Welcome back. Yesterday I wrote about a couple examples of video games which circumvent an issue not by solving it, but by avoiding anything that might trigger it. This morning I came up with a name for that sort of design (though it likely already has one): prohibitive design. You are, in some sense, 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘩𝘪𝘣𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 your player from encountering a problem you know exists. This concept is crucial to diegetic design because it focuses on what you can reasonably do without breaking immersion. Knowing this, let's return to desktop gaming for an exploration of interactivity.
A classic example of prohibitive design is the replacement of invisible walls. Due to hardware and time constraints, early games couldn't simply let the player roam endlessly. Knowing this, designers placed invisible barriers around the perimeter of levels to prevent players from reaching areas with no geometry. The unfortunate result is an immersion break; after all, why wouldn't Mario simply walk to the other side of the mountain? He only has to endure the bombs at the front because the player found a development restraint.
To solve this issue- and properly, this time- level designers began placing literal walls, steep slopes, lava pits, and so on at the level boundaries. This is once again an example of diegetic design because it takes something implicit to media (limited scope) and turns it into an explained element (a physical ocbstacle).
If you're fond of RPG maker games, you may have encountered an irritating design error; placing both instances of a door on the same side of your screen causes you to go back the way you came automatically. If not, here's how it works:
This is an easy fix, but it happens specifically because of the way the game world is presented. Were your view the same as the character's, this would not occur as the door would not change position relative to your perspective.
In the previous part I pointed to interfaces as a frequent pain point. Rather than continue to complain, I'd like to acknowledge a game which converts graphical elements into in-game objects, and quite successfully at that. 𝘗𝘦𝘢𝘬𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘠𝘰𝘳𝘦 is a light-hearted yet challenging climbing simulator with mountains to climb, hats to clean, and birds to swear at. One thing that stuck in my mind, though, is its placement of oft-flat displays on the player's body. For instance, the speedrun timer is a stopwatch held on your belt; using it means looking down and grabbing it, at which point the character will hold it in front of his face, using the controls to set speedrun options. I should note that 𝘗𝘦𝘢𝘬𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘠𝘰𝘳𝘦 is not a virtual reality game, nor does it feature motion tracking of any kind. The control scheme is purely keyboard and mouse driven, but contextualizing inputs as the character pressing physical buttons makes that distinction easy to forget. It even acknowledges the inconvenience of the belt method by giving you crampons (traction shoes for climbing) which activate when looking down, resulting in an automatic and immersive pause state whenever you need to reach for an item.
Throughout this two-part article, I've realized I have nothing well-defined to say- but that's okay. The point of all this is to discuss something I like and why I like it, hoping that some day these design concepts will be put to more frequent use.