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.  

Video Games as Architecture

When we talk about whether video games are art, we usually think of them as fundamentally narrative pieces, most comparable to movies, which also integrate storyline and character with visuals and sound. Part of the difficulty in arguing that video games are art lies in showing that video games can tell a tight story, that (in spite of players' ability to change the course or details of the story) game designers can craft a narrative that affects its players on a level deeper than mere amusement. Even if we can point to some examples of deep characterization and narrative in games, that also leaves out at lot of video games, and there may be games that we thought affected us aesthetically but which don't have great narrative strength. (Ocarina of Time is one game that I wouldn't describe as having particularly sophisticated character or narrative, but which I find profoundly beautiful). So what I want to argue is that the aesthetic effect of some games resembles architecture-as-art more than it resembles film. Let's get a few other points out of the way first, though.

One thing I want to make clear is that I'm not arguing that all video games are more like architecture than like film, nor that all video games are art. I think it's possible for movies, music, and food (among other media) to be art, but not all pieces within these categories are art either: I saw Jurrassic World for the fighting dinosaurs, I sometimes listen to Disturbed to amp myself up for Halo, and I like to eat a big bowl of calorie-rich rice and lentils before I jog. Analogously, I sometimes I play video games just to distract myself for a couple of hours or for the fun of competing. I've never felt aesthetically moved by the Halo series (except perhaps by Reach), but playing it gives me kind of a rush.

Since I already feel heat on the back of my neck from all the Halo players who hate Reach, I want to make a related point. I think that what aesthetically moves us varies from person to person, and, for that matter, from situation to situation. Sometimes I play Kerbal Space Program just for the fun of problem-solving. Others times I find myself feeling genuinely moved toward the aesthetic sublime. Once it caught me by surprise; as my rescue pod took off from the Mun, ferrying a stranded kerbonaut to safety, my heart went pitter-patter, and I suddenly felt very small. So I'm not trying to tell anyone which games they should or shouldn't be aesthetically touched by. I am trying to describe one manner in which games can aesthetically affect us.

I'm also not sure that the other motivations for playing games--for a rush, for problem-solving, for the challenge, etc.-- are necessarily at odds with aesthetic experience. When I rescued my stranded Kerbal from his camp straddling the Munar sunset, I had already put my free time (as well as in game resources) into training that character, as well as into designing the rescue-craft and getting it to the Mun. I suspect that my previous commitment of "resources" to that mission and my desire to succeed were partly responsible for my unexpected empathy with the character I was rescuing. Similarly, when I first took my Skyrim character through the Barrow at Bleak Falls, I felt a real sense of dread, which I wouldn't characterize as a "fun" in any simple sense, but which I might characterize as aesthetically interesting. I think the dungeon inspired this feeling in part because I was actively trying not to be killed by hidden enemies. Though sometimes I really do play video games just for the fun of trying to win, I suspect that the trying-to-win aspect of games can actually contribute to their aesthetic impact.[1]

"But what about this architecture business?," you may ask as I meander through my thoughts. Well, I think that video games in some ways more closely resemble architecture than they do narrative artworks, and that some of the reasons people might use to disqualify video games from the artworld would also disqualify architecture.

Unlike films, games, to one extent or another, encourage players to explore the game on their own terms. This is taken to an extreme in open-world games like GTA and Skyrim, but also characterizes some level-based games like Dishonored and some slow-moving strategy games like the Civilization and Total War series.[2] Similarly, most architecture doesn't limit its viewer to a single perspective, nor does it require you to view it in rigid order of perspectives. Of course, there are some limits in both cases: It's pretty much inevitable that you see bottom floor of Sainte-Chapelle before you see the upper floor; you can't play the last level of Dishonored without playing through the previous levels. But you do have some control. If you want to, you can dwell on Sainte-Chapelle's more dimly lit lower floor for a long time before walking up into the light of the chapel's nave, which might heighten the intensity of the second experience. You can also choose whether to go out to the chapel's balcony or stay inside viewing the windows. In larger cathedrals, like Notre Dame, it's impossible to see everything at once, and you can choose your path through the structure as well as which elements of the cathedral you focus on. Likewise in games, you have some latitude to explore the game-world and its mechanics as suits your preferences; the aesthetic experience isn't engendered by a highly crafted and tight narrative, and we don't complain that cathedrals aren't art on this basis.

