The Imagination Gap
(07/07/2011) I crouch in cover, the red rock hot against my back. I’m down to my last few clips of ammo, and I can only hope that my assailant is too. I can hear him moving, drawing closer to my hiding place, heavy steel-capped boots loud against the compacted dust of the wasteland. I take a breath, ready myself, and dive from cover. Time slows as I open fire. He fires too, and I feel something white-hot sear my arm, but my bullets find their target first. He jerks back, blood spraying onto the hot dust, weapon falling from his suddenly-slack grasp...
At least, this is what happens in my head. In reality, or the reality of Fallout: New Vegas at least, my opponent and I are standing a couple of metres apart, both crouched, both firing. My crosshairs are lined up on his head, and my bullets are hitting him repeatedly in the face. He doesn’t react, although blood does periodically spurt from his skull. His bullets are hitting me too, which only serves to make my screen blur a bit and my health bar to dip a little lower. Inevitably his health bar runs down before mine, at which point his head explodes into several chunks, his body drops to the floor, and I walk over and nick all his clothes.
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| A regualar occurance in the old West. |
Videogames have come a long way since their tabletop origins, but as the above hopefully demonstrates, the player still often needs to make a significant leap of imagination to experience a game’s fiction as intended. My fight with the wasteland bandit is evidently meant to be a desperate struggle for survival. The fact that it’s more like race to see who can deplete the other’s health bar goes to show that, well, we might have come a long way, but we’re not quite ‘there’ yet.
Some games require greater leaps of imagination than others. The RPG genre, still a hotbed of statistics stables and static decision-making, requires more imaginative input from the player than, say, a racing game. Turn-based battles are a wonderful example of the imagination required to justify the fiction; what is clearly supposed to be an epic battle of world-ending proportion is in fact four dudes standing in a row, literally trading blows with another, bigger, evil-looking dude.
And this differentiation seems to affect which types games are the most popular, for quite a simple reason; it’s easier for a non-gamer to become invested in something that doesn’t require a great deal of imagination to understand. We, the player, understand that what’s happening in Fallout is in fact a life-or-death struggle between two desperados, but if someone who had not played the game were to walk in and witness what’s going on, then, well, they’d just think it looks stupid.
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| Fifa 12. |
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| Real football. |
It explains why sport games are so well-received by those who don't play many other games; Fifa’s only job is to look like football. It doesn’t have to create an alternate reality or juggle a complex narrative; it just has to look like a game of football on the telly does. Everyone knows what football looks like, and everyone can see that Fifa looks like football.
One day, ‘fiction games’ will be able to catch up. A future Fallout will manage to play just how people would imagine life in an apocalyptic wasteland to be. We’re getting there already; id’s Rage looks like a much more believable approximation of a post-apocalyptic world, although I don’t doubt it will lack a lot the depth that we enjoy in Fallout.
One day, games will have grown up properly. Non-gamers will be able to sit down in front of a game, without necessarily even having play, and they’ll understand what’s going on. It won’t look silly. It will be fully-formed fictional world. Until then, thought, we’ll just have to keep fighting those titanic battles half in our minds, and half in brilliant but flawed approximations.
