Coherence v.s Expectations: Paint cans & Books.

Recently in the lectures Kevin discussed how while playing Valve’s Half-Life 2 he discovered that if he threw paint cans against enemies the contents would blind them and he could escape. It was a rather trivial detail the developer still thought to include it. The idea of if a container is full of a liquid and you then through the container hard enough for the contents to burst out is very common sense adding to the construction of a cohesive game space and limiting the structural incoherence.

However, I personally remember that exact instance and others like is (particularly in Valve games) where these very common sense minor details have actually detracted from the immediacy of the game and made me acutely aware of the hyper-mediated nature of the game. The reason for this I find is that after growing up playing video games I have an expectancy of brokenness. Not in the sense of glitches but in the sense that only recently has the hardware been developed enough to support all the little common sense interactions a player can have even within a small space. These omissions didn’t detract from the game they were just realities that you accepted when you hung your disbelief up at the door. When you booted up a game you set aside all expectations of being able to pick up a book and flip through it for example. At best you would get an in-game text description of the book hastily plugged into the game which was fine because you knew there was only so much give in the game. Overtime this acceptance of games limitations became the only way I was used to them. I remember the first time I played Half Life and found a functioning microwave in-game it blew my mind.

These days however we have games like the Elder Scroll series which has several hundreds of in-game books across the series, each with pages of text filled out with stories, song, and history. These books add hours of additional content and context to the game world and are completely superfluous to the game itself.  These added details are amazing developments but I can’t help but compare them to my memories of gaming. Every time I boot up a new game I last about ten minutes before being caught up on some trivial detail, like books or paint cans, and start to think about the ‘game-ness’ rather than the story/text. I compare things that I have found in a new game and think about what it would be like if it came out ten years prior.  It’s strange that these additions that work to flesh out the game world and make it feel like a viable space, a liveable space, make me so acutely aware of the games construction.