Alternative Trajectories: Structuring play through videogame physics engines

Abstract

This essay seeks to traverse new territory in the field of digital game studies by combining the focus on performance and play practices exercised by ludologists with the awareness of technological detail common to software/platform studies. This combined approach provides an insight into the immediate effect of algorithms on play and gaming practices. Combining technological details with a close reading of gameplay practices, this essay suggests the impact of a ‘physics engine’—the body of code responsible for the in-game representation of physics—on the first-person shooter (FPS) videogame Call of Duty: Ghosts (2013). This essay concludes that physics algorithms, in FPS games in particular, shape the actions of players through two major methods: via the specific mediation of physical forces (such as gravity and drag) and the related modelling of object interactions. Focusing on the outcomes of these mediations we can begin to think of play practices as simultaneous productions shared between machine and human, drawing on conceptions of interaction familiar to media theory. For instance, as Timothy Barker states, ‘In any form of computer interaction, the user must operate within the limitations, function, and potentialities of the software … By the same token, the software operates with the user's capacities’ (Barker 2012: 115). Ultimately, it will be shown that while physics algorithms have shaped existing gaming behaviours, they are also entwined with the processes wherein players invent new performative practices.