8 GAME MECHANICS THAT, ONCE INTRODUCED, ARE NEVER GOING AWAY
      Over time game mechanics have grown from the arcades into the homes, and with them game mechanics have evolved from that of Pong back-and-forth rallying to that of Mario Odyssey’s seemingly endless mechanics. Throughout my life, I’ve played nearly every genre to find what games held my attention, and which didn’t. But something that’s fascinated me is seeing the game industry introduce game mechanics so face-palm universal that they force everyone else to adapt them as just another standard feature. So here’s eight of them:
1. JUMP - Super Mario Bros
      The Day-1 quintessential game mechanic is & has always been The Jump. Players want to move the character faster than its natural movement speed, always. What better way to move a character than jumping. You can jump forward, you can jump up, you can jump down. Hell, now double jump is pretty standard as well. For *me*, my first experience with the jump was Super Mario Bros. It was essential to the first moments of 1-1. It was one of two buttons. From now until eternity, the jump will be there.
2. WORLD/MINI-MAP - Pokemon Red/Blue
      Here’s a question: do you know where to go in a game? You entered the world from wherever you started. But where are you going? Can you backtrack? Do you remember how to come back to where you started? Do you know where the end is on the map? Well, thankfully games have a map for you to see the larger world & your current location. Introduced to keep players from getting lost in a larger non-linear level, the map has, from inception, been unavoidable-- to the point where first-time players of current-gen games ask where the mini-map is on the HUD.
3. TUTORIALS - Animal Crossing, Call of Duty
      Once upon a time, games didn’t have manuals & didn’t have tutorials. From stickers on the side of the cabinet to kitschy gameplay manuals to full-on handholding in the first 40 minutes of game, tutorials have helped players quickly learn the complex rules governing manipulation & existence in their respective game. They are important given how complex games have become, mechanically, but for some retro, thought provoking games, their absence is a feature. How modern games handle tutorials in such a front-loaded industry decides the limits & kitsch of the game’s command.
4. RED EXPLODING BARRELS - Hitman, Borderlands 2
       You see a red barrel. You have a gun. There are enemies close to the barrels. What now? You’ve seen this scenario play out in many games. The game wants you to shoot the barrel, because it will explode & kill the enemies. You know this, because the barrel is red. Once introduced, red barrels have long been synonymous with explosions, such that Gearbox Software, while making Borderlands 2, had to recolor green explosive barrels, because no one was shooting them. Once red however, testers immediately knew what they were. Goes to show that something as little as a color communicates a wealth of information to the player that a tutorial cannot.
5. QUICK TIME EVENTS - Resident Evil 4
        In 2005, around the time motion gaming was gaining prominence as a niche in the game industry, so too were Quick Time Events. QTEs are known for being interactive cutscenes where instead of taking a seat to a cinematic, the player had to keep on their toes to input different controls & interact with the cinematic. It was too interesting to do away with given how monotonous expensive cutscenes could be gameplay-wise. What better way to cut your budget in half than provide in-engine cutscenes that double as gameplay! At least, in recent years QTEs have died down to being another shorthand mechanic instead of a main feature.
6. AUTO SAVE - Skyrim
        Remember save points? You would tell your parents you’ll be there in just a minute, you couldn’t find a save point, couldn’t save here, couldn’t pause here, and had to keep playing? Yeah, no one has that luxury lie anymore thanks to auto-saving. In what might be the best & worst game mechanic to so widely change the industry, auto-saving has changed massively altered difficulty to suit a passive gameplay experience. Complex, broad, sweeping cinematic games tend to save on their own now in order to help the player instead of punish them. What once was a respite at the end of a long arduous level, the save point is now an icon that decides for itself how far back you will be taken when you die. Once introduced, autosaving is now the first most asked about feature: “where is the autosave? Is it saving?” We can never go back...but thanks to autosaving, if we need to go back, it won’t be too far.
7. AUTO REGENERATING HEALTH - Uncharted 2
        Same as above, health bars, be they hearts or gauges or numbers, have been a staple of gameplay in order to punish impatience/foolishness, & raise the stakes. They were the only thing that really mattered in the HUD for some time. But after games like Uncharted & Call of Duty, health bars regenerate automatically. Auto-regen replaces that tired old HUD bar with literally nothing in order to focus on the breadth of the level’s horizon. Instead, most auto-regen exist as grey sapping the colors out of the world as you take damage. The closer to death you get, the more monochromatic the world, the louder the heartbeats, the dimmer everything else is. It is made to intensify the moment of being close to death. As a feature, it replaces health upgrades & potions/health drops in order to streamline gameplay. It is an instance of game mechanics going far enough to actively limit games in uninteresting ways.
8. THE DUMB BUTTON - Uncharted 2/Resident Evil 6
        The most difficult to google game mechanic that aggravates me, but has changed the industry immensely, is what I refer to as “The Dumb Button.” The Dumb Button is any input or mapped control that the player can rely on to point them in the direction they need to go next. It is the button that tells you what to do. In Resident Evil 6, it is called the Display Route Guide Button, which changes the world to a monochromatic blue & shows an illuminated path for you, the dummy, the disenfranchised, the lost to follow. In Uncharted games, the Dumb Button is up on the d-pad; it will display where to go next with a snap camera zoom & arrows pointing you literally. The Dumb Button is another mechanic, like auto-regen, that is for streamlining gameplay into a cinematic experience. But it works to actively handhold the laziest thinkers & obfuscate truly brilliant level design.
In the case of Uncharted series, a game where level design is most prominent from every vista imaginable, imho, the game passively points you in the one direction it wants you to go. From well worn paths to specifically directional lighting to characters sparsely lending you dialogue hints, Uncharted is a game trying to get you from Point A to Point B as fast as possible. But they still undercut their bottom line with a feature that literally points out the next objective instead of letting their players get a little lost. This engineering rhetoric shows a fragility in the programmers-- better to be for everyone than hurt our bottom line.
All in all, gameplay mechanics are like words in a dictionary to a writer-- they are weapons you have to know when to use & when to leave. --BQ
My third big production is a Lovers production. I thought a good long while about whether or not I could accept The Lovers as anything more than a comic...but here we are.
The Lovers, by-and-large, currently exist in hyper-dense one shots, so consider Makeout Point yet another one shot, but one that could only be animated, & doesn’t work [at least, for me] in comic form.
An experimental unfolding comic that cycles back on itself with a cyclical narrative-- Folding Arcade enjoyed a premiere at Wondercon 2017 as well !! Still only have one run of these, but a fun experiment nonetheless
Born of a particularly long stretch of boba puns, Boba Pun premiered at Wondercon 2017 in hardcopy form !! ;) It was successful enough to print a second run, too !!
"It’s about girls that are sharks & also, girls.”
My second big production was a water pollution PSA featuring Carolina Pulido’s SharkGrlz [@ovejis-art]. We only had each other for this 5-week production. We were both leads on Rodney Sprocket, so we knew what we were getting into when we scheduled the production.
Above are my beatboards for the entire PSA-- we chose a beatboards-to-puppet-animation route, so animating & key poses could be done while animating rather than waste time on board revisions.