Architecture also shares with video games the integration of a variety of aesthetic forms and media. It's true that films contain music, background images, 3D spaces, etc., but in architecture, as with video games, the components need to be appreciable individually as well as within the context of the whole. Whereas in films, viewers are limited by the director's choice as to how closely they can observe the art forms that comprise and back the film, with architecture, the viewer can study each piece individually. A film may pass over a painting briefly, but (keeping with the cathedral examples)  viewers of the building's stained glass, frescoes, or sculptures can dwell on those aspects for as long as they choose. Video games share with architecture the need to form some kind of coherent whole while containing a number of separate works that are individually appreciable. If you look around a cathedral, you'll see one story told by the Stations of the Cross, stories of saints depicted in the windows, and maybe a story of judgment or creation laid out on a ceiling fresco. Each of these works can be in itself visually beautiful (or sublime), and it at least has to be complete enough to evoke something on its own. Whereas films are usually praised as art when they focus in on the psychology of a single character and tie that personality into a tailored story, it seems to me that architecture can work on us by winding together the themes of many artworks and smaller narratives into a great narrative or a great theme. As a lone artwork, a gargoyle, a window, or a fresco may not evoke religious awe, but when all of these smaller works are combined architecturally they can evoke something which none of them can on their own.

This willingness of architecture to play on "great themes" (grandeur, salvation, modernity) by assembling constituent works reminds me of the relation between a video game's whole and its parts. The quests of Ocarina of Time, which stand on their own as mini-narratives, can be fun, enchanting, pretty, and creepy in turn. Individually, most of them probably don't have the narrative weight to be art-fiction. What's of interest (to me) is the thematic interplay between the quests. The first half of the game, characterized by fairy-tale-esque quests, bright spaces, and friendly people, gives way to an incredibly dark second half: The people of Castle Town have been replaced by soul-sucking undead; the realm of the Zoras is frozen solid, and you can never fix it; almost every part of Link's childhood has been transformed into something threatening or macabre, and when you return temporarily to Link's childhood you descend beneath Kakariko Village to find that a darkness has been festering there all along. Even at the end of the game, when the realm of Hyrule springs anew, Link needs his childhood magically restored -- Along the way, he's lost something he otherwise can't get back. In many ways, the game that I remember most from my childhood is about Link's irreparably shattered innocence. It's very lovely and very sad. So without performing as art in the way we expect narrative fiction to, the game is able to generate a thematic interplay that many players, myself included, find quite moving.

I want to point out one more way in which video games and architecture resemble each other: they are both highly technical and industrial, and if we refuse to call video games art for this reason, we'd also need to deny architecture art-status on the same grounds. It's true that video games require highly technical skills, and well as the mobilization of large scale industry to create the computers and servers they are played on, the computers used by the developers, and the networks involved in their distribution. But architecture also is highly technical and requires a large number of skilled workers. For a building to stand, it must be built so that the forces of gravity are distributed properly into the ground; you need to know which materials are strong enough for the job; you need to take into account environmental dangers to the structure. All of this requires architects to make a number of technical decisions to realize their aesthetic vision, as well as to leave much of the execution up to skilled workers who may have minimal personal interest in the aesthetic vision. As with video games, architecture involves a lot of technical skill, and much of the skilled work isn't executed by the work's "auteur." So, I think if we disqualify video-games because of their technical and industrial aspects, we'd also have to disqualify architecture from being art, which seems an undesirable implication.[3]

So what's my point? It's not that all games are just like architecture. Rather, I'm trying to show that we shouldn't assume video games are like films or automatically judge them according to the same standards as films. Some video games are primarily narrative, but there are plenty of non-narrative artistic media, and video games come in many varieties. Perhaps we can expand our appreciation of video games as aesthetic objects if we expand the ways in which we understand them to function aesthetically.

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[1] I think I may be remembering this argument from somewhere else, but I can't recall who should get credit. 

[2] I personally have a hard time getting anything aesthetic out of fast-paced strategy games like Starcraft II, but I'd be interested in whether others experience those games differently.

[3] Come to think of it, I think Roger Ebert made a passing remark similar to this in one of his writings on video games.