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.