context of the sea battle, because this motivation doesn't really contrast with Yara or Ellaria's motivation in any interesting way. Yara wants power, and Ellaria wants revenge. Yara probably wants revenge too, come to think of it. These motivations aren't developed enough to differ in their nuances, and since both sets of combatants want the same basically amoral thing, there's no moral contest at stake in this battle either.

It doesn't help that all of the characters present are essentially B-characters at this point. We haven't seen much of Yara or gotten to know her outside of her relationship to Theon. Ellaria and the Sand Snakes are notably unpopular and lack individual characterization. In fact, when two of the Sand Snakes died, I couldn't remember their names, never mind anything else about them, which somewhat blunted the emotional impact. If, just for instance, Bronn had been involved in this battle, even though he is also amoral and fairly one-dimensional, at least the dramatic stakes would have been raised because he's a familiar and likable character. The only reasonably well developed character present was Theon, and he had his own problems.

Specifically, I found it unclear whether Theon's escape was supposed to be an act of cowardice or an act of prudence. The episode seemed to imply that Theon's escape fit into the ongoing question “Has Theon recovered his manhood?”¹ and this question was answered in the negative, setting up a further manhood-recovery arc for Theon. This is a problem for me for two reasons (1) This particular narrative has already been played out with his escape from Winterfell. If they wanted to reignite or further develop Theon's recovery narrative, it needed more set up than it received. (2) Running away struck me as the obviously prudent thing to do, rather than as cowardly. He had no chance whatsoever of rescuing Yara or reversing the battle. Attacking Euron would have been suicide and/or Euron would have killed Yara, whom he was holding hostage. His decision seems no more cowardly than Yara's retreat after her abortive attempt to rescue Theon from Ramsay.

So, what we are left with is a battle between two groups of underdeveloped characters, set up by a MacGuffin, in which both sides just want to acquire power for themselves, where they fight in the dark, and in which it is often unclear which ships and figures are fighting for which side. The show clearly intended the battle to provide a strong emotional cadence for the episode and to establish a sense of real peril for other beloved characters. Instead, it incapacitated a number of characters that nobody cares about, and it signaled that Captain MacGuffin Greyjoy can strike anyone, at any time, regardless of whether it makes sense.

That is not the same thing as establishing peril, because the audience has no parameters according to which they can worry about the characters. When Rob Stark married inappropriately and then returned to the Twins, that established peril for a major character, because the viewers had a specific reason to worry that Rob might be betrayed at that specific time, leaving them on the edge of their seats. When Stannis attacked King's Landing, a battle which was set up over the course of a season, there was specific peril for well liked characters, such as Tyrion, because it was established that Stannis was a self-righteous ideologue receiving most of his advice from a religious zealot who burned people alive. If Stannis won, he would surely have killed Tyrion, who at that point in the series was colored with shades of gray that would have been imperceptible to someone like Stannis.

If a Euron can ride the Black Pearl over the horizon at any time, seems to possess godlike durability and combat skills, and doesn't have a clear set of motivations, this doesn't put any particular character in peril; it puts every protagonist in vague danger, and you can't be on the edge of your seat all the time for a whole season.

Some thoughts on the episode from a feminist standpoint – I don't think it would be quite right to say that the end of the episode was outright sexist, but it struck me as somewhat tone-deaf on matters of gender-politics. The episode's finale featured a notably vile male character (Euron), whom a number of viewers have identified as an analogue for Donald Trump, killing or capturing four of the show's combat-oriented female characters in under 10 minutes. Euron personally overpowered two Sand Snakes and captured Yara, and was party to the capture of a third Sand Snake. So far as I can recall, that leaves Arya and Brienne as the only two women in Westeros who are established as able to use a sword. I understand, of course, that Westeros is a feudal society. The problem isn't that there are few combat-trained women. What's uncanny is that the writers just had Euron incapacitate two thirds of them at once.

I also understand why the writers might have wanted to do away with some of these characters, especially the Sand Snakes. One would wish to avoid a television show full of Sand Snakes for the same reason one would wish to avoid a movie populated by 13 dwarves. They are underdeveloped, interchangeable, and (in the case of the former) widely disliked. I am not convinced, however, it was an unavoidable that these female, martially skilled characters were underdeveloped. It was, at some point, a conscious choice by the show writers to give the hound an interesting story-arc well after he dies (or retires) in the books, but to have Obara and Nymeria pout while Tyene whispers to Bronn about his need for “bad pussy.” So, I'm not saying that it was sexist for the writers of Season 7, Episode 2, to kill off Obara and Nymeria. I'm skeptical, however, that the factors which led them to be disposable, unpopular characters were nothing but random accident.

Finally, the writers seemed to have obliviously repeated one of the most uncomfortable features of the scene from Season 5 in which Sansa is raped by Ramsay Bolton. Arguably, the most objectionable aspect of that scene was that Sansa's brutalization turned around suddenly to feed into Theon's character development. The scene's cadence wasn't about Sansa's trauma, but Theon's emasculation as he stood by and failed to intervene. By all accounts, Theon's current importance to the “great game” is ancillary at best. Yara describes him as an adviser and protector, though we've seen him doing neither of these things. Nevertheless, as Daenery's fleet is lost, and two significant political leaders (Ellaria and Yara) are captured, the scene ends with an emphasis on Theon failing to fulfill his potential. This doesn't seem like the right water for the series to retread.

1I don't think this is a bad way to describe his character arc. Theon starts out as a deliberately macho character, then is is literally, physically emasculated, and then he needs to find himself again.