What Does it Mean to Jump?
That may sound like a silly question, but it’s an important one if you want to tackle the complexity required for skill-based gaming with emergent play. Before we can create a world full of incredible, unpredictable moments of fun, we must take our first step – or leap. Many of them, in fact, as it turns out there’s a lot of things ‘jump’ can mean in a game, and each one forms the foundation of a completely different player experience.
What Jumping Used to Mean
One of the most common ways of simulating a jump is to put a force on the bottom of the character when a button is pressed. Couple this ‘impulse’ with some gravity, and it sure seems like jumping. Only it’s not. Jumping doesn’t only mean movement up and down. Nobody jumps from a standing position because a magical force suddenly lifts them skyward. So that’s not jumping yet, not really.
We could do the version where we define the distance a player can jump. Then we build animations that support that pre-packaged jump. A leg moving a certain way, arms flailing…thanks to Unreal, we can make these animations blend super well. You might even think it’s a jump. But it isn’t really. It’s the same canned response to a button press, now covered up by talented animators. Ultimately, what you can actually DO in the space has been reduced to a single motion. It feels systemic, but the jump is always the same jump. That’s still not really jumping, is it? More importantly, it still doesn’t allow for emergent gameplay, which is key to providing a thrilling, rewarding, and uniquely human experience.
None of This Works
A game with a high skill ceiling requires layers of systems interacting so people can’t quite predict what’s going to happen, forcing them to deal with a truly unscripted event. This is more like how the real world works: jumping may be something we take for granted, but anyone who’s tried to hop a turnstile knows it entails a whole sequence of intentioned movements. Every muscle in your leg engages in perfect order and in different ways, ankle, hip, and knee joints hinge or rotate appropriately, all while tubes in your head transmit readings to help you balance. So how closely can we really model a jump, and how does striving to do so enrich gameplay?
The real people who are best at jumping aren’t consciously operating all these mechanics. Instead, through practice, they’ve developed a trust in their body that makes what they do seem effortless. Someone who’s jumping a hurdle in parkour will put their hands out to brace themselves lightly, but they don’t catch themselves or think too much about what they’re doing. They just move through a flow of cues that trigger other cues, managing the whole thing based on physical feedback. That’s a pretty complicated way to think about jumping, but it’s also true to life – and more fun. That’s the feeling we want to convey, so that’s how complicated a system we need to begin with.
What does it mean to jump? Let’s try to get a fix on things by measuring them. How high do you think someone who’s good at jumping is able to jump? How far? How does that vary based on getting a running start or nailing the jump angle or push-off? We know folks who can get themselves up well over a yard in the air, so maybe that’s a good baseline. Of course, there are people with shorter legs, longer legs, different joint placements, a tendency to favor one foot or the other. In every case, we know they have to push themselves forward at some point in the jump, so let’s simulate that by having the player press W to go forward. That’s all, just W, and their legs and feet work automatically like in the real world. They don’t push different buttons to move different feet unless they’re playing QWOP, a game that actually proves the point of this blog post – virtual jumping is more complicated than we think.
To further develop our simulation, let’s add a Spacebar press that makes the character push down off the ground, causing it to push back up on them and propel them into the air. Of course we’ll also need some gravity, so they reach a sensible height and fall back to earth. To make jumping skill-based, we also need to simulate that biofeedback we get from all of our senses when performing any kind of move in the real world. We mimic that input by providing the user with information via UI elements, color coding, sound design and effects, glowy-shit, everything. Now they know if each jump did what they wanted it to and can practice at becoming a better jumper. Now the system is complex enough to even allow for better jumpers and worse jumpers. Now we have a game.
But jumping in a game can’t be entirely the same as jumping in real life. For example, in real life, as you near an edge you plan to jump from, most people instinctively look down real quick to make sure of the placement of their last step, the push-off. In our games, you won’t do that. We tried it, you won’t enjoy it. It’s not fun. Looking down at your character’s foot briefly before a leap – even gamifying where that foot lands and whether you nail the ledge – not that fun. Then “what does it mean to jump?” also implies a host of artistic decisions. The way you move in a game is, or should be, a bunch of very conscious choices made by the development team. It’s kinda hard to rebuild gaming from scratch, tbh.
Speaking of that moment at the ledge, did you know lots of games gloss over it by making you Wile E. Coyote? Just like that poor hapless bastard, your character model is able to run just a bit past the edge of a cliff and still trigger a jump if they need to. It works to push our brains past that moment of unreality, but it remains, in some sense, unsatisfying and incomplete. We still haven’t fully answered the question: what does it mean to jump?
When you’re about to jump, your body compacts and you become a slightly smaller version of yourself; no one leaps with their legs straight. This primes your joints and muscles to expand again, so you can aim all that energy groundward in a burst and blast off, briefly defying gravity and spitting in the very eye of God. To simulate this aspect of jumping, how about instead of pressing Spacebar you hold it for a semi-arbitrary length of time, and that represents how much oomph you’re putting into each one? Now you can perform a small skip, a light jump, or a huge leap, and build games that require that level of precision and attention to succeed. Mechanics like this invite us into the game, into a moment of focus – into a state of flow.
