A Physical History of Video Games

Video games have been a part of my life since literally as long as I can remember. But as I get older, I find I play less and less despite appreciating them more and more. I don't consider many games up to my standards, and yet I don't think I am picky. I just think games have lost the impact that they used to have when I was younger.

I first learned how visceral video games could be with IO Interactive's Hitman: Codename 47 on the PC. We were at a friends house and my buddy loaded it up to show us the then-incredible "Chinese take-out" level (as he called it), assuring me all the while that it would be "bad-ass". He started his game and quickly choked out a waiter. Dragging the corpse behind a dumpster, he stole its clothes and weapon and left the scene. As he approached a red and gold-inlaid building, the guards at the front were alerted by my buddies flagrantly drawn weapon and began to attack. Guns-akimbo, he exploded into the restaurant and began shooting at anything that dared to move.

We watched as people crumpled realistically to the ground, bodies slumped over tables, and corpses flew through the air like flung marionettes. When the smoke cleared, the destruction he'd caused was literally unlike anything I had ever seen before. He reloaded his save-game so that I could have my turn, and not long after that I began my love affair with simulated physics. Today, my appreciation has grown to the point that I believe they are almost a necessity for a game to be fun, and with every release I hope to see new and interesting implementations of natural law.

I had to cheat to even make it this far. Games used to be hard.

Simulated reality brings authenticity to games, allowing us to further immerse ourselves in the digital universe as we can easily draw similarities to the analog one. Over the last half-century accurately modeling Newtonian physics has seen great strides, and every thrown grenade, bullet penetration, exploding gas canister, and flowing cape has benefited from it. Scientific calculations began in the '50s, and in 1961 Steve Russell led a team of programmers at MIT to create Space War, which had two ships firing at each other in what seems to be simulated molasses. Five years later development began on the Magnavox Odyssey, an analog computer that relished in futuristic, pong-like gameplay. Probably the only thing it did right was analogize the idea behind basic physical interactions in your average 2D game; objects are treated as primitive shapes or polygons, typically squares, and interact with each other as such.

We may see a blue hedgehog jumping on top of a magic TV with gold rings in it, but he interacts like a box would with another box. With experience, developers learned how to make these boxes hop on enemies, play spectator sports, and blast space aliens from futuristic spaceships. All they had to do was slap a different 2D image, called a sprite, on top of it. Eventually those blocks became three-dimensional and games expanded onto another plane, and it wasn't long before it was time to take the next step. New technology allowed developers to exchange sprites for lush 3D models, though animating these by hand required extensive time and effort.

Inverse kinematics (IK), a type of procedural animation, soon arrived on the scene and brought with it a new era of realism to video games. Ushered in by the release of Wavefront Technology's Kinemation software initially used in big-budget movies, this system is largely responsible for the simulated dinosaur movements in the movie Jurassic Park. As well as allowing the dinosaurs to move organically, it also saved the production team a great deal of resources.

With IK, a simulated skeletal system is applied to a model and at each point/joint is a node.  Each piece of an arm, for example, is linked together like a real one, so when you tug on someone's hand during an animation, it reacts as it might in the real world. When you apply force, say by shooting an enemy, the blast pushes on the individual nodes with realistic force, and when they hit the ground, they come to rest in a realistic manner. This technology can be applied to people, animals, structures, furniture, clothing, soft materials, and even simulated fluids to emulate movement as we have always known it.

First-person shooters and action games lapped it up like kittens would milk. The first game to use this technology was Dreamworks Interactive's Jurassic Park: Trespasser, released in 1998 with the goal of wow-ing the world with a hyper-realistic experience. You will think I am joking, but the picture above is me checking my health while playing it. In Trespasser you play the part of a stranded vacationer named Anne, or perhaps more accurately, her right arm and breasts. Using Anne's infinitely jointed arm, she can lift, push, and pull objects like boxes, tree branches, and even steel girders to fight and puzzle her way off of a dinosaur infested island.

Unfortunately, horridly unintuitive controls, buggy gameplay, and Minnie Driver's voice all led to universally poor reviews, with most critics overlooking what little it did right. Loading up the demo to see what I had missed yielded some genuine fun before I grew tired of fighting the control scheme while defending myself against velociraptors. Grand aspirations to make it an ultra-simulation far exceeding the technical reality of the time ultimately cost it excellence in every regard. The end product is a smattering of potential soaked with the stank of failed endeavors, but a terrible reception wouldn't stop the rapid adaption of this new animation technique.

Fox Interactive's Aliens Vs. Predator, Soldier of Fortune, and almost all of Tom Clancy's games have incorporated IK into their engines and received fair reviews in the graphics and realism departments. However, the computationally-costly nature of these improvements limited their ability to replicate real world physics exactly, and until computer hardware caught up, trade-offs had to be made between performance and appearance. Hitman tried something called verlet integration to handle collisions quickly and efficiently, but the result is an effect similar to chucking a stuffed animal against a wall during a hissy fit. It gets the point across but can sometimes be outright ridiculous.

