Space is a crucial element in a video game. It helps dictate the environment, defines the limitations of the player, and establishes the boundaries that can either help or hinder one from progressing through what can sometimes be many many hours of real world time. The way that the interactive environment has evolved—from concrete and planar to a fluctuating open-world 3D ecosystem—gives the awesome impression that you can “go anywhere” and “do anything.” Unfortunately, it’s kind of the exact opposite: with such a highly complicated and tech-based infrastructure, the freedom a player actually experiences is all in-game, and the possibilities of trying to color outside the lines (or full-out “breaking” it) are getting fewer and farther in-between. Many people like their realism, and that’s fine, but sometimes I wish that games hearkened back to the olden days (of yore), when the discourse was more elastic and dictated by gameplay, and the spatial relationships were more “open.”

For instance, a mechanic (shudder) that seems to have fallen by the wayside involves a looping, continuous line authored by the player: when the character you control travels in one direction, he/she will continue in that direction, even if they leave the playing field. If they go off of the screen, this doesn’t result in failure and/or a lost life: you’ll simply cycle around to the other side of the screen without ever losing any momentum. Kid Icarus (1987) utilizes this concept in some of its level design—what appears to be a blocked vertical path can actually be circumvented by moving from one side of the screen to the other, not by traveling across the designated geographic layout of the level but by purposely leaving that space and popping out on the other side. In other words, the player is manipulating the game’s “negative” space. Pac-Man (and his Ms.) allow for this technique also, as you can move from one side of the board to the other via the two openings in the middle of the maze, a quick way to avoid closely pursuing ghosts. Early one-screen arcade and NES titles like the original Mario Bros. and Balloon Fight contain an extra dimension of strategy because of the perpetual direction you can apply to both sides of the board at any given time.

I remember one of my literary professors back in college describing Eastern writing as “spiral-like” by nature, and that concept stuck with me ever since. Modern Japanese authors like Kobo Abe and Haruki Murakami employ a writing style that is both flowing and cohesive, never lingering on a plot point yet also never failing to laterally connect with the events that came before. The results are fluid, briskly paced works that, while often dealing with the surreal and fantastic, never have any rough edges or tangential prose. The plots of most games—retro and modern—certainly don’t hold a candle to the masterpieces of the great Eastern novelists, but in games like Kid Icarus, the spiral materializes in other, more implicit forms. (It may seem like I’m trying to argue that this is a fundamentally “Japanese” quality, but games like Williams’ Joust and Rare’s Jetpac also use the non-terminating line, although the argument of whether any particular game influenced any other is an historical matter that I’d rather skirt for the time being.)

Another interesting implementation of space is “warping,” but in the case of a game like Super Mario Bros. (1986), the idea of using an interstitial space to travel between two points within a game’s diegesis is actually a tool with a physical presence: the pipe. This was all designed as a means to encourage exploration and tuck away secrets that could be discovered after multiple play-throughs, of course, and I concede that there is something very whimsical and fun about having Mario duck into a pipe or climb a quickly growing vine as a means to traverse terrain that breaks from the game’s pre-established norms, but it seems that a little bit of the “metaness” charm present when you actually force yourself off-screen is lost by making it a mechanic (oh, that dreaded word again). It turns into something explicitly anticipated and flaunted by the designers instead of being a more subtle technique that creates the illusion that the player is discovering and exploiting some unseen bit of architecture all by themselves. But the pipe serves a valuable purpose: by being an in-game object in SMB (one that everyone recognizes) that is also a vehicle for quickly skipping through game areas or accessing secret rooms, it fills in a spatial gap that would otherwise break our engagement with Mario’s world if we simply just jumped, say, from World 1 to World 4; without the pipe, it would seem like a cheat, like we were passing over something, but with it we instantly picture Mario tubing through some unseen labyrinth of plumbing that some very enthusiastic Mushroom Kingdom planning committee drew up one night. And all of this taking place telepathically, while the screen flashes black.

The “continuous line” principle does make a brief comeback in Super Mario Bros. 2 (1988) (or Doki Doki Panic, depending on whose side you’re on), but unfortunately it’s severely restricted as the closed, mostly scrolling, and compartmentalized level design is not very conducive to physics-based platforming puzzles or strategic cross-screen vegetable throwing combat. You would think that the boss fights might try to involve some geo-spatial quandaries, but alas, the lairs in which you battle these large enemies are woefully brick-laden and claustrophobic, with hardly any character finessing involved at all; it becomes either a block stacking mini-game fit for a robotic operating buddy, or a surprisingly boring round of explosive hot potato.

With the advent and popularity of side-scrolling in game design, the fixed screen grew out of favor and never really came back in any significant way, with some exceptions (the puzzle genre, for one). Even today, I don’t think that developers want to mess with the idea of left-right screen wrapping anymore: it’s too jarring, too unrefined. How can Realism exist when the player is given the opportunity to go Dada? And while warping remains a feature in use today, it certainly doesn’t have that element of discovery and imagination that it did in the days of SMB—oh look, Niko, you found a subway car. Stand clear of the closing doors.

I would love to see more clever uses of negative and interstitial spaces in today’s games, because the potential is there: Closure (2009) is an excellent example of “negative” design done right, and Portal (2007) deliciously hints at how continuous momentum would work in a 3-D environment. I say “hints at” because Portal uses its level design to cocoon a system of control around its concepts instead of allowing much player freedom, but hey, everything starts somewhere. Can you imagine a Portal multiplayer mode, for example, in which the maps are simple, single rooms, much like the one-screen boards of Balloon Fight? Or a game where the player can only inflict damage or influence the environment when their avatar is out of view, in the game’s ”between” spaces, resting in the seams? Perhaps by looking back at the early titles (of yore, remember) that favored a more interactive method of spatial discourse, video games can be open-ended enablers of self-narrative that also feature the polish and production values that gamers enjoy today. There’s no reason why developers can’t focus their hindsight a little more; after all, the line of technology is always curving, never straight, and the most important quality of a spiral is that it can continue to grow while still revolving around its origin.

Game screenshots from VGMuseum. Magritte/Pipe image by Genée Cosden.

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Posted by Kurt Shulenberger on June 17th, 2009 :: Filed under Posts
Tags :: Balloon Fight, Closure, Game Design, Interactivity, Jetpac, Joust, Kid Icarus, Mario Bros., Narrative, Pac-Man, Portal, Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 2
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