Tyriq Plummer, the creator of Catacomb Kids, gave one of my favorite ever talks at the Game Developers Conference yesterday. The premise was simple: human beings have a physicality to them that’s rarely represented well in games. Or, as he put it:
“Human bodies are incredibly unique… bodies come in all shapes and colors. We have one thing in common: we’re all made of skin, bones… meat.”
It’s not just body diversity (though that’s certainly part of it). Plummer is getting at something deeper, maybe even something primal — it feels a certain way to live in a human body. We break, sometimes. We heal, over time. We take up space and weight in a heavy, complicated world. Most games put us in a virtual avatar that feels insubstantial. There’s a massive disconnect between the way bodies work in life, and in the way they are commonly represented in virtual worlds and games.
Plummer touches on something I think about often, in so many aspects of my life. For someone who works online and writes about games for a living, I’m sort of unusually oriented towards the physical world. It bothers me, often, that games “do” bodies so poorly.
I used to be — and will very shortly again be — a certified Emergency Medical Technician. I’ve seen the human body in various states of disrepair, and I’ve studied the amazing, complicated and often bizarre worlds of anatomy, physiology and pathophysiology. I know what a real gunshot wound looks like, and what a compound fracture smells like and feels like to touch.
I’m also a runner and a boxer. I know what it feels like to hit someone really, really hard — and be hit back much harder. The sound it makes. The physical impact of trauma. Boxing is a safer way to explore violence (there are rules, supervision, and safety equipment in play), but it impacts everything about the way I see violence in games.
There’s no denying the immediacy of a punch.
These are weirdly disparate endeavors, I know. But Plummer’s talk got to the heart of why I seek out these activities: they feel, for lack of a better word, real. There’s no denying the immediacy of a punch. I can’t pretend that a patient isn’t bleeding in front of me. It’s real, here and now, and that forces me to live in the present. It sounds weird, because I’m a person who deals with anxiety disorder, but intense physical experiences help me to live in the moment.
Games help me to live in the moment when they convey intense emotional experiences, or give me incredible, impossible worlds to explore. But games based on hand to hand combat often bore me, because they’re not as fun or interesting to me as the real thing. Pressing a button to punch doesn’t give me the the same physical challenge or satisfaction of nailing a good shot in real life.
This probably just makes me weird, but Plummer’s talk gave me hope that maybe I’m not the only one who thinks about these things. That maybe, smart people will actually seek and find solutions to these problems, and offer more interesting ways to embody a player.
This certainly shouldn’t be relegated to just combat. We are complex animals that could fall apart in thousands of ways, at any time. This is equally horrifying and wonderful, and games are uniquely equipped to allow us to explore these concepts.
I often want games to show that in some way. Games are able to dramatize feelings — and let us play with those feelings in a safe way (far safer, even, than getting into a boxing ring). I want to inhabit other kinds of bodies, but bodies that have a kind of “meatiness” that makes them feel like they’re really there. I want to know what it’s like to fight and survive and explore and exist as someone else or something else. Making that experience — of being in another body — feel ‘real’ can only make that experience more powerful.
I don’t want every game I play to make me feel like I got punched in the gut. Like other areas of life, I simply want a wide variety of experiences — some pleasant, some challenging. Like Plummer, I don’t even need most of these things to be “realistic” in the traditional sense. But I do want bodies in games to feel “true.”
“Humans, I think, are incredible,” Plummer said in his talk (which, by the way, was literally titled ‘Made Out of Meat’). “I’m amazed we live as long as we can, despite the million little things can go wrong at any minute… Games are pretty cool, I feel like they’re able to give us a unique perspective [and] give us a better view of other meat; other bodies. I want to know these stories — see the different types of bodies represented in games.”
Plummer referenced the action hero archetypes which fill our games, the seemingly endless carbon copies of brown-haired scruff-faced muscle guys. “I’ve been Bruce Willis many times,” Plummer says, “but I’ve never been… you.”
Danielle Riendeau is the Reviews Editor of ZAM. By the time you read this, she will be back in New York to take her final EMT exam. Wish her luck on Twitter @danielleri.