By taking nothing for granted and rebuilding what it means to jump, to run, to attack, to play, we can use the latest tools to honor the richness and complexity of actual physics, and therefore expand the range of skill growth and satisfaction available to a player. Easy to learn, hard to master, fun to play – that’s what we want Consortium9 games to be. So next time you’re gaming, next time you hit that Spacebar, ask yourself: does this jump mean enough? Could it mean more?
What does it mean to jump? It means going for it. It means energetically moving forward with the trust that you’ll be able to stick the landing. A jump, once undertaken, is something you can’t take back until it’s completed (or unless you’re Prince of Persia circa 2003).
For us, NOR is a big jump. We hope you’ll make it with us.
Brooks Brown
CEO, Consortium9
The PlayFi Manifesto
The videogame
industry is broken.
Players are acutely aware of how they are being exploited by developers, developers are frustrated as their games are perverted to serve lootboxes, and financiers are frustrated because Candy Crush makes them oodles more money than a retro platform – and they don’t get why they can’t just monetize the platformer as much.
The vitriol is aimed at all of them, but the truth is it is neither developer, nor player, nor financier who is to blame. It’s the things between them. The way things are done. And it’s time we destroyed the way things are, and build it. Anew.
It is time we talk about what Play really is.
ONE.
PLAY COMES FIRST
Before you can lead a soccer team to a league championship, you have to kick the ball. Play exists before anything else.
This means games start not with a world, but with a tilt of the controller. With each tilt and button press, an order emerges. This order is an understanding of the rules, the functions, and all the possibilities they bring.
TWO.
PLAY IS NOW
Play does not concern itself with the future or past. It is the movement of your body, the pounding of your heart, the words that you’re thinking as you read this sentence.
As the game grows, it is the responsibility of the developer to ensure only the now enters. It is their job to protect Play.
THREE.
PLAY IS NEW
Pete Gogolak played. Dendi Played. The Eagles played. These moments happened because of the extraordinary agency afforded the players within a very tightly controlled space. This space allows experimentation. It allows boundaries to be broken. It is the new.
Developers have a responsibility to maintain these spaces to enable the new, not crush the new.
FOUR.
PLAY IS FREE
If you monetize play, you break it. If you say otherwise, you’re wrong. FIFA doesn’t monetize vanity items for players, charge them for special bonuses, and it doesn’t slow them down if they are poor.
Being as ethical as FIFA is a very low goddamn bar.
Within NOR, Play is never monetized. Play will always be free.
FIVE.
PLAY IS NAIVE
Three Card Monty works because the players are given the experience of feeling like they are good at the game. The space the game holds is a fragile illusion, one any hustler knows players are scared to shatter.
Modern Game Development is no different.
Players all get to enjoy being empowered. Until the game turns on you, pushes you into paying to continue that enjoyment, and the scam is complete.
SIX.
PLAY IS ALIVE
Within the space of the game, Play is a living, breathing force. Eventually all games end, and this ending concludes play, setting it in stone.
Concretized endings make space for the new. This closure enables the play – now past – to become something else. They become part of the emergent Metagame.
SEVEN.
META COMES SECOND
Among the sea of concluded games, another type of player emerges. Looking over all the games, they see patterns. They recognize efficiencies. The Past and Future come together in a new game, one beyond the games.
Metagames are the result. Simply Metas for DOTA2 all the way to Fantasy Football, Sports Teams, Agents, and Sponsorships are Metagames. These are not accidents.
EIGHT.
METAGAMES ARE PLAY WITH GAMES
One Player throws his credit card at a game, and others players do not understand. “You aren’t actually increasing their skill!” they say, as the words fall on deaf ears.
This player doesn’t hear them because they aren’t playing the same game. These players are not playing with the Now, they are playing with the Meta of the game: purchases, markets, efficiencies. These players are Metagamers.
NINE.
META IS PAID
Play is free, and this applies even here – where the Metagamer is spending capital. In the Metagame the money itself is the mechanic of play, an analogue to the controller, the button press, and skilled reactions.
Like the first Magic Circle, if allowed to bleed into another, players are tricked into spending money – and Metagamers are tricked into feeling they’ve bought skill. They haven’t. 3 card Monty strikes again.
TEN.
THE WHOLE & ITS PARTS
Metagames are emergent from Games. Games are conditioned by their Metas. Players and Metagamers rely on each other. Their only relationship is their difference.
We let that fool us into thinking they were the same thing, which removed not only their agency, but put them in conflict as each fought to be the audience that game makers would care about.
Play does not need to compromise. Metagamers and Players can have their space, play their games, and thrive alongside each other.
We believe it is time to give the same freedom to all who Play. For Play and Finance to work hand in hand, not for one to dominate the other.
THIS IS PLAYFI.
THIS IS NOR.
And if you agree with us, we want you on this journey. Join us as we bring back Play.