Blink and You’ll Miss It: The Era of Alternative Video Game Mechanics

As we as a society become more technologically savvy and in turn more attuned to the joy of games, there is room for an all too often overlooked development. Over the years games have become more and more impressive, not just in their creation but in their approach and mechanics. I believe that this could be an opportunity to learn from ourselves and create games that are more accessible by utilizing alternative game mechanics.

In the game “Before Your Eyes,” you play as a boy relaying the memories of his life to the Ferryman. It is a stylistically simplistic storytelling game with a unique spin: the game progresses every time you blink. The implications of this game mechanic story-wise are quite interesting. At first, you go through the slow story of this young boy’s life, blinking in a usual rhythm because everything seems normal at first. That is until the Ferryman sees the boy’s lies and the player discovers the twist of the game. The scenes suddenly become shorter and quicker and your life passes you by with every blink. The story’s most emotional moments are in the most important scenes which most players don’t get to fully experience because they just can’t keep their eyes open long enough. 

Cover of “Before Your Eyes” on Steam

“Before Your Eyes” was not only a piece of art, but a marking and reminder of what we are capable of. Gaming mechanics typically involve a keyboard or buttons and a joystick or mouse, but “Before Your Eyes” is not the only game to incorporate an alternative mechanic. There is the simplistically designed Flappy-Bird-esque mobile game “Scream Go Hero” where the player must make noise to move the character, most of the time having to scream to save their avatar from falling. There are games we may not think about immediately, such as kinetic games like “Just Dance.” There are alternative game mechanics within regularly played games, such as the “Don’t Move” mechanic in “Until Dawn” where the controller requires the player to be extremely still while their character is hiding. While many of us might see these games as impressive pieces of art, media, or technology, I believe this could be an opportunity to become more accessible. 

Top 10 video games for the visually-impaired according to Lenstore

Just as games have become more diverse, accessibility creates many different images in people’s minds. There are visual and mobility impairments, that can even inhibit someone’s ability to sit in a chair for an extended period of time. With this in mind, a factor important in the accessibility of games is not just the ability to play the game, but the options of games that are playable. I believe this has become even more significant as technology makes its way more and more into settings such as the classroom, the workplace, and the social scene. Alternative mechanics that don’t require the use of fine motor skills such as the one in “Before Your Eyes” could potentially be integrated in ways that would assist those who struggle with such mobility issues even outside of gaming. 

– Emily

Worlds Connect in World of Warcraft

In 2009, my mom, an Air Force officer, was stationed in Abu Dhabi, UAE for a year. In all that time, she was not able to see me or my dad in person, except to talk over Skype on occasion. Also while stationed in the UAE, my mom completely maxed out her character in World of Warcraft, a Level 99 dwarf mage, while playing with my dad, a Level 50-something Human Paladin. While working as an intel officer in a foreign country where she did not speak the language, my mom used the MMORPG (multiplayer online role-playing game) platform as a connection to a more familiar world. But even without the company of my dad’s avatar on the screen, she would still venture the world of Azeroth on her pet Griffin (a pet you can only tame once reaching Level 85). Her’s is a story of how our family stayed connected in a difficult time and one that contradicts a common misconception that playing video games alone perpetuates isolating behavior and introvertedness. 

A starting page for a dwarf mage in World of Warcraft.

Entering the World of Azeroth

When players start up World of Warcraft, they can create a character of any race and choose to be any class, ranging from a thieving Rogue to a “holier than thou” Paladin. For those that are familiar with Gygax’s Dungeons & Dragons, the aesthetics and character building is fairly similar. Once spawned in Azeroth, the player spends the next ten levels in Exiles Reach. Ten Levels feels like quite a long time, and as someone who has played the game, even the first ten tutorial levels can take quite a while to complete when you include side quests. And all of that is presuming you are playing alone. 

For my parents, it was a reprieve and a connection in an exhausting time in our lives. I was still 5 or 6 and my dad was just finishing medical school, to add to the stress. During that time I created a character, or played using my dad’s character, to venture the game’s world with my mom. Trailing behind her avatar, “Keeksnik”, she would tell me what the different colors of health bars meant. Green was an ally, yellow was “be cautious around,” and red was an enemy. While my mom and dad would play together often, this was a moment to connect and learn at a pivotal age, when I, and my mom, would otherwise lose out on a year together. 

By spending so much time in the introduction, the game immerses you to its world, and in a way, its “culture.” You learn of the two factions you must choose between at the start of the game: The Horde and The Alliance. All to bring together this intricate world, with a population size that would actually put it in the top ten most populated countries.

A map of the main world within the MMORPG, “Azeroth.”

Emotional Connection and Emergence into a Fictional World

According to MMO Populations, World of Warcraft is ranked number one out of 140 MMOs in terms of player population. Everyday, around 2.5 million users log on to the game and the game itself has around 134 million total players. In other words, the game boasts a subscriber base bigger than the population of Mexico and equivalent to 40% of the current US population (World Population Clock). In 2009, that metric was a lot smaller for my mom, with a little over 10 million players (still bigger than the population of the UAE in 2009, though). Having this world that had the size to boot, made the emergence even more deeply personal.

As Jesper Juul puts it, “Emergence is the primordial game structure,” and this is even more true for an MMORPG, where the “RPG” stands for role-playing game (Juul, 5). This kind of emergence allows for a deeper connection in the game that differs from a connection in a chat forum or even a Skype call. Particularly when playing with other people, the objective of progression and quest-seeking gives players in a duo or party a common cause and topic when the players could be thousands of miles away from each other.

The world of Azeroth fitted comfortably within my mom’s computer, a more familiar world that allowed her to temporarily break from her job and the loneliness of being a world away from us in order to see her loved ones, even if it was just the image of their avatars. 

-Emily 

Sources:

World of Warcraft Player Count, MMO Populations, https://mmo-population.com/r/wow 

World Population Clock, https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

Juul, Jesper. Half-Real.