I took a bike ride this weekend. It had stormed the previous night, and one section of the bike path was covered in mud at least an inch high. When I saw it, I briefly panicked; I’m not very skilled as a rider, and I wasn’t sure if I should push through the thick muddy path, which might lead to a sliding bike and getting very muddy as I fell into the brown muck, or if I should get off my bike and walk it through(riding on the nearby grass was not an option, as it was probably worse than the path). I decided to bike through, and after a few seconds recognized that I had made a poor decision: my tires picked up large globules of mud and embedded them into the treads, my bike began to swerve as it lost traction, and I was getting very muddy. I changed my mind and walked my bike off the path. My shoes nearly came off my feet as I pulled myself over the muddy trail.
Both I and my bike were covered in mud. It was caked all over the bike – in the brakes, the spokes, the chain – it sprayed all about me as I rode on further, staining my jeans and backpack in brown inkblot.
I’ve never been much of an outdoors person, but I found the experience immensely satisfying. Sometimes it’s fun to get dirty: a lesson many kids learn when they’re four, but apparently I forgot. And not only that, but the interaction of my bike in the mud and water, the way it caked onto the frame, the spray of it as the moving parts of my bike repeatedly careened against the buildup, it all made me think of how far games still have to go in terms of simulating something that even faintly approximates the complex interactions of physical objects in the real world.
This was an exciting revelation. The truth is that games don’t model things all that realistically right now, especially when it comes to physical bodies of different composition meeting up in space. Think about it: there’s no processor or supercomputer on Earth that could reliably model the elaborate back and forth of interactions that occurred on my bike ride. But these kinds of things will be modeled, maybe not now, maybe not in the next ten years, but it will happen. That’s exciting, especially because of what it means for gaming.
Perfect facsimiles of the real world aren’t necessary to have fun or to make a good game – it’s been proven over and over that complexity does not necessarily equate to better games. But what it does do is open up possibilities, much in the way that the steadily growing trend of games based entirely around physics have changed the ways we think of games and gameplay. The future is bright. I’m excited.
