Level design and folk representations of the world
In lessons from first-person shooters, Robert Janelle curiously describes the quirks one can find in FPS:
“Red Barrels Always Explode When Pierced By Bullets
You Run Faster When Holding a Knife
You Can Fit ANYTHING In Your Pocket
Coloured Doors Are Locked
Green Liquid is Harmful
Helpful Items Are Just Lying Around
Crates Break Into Splinters When Pierced“
Why do I blog this? a video-game world is a “microworld” in the sense that it’s a close environment with its own rules and processes. As an artifacts crafted and designed by humans, it embeds values and folk mechanisms about how the world could behave. It’s then curious to see what are people’s projections as the one described above. Would a game level be boring/non-challenging if it replicated the material world?
October 18th, 2007 at 6:07 pm
“Wanna go for a jog man? We can go for a jog!”
“Okay…but what are you doing with the knife?”
“What do you mean? You run faster with a knife. Everyone runs faster with a knife.”
-Pure Pwnage Ep. 5
January 10th, 2008 at 11:19 pm
I think most of these details don’t actually derive from values and folk mechanisms, exactly. They may at some level, but different games absorb them differently, and the mechanisms and projections that do somehow make into the FPS structural canon do so because they work well in an FPS logic, not for some other reason.