Often, when developing a game, the creators have to take into mind what I like to call “Unnecessary Realism”. There are moments inside games that would, quite simply, be annoying if they were to follow the rules of the real world. To a gamer, reloading your gun in an FPS is perfectly acceptable and, indeed, considered a good move if you get a free chance regardless of how much ammo is left in your gun. However, it might seem to an inexperienced on-looker that the player is removing the clip with their remaining bullets and refreshing with a new one. Of course, we know that we are only reloading the missing bullets and that the animation of changing clips is for flavor.
I was watching my roommate play through The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess on the Wii. She completed a puzzle that was necessary to advance and she was high up in a room and then began to walk back down to the bottom to continue her task. “Why didn’t she just jump down?” I thought to myself. It was clearly much faster. She seemed absolutely shocked that I had considered throwing poor Link off the 30 foot cliff. Again, real-world logic is interfering with efficient game-playing here. On the one, realistic hand, yes… throwing Link off the cliff is quite cruel. On the other hand, you’re only going to lose 1 of what was currently 7 hearts because of this. When you have to play through what will end up being a 40+ hour adventure, cutting corners like this becomes second nature.
Inexperienced gamers also seem to be under the impression that anything “secret” should be a secret to everyone—without any hint at all. But once again, that would be quite simply frustrating and so developers give us helpful hints. Again, while watching my room mate play Zelda, I voiced my concern when she ran right past a secret area. She backed up and looked around but was confused. All she could find was rocks. Ah, but the rocks were formed in a circle, I pointed out. Still confused, she didn’t seem to understand that this wasn’t a natural formation. “Go back and spin in a circle counterclockwise with your red clothes on! It’s so obvious!” I exclaim.
Finally, she performs the spin and, sure enough, a secret room lay hidden. (note: there is, of course, no secret in Twilight Princess where you have to spin counter-clockwise with red clothes on. You can’t spin counter-clockwise and there are no red clothes to be worn! I take the liberty of invention in my blog!)
We, as gamers, can notice when something is out of place. We recognize that the world we are playing in is programmed and that if there is something that doesn’t fit the formula, it’s either a glitch or a deliberate change. We have developed a fine tuned ability to recognize what is deliberate and what isn’t. If we come across a slightly discolored or rounded rock, our instant reaction is to blow it up with whatever means necessary. Our eyes are constantly scanning trees, bushes, houses and the like for the slightest irregularity so we can unleash our full arsenal until a satisfying chime indicates that we’ve discovered a secret.
If anyone actually comes across this blog, please post your own observations on gaming logic. What sort of skills and logic have you developed from your gaming experience? There are certainly logics out there that I’m not privy to from not having played a certain genre enough.
Despite being a rather experienced gamer, I'll still take the long way down a tall room. It has nothing to do with hearts and cruelty; I just like taking the longer path. In my gamer's logic, getting somewhere taking the long path if often the most satisfying way of doing it. This is especially true when I discover some form of treasure or secret because of it.
ReplyDeleteAs gamers, we tend to see everything as inherently equal; balanced, if you will. This stems from our increasingly founded belief that developers seek to make the experience pleasant for us regardless of what style or flavour of play we might choose.
ReplyDeleteA prominent example lies in fighting games where most typically, large and muscled characters are slow while small and slim characters are fast. If we were to take a realist perspective on this, the larger guy should be faster. After-all, how many olympic runners do you see as small and skinny?
Similarly, where the gun beats the sword in real life, in videogames they are often balanced so as to both be usable(often with the gun losing damage or DPS to the sword). This is most prominent in RPGs.