As the need for a unified middleware grew with the size of gaming ideas, budgets, and development times, software packages like the Havok engine came onto the scene. Developers could acquire these software development kits for use in their games for a licensing fee, making it relatively easy for any game to benefit from their superior simulations. The Havok engine alone has been in over 150 games to date, including Soul Calibur IV, Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, and Armed & Dangerous (huh?). It's included in both of Blizzard's upcoming blockbusters, Diablo III and Starcraft II, and while the cost to use it has been steep at times, efforts have been made to make it affordable for smaller development houses.

Perhaps one of its most appealing qualities is dynamical simulation, which allows falling masses to move as they would in real life; naturally. The best example I could load up was the collapse of the train tracks at the beginning of Half Life 2: Episode Two, which you can see by clicking this image (skip ahead to 4:40). It's still one of the best uses of real world physics I've seen in movies or video games. Valve's Source engine employs Havok heavily and neither the Gravity Gun nor the game would be the same without it.

Recently one of the largest leaps forward for games isn't technically considered a physics engine  by the developers, saying instead that it simply emulates biological movements as naturally as possible. The Euphoria engine, created with proprietary technology developed by NaturalMotion, expands upon the skeleton concept and adds virtual musculature to the models that is analogous to our own. Collision detection boundaries are wrapped around the model rather than encompassing them in an invisible primitive, so characters interact with their environment like humanoids rather than giant invisible boxes with people inside. An additional "behavior" layer is added to refine how models react to collisions with other objects, and each interaction is processed in real-time. The outcome of any one event can play out differently every time it happens, and each interaction and impact is unique.

The real world benefits of the Euphoria engine can already be seen in easily one of the most popular video games of all time; Grand Theft Auto 4. If you haven't played it for yourself, then you can see it in action with the video below. It's a far cry from bumping boxes together, which is one of the reasons people are still spinning it in their respective consoles:

Star Wars: Force Unleashed provided some of the first real-world examples of the engine in play, and while the game wasn't a riveting success, many reviewers have expressed great appreciation for its ability to replicate the fantasy of being able to use the Force:

Though that movie was prerendered, it uses the same animation you will see while playing, unless you have the Wii version (read: a $50 coaster). Spanking stormtroopers has never been so satisfying.

Elsewhere in the industry, Indie developments enjoy the most unique use of physics to date, bringing even the most preposterous ideas to life and fame. Games like Crayon Physics Deluxe are stealing the spotlight from more conventional releases even immediately after a hot holiday season, yet all you do is roll a ball into a star by drawing shapes. De Blob for the Wii has moved almost 700,000 copies internationally and the combined efforts of four Katamari Damacy ball-rolling simulators have seen over a million sales since their release. These titles show us new and creative gameplay styles using advanced physics simulations, and their critical appeal and financial successes have not gone unnoticed.

Crayon Physics Deluxe's best feature? Shameless Promotion Mode.

It's important to note that many individuals and companies have contributed enhancements to the algorithms used to flavor our digital worlds, and that it is the amalgamated effort of all involved that has made games into what they are today. The skills of programmers and development teams over the years have refined an efficient solution into the massive engines that power games-come-tech-demos like Crytek's Crysis series.

We will obviously see further improvements to the technical accuracy of these simulations, and they've already extended to altering the models themselves. The Gears of War 2 meat-cube video is a great example of some of the things we should expect for the future:

But it's the practical application of these new technologies that has me excited. Character physics have practically been mastered with Euphoria, so it is time to start working on fully deformable environments. Imagine if a wall was made of wood and nails rather than a block and textures. Imagine playing an MMO and walking into a town you've never seen before because the inhabitants only recently constructed it, and from the forests around their homes. What if a bar fight in your favorite beat-em-up was as brutal as they can be in reality, with bottles shattering realistically over the heads of your enemies and bar stools being as practical a weapon as they are furniture?

And what if watching someone else play video games stopped being boring and started being more like watching your favorite action show, only with more spiky haired protagonists? This could literally be all that is needed to make video games an acceptable spectator sport and bring institutions like Major League Gaming the credibility they so desire (but arguably do not yet deserve). Even the most technologically advanced games ultimately become repetitive experiences, and additional work on properly integrating physics into the gameplay is one of the better ways to combat it. Know what a rocket jump is? From Quake? That was not an intentional feature; it was discovered by players and has grown to be a beloved tactic in almost every FPS. This is just one of the ways that physics systems can inadvertently make games better than intended.

Thankfully ragdoll, IK, and the PhysX, Havok, and Euphoria engines are only growing in popularity. It will become increasingly difficult to find games without them in the coming years and it won't be long before we forget what it's like to be without them. The wildest card, though, is the developers themselves, and its crucial for production teams and fans alike to stress the importance of properly instituting these features for the benefit of gameplay, not just graphical fidelity. We all appreciate piling zombie bodies waist high, but checking a box on your buzz-word list won't make a shitty game fun.

I'll bet you 69.99 that I'm right about that much.

-Unfather

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