Exploding Barrels

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What's in a cliché? Games start a bad rap for leaning to a great extent on what we consider tropes like, for example, the exploding drum. See a red barrel in a game and it's a safe recko you stern shoot information technology to establish it explode. Instinctively you bed and so that doing so when a bunch of enemies are nearby bequeath bollocks up them all up, and so you begin mentally preparing your strategy to take that into bill. You duck and weave, charge few guys to fix their attention and then lead them into position stingy the barrel … and then you suddenly realize that what you once considered a cliché is actually an important aspect of level contrive – one of which you are more than felicitous to capitalise.

One man's cliché, therefore, is another man's core game mechanic. Or, looking for at it another way, a cliché could conscionable as easily be seen as piece of an archetype. Games, after all, are as much a storytelling medium as they are interactional entertainment. If you feel like the whole "save the princess" thing has been through to death, you're non wrong. It has. But it's an important part of the recipe. One could just as easily say that using flour in muffins is clichéd.

Games furnish you an excuse to do other meaningless tasks in a fun, piquant way. You need a reason to be mowing through enemies or jumping over obstacles. What's a fitter need than a damsel in distress? We're hardwired as a species to want to touch the aid of those in necessitate, but would a dude stranded on the wrongfulness lateral of town cut it? Fat unplanned. He can take a cab. But a kidnapped princess? The very estimate represents not only chance but conceivable reward and subtextual romance. Rescue that princess and you're not just helping come out a fellow human organism, you're doing a party favour for a flush and pulchritudinous girl. Line up, boys!

The real cloth of games – all entertainment, really – is made up of such seeming clichés. Peer intimately sufficient under the microscope, though, and you begin to see that these clichés are not bare embellishments, but part of the wande. The condition "cliché" suggests a miss of originality, but adherence to an archetype like the kidnapped princess and implementation of accepted mechanisms like the increasing barrel are non so much inventive laziness as they are entertainment stenography. In other words, what's more important, originality in game mechanics and presentation or a creative, new way to blow finished multiple dudes straightaway? If the barrel were instead a hot blossom pot, and indigo orange, would that really score for a finer game?

One could even as easy say that guns are clichéd, and games would be more original if they had weapons made of fish. Or that instead of rescuing a princess, make it a poodle with a really waggily tail. Or, jettison the whole rescue thing altogether and shuffling a game in which you fend off enemies and surmount obstacles … just because? Or maybe you're the princess and the goal is to rescue yourself. These games exist, actually, but even they use exploding barrels. Because, hey, why reinvent the wheel?

/Fingergun
Russ Pitts

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/exploding-barrels-2/

Source: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/exploding-barrels-2/

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