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Breaking Out of Breakout
Line up your extended finger with the lower left corner of the TV screen a comfortable six feet away. Now track back and forth several times in line with the bottom border and project a movement of that breadth onto an imagined inch and a half diameter spool in your hands. That's how knob and paddle are geared, a natural correspondence of scale between the body's motions, the equipment, and the environs preserved in the interface. There's that world space over there, this one over there, and we traverse the wired gap with motions that make us nonetheless feel in a balanced extending touch with things.—David Sudnow, Pilgrim in the Microworld
This chapter concludes with a detailed look at two digital games, and an examination of how the core mechanic helps create an experience of meaningful play. The first game is Breakout for the Atari 2600, the game David Sudnow details in his book. Breakout's core mechanic is both simple and elegant; it is one of the keys to what makes the play of the game so meaningful. The player uses a paddle controller to move a bar on the bottom of the screen left and right, trying to intercept a "ball" that is bouncing around the game space. It would be difficult to find a core mechanic more stripped down than in Breakout. In the game, players are not moving an animated character through a richly textured 3D space; they are not even moving in 2D. Players are moving a blocky, rectangular shape in one dimension along a line. Players don't have a range of actions and powers. They don't have a complex set of tasks to complete or resources to manage. All players do is turn the knob, move the line, and avoid missing the ball. Despite this spare interactive scheme, Breakout manages to generate meaningful play.
Breakout
The simplicity and immediacy of the design creates an interactive circuit between the player and the game. The response of the paddle on the screen to the movements of the knob in the player's hand is intuitive and instantaneous. The screen, the controller, and the player enter into a larger set of experiential relationships, forming a system that bridges the "wired gap," as Sudnow puts it, between the player's world and the televised world of the game. But if that were everything there was to Breakout, a line moving on a screen, it wouldn't be a game. It wouldn't have meaningful play. And it certainly wouldn't generate the obsessive attachment Sudnow documents. On top of this core mechanic, the simple action of knob-turning and ball-blocking, Breakout builds a more complex game experience. Of course the lights didn't obey the laws of physics governing solid objects, like billiard balls, say. But Atari had rather decently simulated a sense of solidity.The light [ball] came from a certain angle toward the side wall, and then followed out the triangulation by going in the direction you'd predict for a real ball. What about the paddle? Hit on an off-centered portion of a tennis racket or hand, a ball will deflect on a different path and you can thereby place shots. Sure enough they'd programmed the trajectories and different parts of the paddle surface to match, so the light-ball behaved rather like a tangible object, refracting and deflecting so it seemed you could at least somewhat control the ball's direction.[3]
At first, playing Breakout is simply a matter of hitting the ball, trying not to let it pass by the paddle. If a player misses the ball five times, the game is over. But as play continues, the game play grows deeper. The paddle is divided into five sections, each of which ricochets the ball at a different angle. Using the simulated physics of the game, players can learn to direct shots. When the ball hits a brick, it disappears and the player gains points. The goal of the game is to direct the ball to remove as many bricks as possible, gaining points along the way. Because the brick patterns at the top of the screen change each time the player hits and removes a brick, the playfield gradually shifts from full to empty as a level progresses, each new arrangement offering different possible trajectories for the ball to follow. Many patterns and rhythms of play emerge. A skilled player will concentrate on one side of the screen, creating a hole in the wall of bricks that allows the ball to "break out" and bounce back and forth along the top of the screen. Other kinds of strategies are required for the endgame, in which only a few bricks remain: the center of the paddle is used to hit the ball in a nearly vertical trajectory, cutting a slow path across the screen toward the remaining bricks. More than just a simple system of interaction, the game rules create multiple levels of play experience, layering strategic thinking and gradual skill acquisition on top of the physical and perceptual components of the core mechanic. All of this experiential complexity in such a simple game! Yet the player's action, the essential activity, the core mechanic, remains strikingly spartan: rotate the knob with the wrist. Out of this basic interactivity blossoms an entire structure of play. This is precisely how meaningful play emerges on the level of experience: through player action, input, and output. In the end, the system of play becomes more than the sum of its parts. [3]David Sudnow, Pilgrim in the Microworld (New York: Warner Books, 1983), p. 37.
