Towards An Understanding of Movement

general
1

I’ve been on a bit of a tear with search-action games lately (Nine Sols, Ender Magnolia, Vernal Edge, Blade Chimera, Ultros, Shadow of the Ninja Reborn) and it’s got me thinking about movement as a concept in video games. Are there ways to discuss the mechanics and the pathos of movement that are pertinent and malleable? For example, I toss around the term, “Metroidvania” but that does nothing to truly describe the media at hand. Yes, the Venn circles of Metroid and Castlevania overlap in significant ways, but as we are experiencing more diverse explorations of just that particular genre, that initial term becomes more irrelevant within contemporary contexts. Is it meaningful to build taxonomies of movement in video games? I feel like it would be rad to know/be able to easily search for games that have describable/searchable/accurate systems of movement. Inherently the medium is interactive and, at a functional level, concerned with collision. And if it’s concerned with collision we ought to be able to collectively communicate the trajectories that lead to a collision.

I also recognize that this may be reductive and potentially damaging/diminishing. I come to this all as a curious dude who’s experienced a fun chronology of video game movement and who likes to think about things. Is it just that I wish there was a shorthand description for aspects of a game that has the player character pause slightly before jumping off a ledge versus one that allows for a healthy cantilever of runway to smoothly bounce off platforms? Are these conversations ultimately about speed and perception? Input and action? It would be neat to not diminish but unshackle conversations of on-screen-object-movement from comparisons to commercially successful versions of other games.

8 Likes
2

I definitely can detect differences and form preferences, but I have no way to articulate these.

I think, for Metroidvanias, the biggest part of the “feel” for me is the jumps. I like fluid jumps, and meant different kinds (e.g. my favorite “feeling” one is Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, which has a standing jump, a running jump, and a backflipping jump. I did not like Animal Well at all, which basically has one very simple jump).

Again, I am aware that I am not articulating this well.

3 Likes
3

Before getting into any discussions, it would help to clarify what exactly we’re referring to. From my perspective, we can break this down into two distinct and very complicated topics: the qualities of movement itself (weight, inertia, etc.), and how games operationalize movement.

That’s about all I’ve got.

3 Likes
4

These are good distinguishing avenues to think about this.

Here’s an example of what i’m thinking about. In Blade Chimera if I want to vault over a gap I need to press the jump button, perceptually, well before the on screen character reaches the frame-end of the platform it is jumping off of. In contrast, taking running leaps in Nine Sols needs less precise input/movement to accomplish successfully. There is no hierarchy or judgement that can be made of either system within this scope. Both are decisions made that, I feel like, contribute to a game environment’s overall sense of self. I think movement/friction in games is a significant area of examination that isn’t talked about enough. In my example the jumping in Blade Chimera points towards a significance of weight/gravity that has an intention. If people made the jumping, I can be curious about why it is the way it is. Video games exist in technical and emotional frameworks in an extreme way. Sometimes I feel like understanding an aspect better in one way can excite curiosities of the other and vice/versa. Also they aren’t necessarily binaries but that’s a helpful way for me to think about it.

Ways of talking about video games feels too focused on messaging and not the actual message. Graphics, sound, story, and gameplay are helpful ways to describe something, but I’m looking for ways to talk about feelings and beings and curiosities of movement.

Mostly I don’t have any clear goal for this other than to make space for conversations about how movement in video games feel.

5

To clarify, are you talking about coyote time or about the arch of the jump or both or something else?

1 Like
6

What I’m referring to specifically, I think, is the combination of elements that come together in a moment for the user and the on screen character, how that feels and what that may be able to say more broadly about the game world.

7

Some people have tried, such as ex-friend of the show Tim Rogers in his essay In Praise Of Sticky Friction (skip to the section titled FRICTIONARY to get to the point).

8

Thanks for sharing that @tombo. Personally I don’t much appreciate his style or voice and I would like to generate new discussion. What are some notable movements you’ve noticed in 2D games? Has a game’s movement ever made you curious about other aspects of the game?

Maybe I’m overall looking for more discussion about how a specific part unique to video games (user/on screen movement) can reveal and inspire other parts of the creative thing at hand.

9

In some ways it seems it’d be easy to make a taxonomy of movement since in theory you could just crack the hood open and assign a numerical value to whatever physics are at work.

On the other hand, I think this would be missing the spirit of the question because a lot of what makes movement feel good in games is the context of other non moving parts, like level design and enemies etc.

