Bennett Foddy, deputy director of the Institute for Science and Ethics at Oxford University, makes games about embodiment, and the “neurological magic” in gaming which allows us to inhabit the heroes on screen.
But unlike most artsy, experimental games with a point to make, Foddy’s free Flash games are hilarious, alarmingly addictive and eminently playable. His latest, a fiendishly compulsive rock-climbing simulation called GIRP, is a masochistically difficult game that turns your keyboard into a cliff face.
The rock face onscreen is covered with hoops, each labeled with a letter of the alphabet. You have to dart and wiggle between handholds by pressing the appropriate keys, all while flexing your muscles through an additional button—which you’re probably tickling with your pinky, considering the Twister-esque spaghetti of fingers on your keyboard.
Just like the ludicrous QWOP on PC and iPhone, which has you manipulating a sprinter’s individual leg muscles like a puppeteer to run, walk or awkwardly flail to the 100-meter finish line, GIRP is about turning gaming’s heavily abstracted and automated actions—like running forward or scaling a perilous cliff face—into brutal simulations of the most intense micromanagement.
It’s all about exploring the way gamers embody the character on screen. “When you play a videogame,” Foddy explains to Wired.co.uk, “as long as there is a very short time between your formation of an intention to act and something happening on screen, there’s a kind of neurological magic which makes you feel like you are the character, rather than just controlling a little guy on a screen.”
His games toy with that sensation, in different ways. QWOP turns the whole thing on its head, “making a deliberate disconnect between your intentions and the character’s actions.” GIRP, on the other hand, maximizes the feeling of embodiment, through Foddy’s ingenious metaphor, which turns your keyboard into an impromptu cliff face. “You have to grip the keyboard just like you would cling to the cliff,” he says.
So, one reading of the two games—which seem to work even better as a pair than separate entities—is that you don’t feel like the sprinter in QWOP because of the mangled, disharmonious connection between your actions on the keyboard and the athlete on screen. But as you intimately share that white-knuckle grip with your daredevil climber on GIRP, you suddenly inhabit and embody the topless mountaineer.
Foddy has used things he’s learned through the success of QWOP, and his research into addiction at Oxford, to make GIRP as rewarding and maddeningly compulsive as possible.
“One of the things I found with QWOP,” he says, “is that people like to set their own goals in a game. Some people would feel like winners if they ran 5 meters, and others would feel like winners if they inched all the way along the track over the course of an hour. If I had put a social leaderboard or par system in, those people would probably have all quit out of frustration, leaving only the most determined or masochistic players behind.”
That’s why GIRP’s score system changes over time: It’ll show your distance when you start playing, but if you reach the top of the cliff (which will definitely take more than a few goes), it’ll record how fast you can scamper up the next time you play. Foddy says he can reach the peak in about 20 minutes. Sounds like a challenge to us—if you can better it, take a screenshot and post a link to it on our forum.
What’s next for Foddy, and what other heavily micromanaged activity is on his plate? Simulated eating or perhaps player-controlled blinking? He tells us that he likes to “try to take a genre which has either never been done or which has fallen into stagnation from a design perspective.” At the top of his list? A unique take on the fighting or soccer genres.
“It boggles my mind that the two most popular [soccer] games are, in terms of their fundamental design, exactly the same as International Soccer on the Commodore 64, from 1983,” he says. Sounds like it might be time for Pro Evolution and FIFA to meet a new, limb-flailing, micromanaged opponent.
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