Wednesday of video games

Once again I bring you a Wednesday of video games because I love video games and  because being a physicist I also love trying to understand how things work. Today journal is about the invisible walls and other limiting constrains usually found in games and more interesting at least for me is what makes some of this elements acepted by gamers and why others are not.

So I wanted to share some of my ideas and don't worry this post will be short. As I said before theres nothing more important in a game that to keep the player on the right track and nothing considered more cheap that putting a invisible wall to do it.

Why an invisible wall stopping you from going somewhere is considered so terrible but a visible wall or a classical pool of lava is considered acceptable and why the same invisible wall avoiding you to fall from a ledge is acceptable in so many games specially in some RPGs and third person shooters.

Part of the answer is that a simple invisible wall feels like a lazy way to constrain the player. For example if there's a place you shouldn't go they simply put a mountain or a cliff to stop you. It works in the same way as the invisible wall but psycological for the player is not the same. if you see a mountain, cliff  or door you can try to avoid it and you feel like you are cheating the game trying to beat it going crearly where you aren't supossed to go. If there is a place you can reach but you meet an invisible wall you feel cheated by the game that is stoping you for reaching an area you could clearly be able to reach.

But why a  bottomless pit or a pool filled with lava are considered acceptable classical (if not almost cliché) means to  constrain the players. From my point of view this is because we as people have some concepts of how the physics in our world works then we expect similar behaviors in the virtual world presented by a video game or at least some self consistency within the game's world.

I think that's why physical visible barriers are preferred over invisible walls. Is interesting because after all everything in a game is not real buy still we ask for physical plausible scenarios, we play a video game and even knowing it is a virtual world we don't walk randomly into walls expecting to go through them. We expect that the game behave as the real world or at least inside the logic of the game.

Usually in most RPG you have very limited movements, you can't jump or climb most of the objects so when you meet an invisible wall on a ledge or path usually is not annoying because it fits in the limited movements of the game. In contrast in more action packed games like Destiny and some others games you can run, jump and move with a lot of liberty so when there appears a wall it feels like it is broking the freedom of movement that the game is giving you.

This is the same for so much other elements in a game, explosions, guns, movement and other things needs to looks, sound and feel real. I even think that usually we ask for more realism in games that in movies (at least in some aspects). Heroes that are damaged without even flinching, guns that never need to reload and that send people flying several meters, totally unrealistic gravity and momentum mmm.... definitely some of that movie clichés would made games much more boring.
As a side and final note, I finally get my hands Dragon Age Inquisition and is pretty awesome, it feels like an open world game at least it doesn't have all that annoying invisible walls that plague Destiny. There are some issues that are bothering me but I'm still in the early phases of the game so is too soon to start complaining. I probably won't have a full review soon but maybe in two weeks I already have something.