2 Likes
10

I have wanted to try a search action game where you hold down jump to crouch and release it to jump like in tiny hawk but I suspect I haven’t seen it because it feels bad. Like, you’d run you’d hold the jump button that would make you crouch a slide a bit but also take away a bit of momentum but if you timed it right your jump would be a little boosted. I think it might be satisfying.

On topic, I ding know how we would get enough people on board all using the defined terms correctly. It would need to be crowd sourced and that is what has gotten dark souls being talked about as a metroidvania. The more people involved in an organization task over time, the more meaning erodes and to the meaningless

I would love it. There are things I want in search action games that the current way makes difficult to talk about. I don’t know how to create it in a way that would protect it from the mob.

11

I will take a stab at it later but I think part of the problem is precisely that everyone wants to invent a whole new language for things that have been observed and described before, and even if you come up with good-enough terms to describe things, nobody but your loyal readers are likely to know what tf you’re talking about. language requires enough commonality to be understood and iterated over time. the core problem in videogames is that the vast majority of people are only deeply interested in them for 10-15 years, until they develop other interests and responsibilities, so the discourse goes in circles and you see the same discussions recurring over and over again, because nobody stays long enough in academia, game development, or what remains of game journalism to sustain the transmission of that common language.

6 Likes
12

The IGN review for Star Ocean 6 compares the movement to having a Jet Pack (i.e. the DUMA system), which is technically correct, but I don’t know if it does it justice. Moving around in that game is the most fun I’ve ever had moving in 3D. Floatiness in space is the only consistent word I can think of (for 2D and 3D action games), slipperiness/friction too I guess to a lesser extent. The phrase physics engine does have the built in implication of player movement physics, but people usually are referring to character-object interaction instead of physical space interaction. Within that you could go further and differentiate from movement from a complete stop (origin) vs movement from other movement (chaining), to ending movement (stop). “Oki” in Fighting games is a good encapsulation of people trying to create a slang word for a certain type of movement.

This conversation also just reminded me that the Tales games have funky acronyms for their battle systems (and indirectly their movement within battle system), eg the LMBS system (Linear Motion Battle System), the E-LMBS, the A-LMBS, TT-LMBS, ML-LMBS, etc etc.

1 Like
13

I guess I’ll try to summarize Tim’s ideas in my own words (as I remember them… it’s been 10+ years since I read that article), since regardless of whether or not you like his style, he attempted something very similar to what you’re asking for. You can throw out the vocabulary and categories he introduced, but I think the main idea is a good one: what makes movements different is the kind of resistances (or “frictions”, as TR says) that are built into them.

The “platonic ideal” of motion is the sort of thing someone just programming games for the first time might wind up with: you start out motionless, you press a directional button and your character instantly starts moving at full speed in that direction, the you let go of a button and you’re instantly motionless. This of course isn’t fun, so we introduce different types of resistances to complicate how we move.

For example, if we compare Super Mario Bros with the above, there’s a resistance introduced at stage of pressing a directional button: Mario wants to stay still, so he takes a while to accelerate. There’s also a resistance when you let go off a button at top speed: he wants to keep running, so it takes a while to slowdown. Furthermore, while turning might just seem like a combination of the other two (you’re simultaneously letting go of one directional button and pushing down on the other), from a game design point of view, it’s worth designating it as its own third point of resistance. This is because as a designer, you can actually use different numbers for the friction and the acceleration here than what you’d naturally get from combining the other two effects, creating a very different feel. Also in Mario’s case there’s a special sound effect played at the turnaround.

By analyzing at what points the player encounters resistance and how much resistance there is, we have a fairly objective way to compare two different kinds of movement. It’s obviously not the only way to think about movement, but for game design purposes at least it’s a good heuristic I think. At the very least, it helps to get beyond vague comparisons to figure skating or stick shifts, which can get in the way when you’re trying to cooperate with other people to design something. It works best for comparing two types of motions that are fairly similar, but which are “tuned” differently.

I am suspicious of any grand taxonomies though. When we’re making a game, we’re trying to do something new. If one only looks at finished commercially released games, it’s easy to get the impression that there’s only a very limited range of movement types possible, but spending any time at all with game-designer creative types and you quickly realize that there are millions of other movement types out there. Not all of them are rich enough to build whole genres or even whole games out of, but many of them are still interesting just as something to play with.

I think I had an idea for something similar in 2018, but I only made a tiny prototype for it. You move with the left and right arrow keys then press down to charge your jump. At the time I thought of it as the inverse of Mario: in Mario holding down the jump button after you jump keeps accelerating yourself upwards for a short period of time, leading to a higher jump, whereas with this idea all of that accelerations is anticipated before the jump.

6 Likes