Last updated on December 6, 2012
13 Then Moses said to God, “Behold, I am going to the sons of Israel, and I will say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you.’ Now they may say to me, ‘What is His name?’ What shall I say to them?” 14 God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM”; and He said, “Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”
= Exodus 3
I remember reading this a while ago, but I needed a reminder.
All good games have “friction”. That’s a difficult concept to define without some rather extensive examples. As Tim Rogers might say:
It is the inertia of Mario’s run that endeared him to us. It didn’t have anything to do with brand strength or graphic design. Those things were secondary. It was all about the inertia, the acceleration, the to-a-halt-screeching when you change direction. You can feel the weight of the character. People never put these feelings into words when talking about games, though they really, really are everything.
It’s not just weight or momentum, though – what about strategy games? Role-playing games? Other? These all have their own specific forms of friction. It can come from a simple button press correlating with something fabulous happening onscreen that YOU just did. It can just happen as you finish a particularly challenging level and you get that little musical jingle at the end that means “you completed a level”. There’s good and bad friction, of course; if it’s just there to make you feel good when you play, that’s a problem. Friction has purpose; it’s there to be used as both engaging and rewarding.
Honestly, what great game grants you worse control than you’ve ever imagined? Even, let’s say, unintentionally? Most people liked Resident Evil’s brand of survival horror due to atmosphere and engagement – not the controls. The controls, frankly, are absolutely awful. The moment they fixed them in Resident Evil 4, the entire RE series ceased to become interesting and original. The tank-like handling of previous protagonists was exposed as a limitation with which they struggled – the “survival” bit seems a quaint solution to that problem. You can’t have survival horror without them; by empowering the player’s movements, you prevent them from feeling fear. Feeling like you can avoid anything the game throws at the player doesn’t engender much terror, does it? When you control so unrealistically, it’s difficult to give the game latitude. At least make the fear something I can’t kill (F.E.A.R.) or excessive supernatural/creepy (Silent Hill) while allowing me to play the game well.
Even a role-playing game can have friction, though! Scrolling through menus might not seem like something deserving of critical examination, but you’d be wrong. Imagine Active Time Battles in Final Fantasy; there’s a flow, a movement, a speed, a certain sound that plays over and over as you scroll through various spells and abilities looking for JUST the right one. Too fast, and you can’t quickly move through the list with ease; too slow, and how am I going to get to Cure 4 on time? When you finally do reach the specific ability you NEED to press RIGHT NOW OH MY GOD ZEMORUS BIG BANG ATTACK, you get a slight pause and a feeling of satisfaction at not only your good timing, but the array of colors and sounds and feeling from success. Good games succeed at making you feel this friction at each individual action which causes a minor victory, while also making the action roll right into the next challenge.
Bad games don’t have friction. Those that do have “friction” fail to slather that friction all over the proceedings. That’s the central problem with memorable video games: even the handling of one’s character was relentlessly examined, improved, and refined over the course of a development cycle. If it wasn’t there at first, if you’re merely creating the friction at the end – you’ve failed. Sound effects and aesthetics complement the physics, surely, but they don’t make up for a lack of design. In God of War, for example, there’s a short pause between the hits of any attack – you’ll shortly find that these pauses create an automatic response in the player, one intensely correlated with “satisfaction”. The swooshing sound helps too! God of War, though, fails to take that concept the whole way – the levels aren’t designed around that particular bit of friction. Thus, it’s merely one big room after another with box puzzles every once and a while. It’s a shame, really.
Also, can I reveal my prejudice that few American games have any friction, at all, at any time? Excepting World of WarCraft, I’ve never had a Western game where, in a sheer moment of joy and tremulous anticipation, I found my character was delightfully designed for the most intricate of movements. It feels good just to move around in some games (I suppose that comes with the additional caveat that you have time to experiment with said physics because the game’s not paced well!), but these rarely come from the English-speaking world. They plie you with stuff – endless amounts of time-wasting tasks and SCHWEET GRAPHIX, all the while neglecting what makes games memorable and satisfying.
All in all, though, friction’s hard to identify. It’s even harder to implement! The game must be designed with this in mind from the get-go – not heady philosophical concepts, or a particular experiential quality, or atmosphere. Less and less games today recognize this ineffable quality of great games. They take the surface values, expect to make a great game and then birth a creation that is decidedly mediocre. Just look at the difference between Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Playstation All-Stars: Battle Royale; there’s just no pizazz or satisfying elements to the latter. It’s just boring, truth be told, and it lacks any kind of friction.
Does this friction come from intentional design? Well, considering next to no one knows about this, I’d say “no” sounds like an accurate answer. However, what they do tune is player reactions to games – that’s why they have focus groups, after all. Perhaps they didn’t have that luxury back in the day; they literally had to guess by their own, completely subjective, opinion on whether a player would like something or not.
Honestly, this exploration hasn’t really solved any of the issues – more often than not, it merely points towards the answer that I can’t actually put into words. You know the old saying – “How can you judge a game when you haven’t even played it yet!?” For games, that’s always held true – one must play it to understand why it’s good. I could read a ten thousand word opus (hello, NieR!) on a game and still get no closer to conveying my feelings, why it made me feel that way, why it was exciting, engaging, satisfying, or any other number of human labels applied to human creations.
I suppose God wants us in that state of mystery too – if He’s not even going to give Moses His name, why should you expect answers to how everything’s been created and established? After all, the ancient world believed that giving a name over something declared ownership; God transcends this by being self-existent, existence itself (the tetragrammaton, or YHWH, though that’s not a correlation by any stretch). I have tried my best to understand and convey friction with little success; how much greater could God be than that little ineffable tidbit?
