Game logic

  I drive a couple of hours every day with going to work and back. While doing that I listen to videogame podcasts since it helps pass the time rather than listening to shitty radio or the same old music I've had for years. As part of those a lot of new games are talked about. I try to avoid any particularly spoiler parts of games I want to play but generally the people on them talk without spoiling things too much. More often they talk about how a game plays or various interesting things that happen while playing the game.

  One game a lot of people are talking about right now is Skyrim. It seems it has turned out to be really good and the game logic and systems work together really well. Sometimes though the game logic can be a bit too logical. In this game you can steal owned objects. If you get seen while doing it people get annoyed and will chase you and call you a thief. If however their line of sight is broken they won't see you and you can steal with no problems. Totally logical and it works.

  If you then consider how this reacts with another system in the game it can get silly. You can fight pretty much anything and anyone in the game. There are people out there that are trying to play through the game and kill every single living person in the towns leaving the whole place a wasteland. To do this there are obviously game systems of attacking but you can't attack with everything. Hitting someone with a normal object, say a pot, won't get them to react, they will just comment on it and carry on as per normal.

  So consider these two systems then, stealing and object interaction. What would happen if you put a large pot on someones head? They wouldn't be able to see but wouldn't mind since you are not interacting with them with a weapon. What happens if you put a pot on the head of everyone in the room and then tried to steal objects. People have tried this and it actually works. It follows the exact game logic of stealing and people/object interaction. Yet despite this it is totally illogical if you think about it. Try watching this video to see it in action.

  It is this kind of game logic interaction that makes games so interesting sometimes. In the effort to make things act like they should the cross interactions between those systems ends up being totally crazy and silly. Some of these are intentional (like what happens when the giants hit things dead on as in this video) and others are just downright strange. They never fail to surprise though with so much happening getting the logic to be consistent and perfect is extremely hard.