“Keep running up that hill” Player Interaction and Accomplishment

A couple weeks ago I discussed my thoughts behind how man-made mountains of architecture can have a connection to game design.  Today I want to take a piece of that theory and see how it’s been used to show challenge and accomplishment in games throughout my time enjoying this medium. 

I’ve recently been helping a couple people in my local museum on the subject of architecture in New-Town Britain (post war 1950s+) in which we’ve talked primarily about the large amount of experimentation that was going on.  One of these examples was Bishopsfield in the 1960s; a residential area of flats, maisonettes and open-plan living spaces that featured an interesting street layout.  The Core block, which featured flats and the majority of the communal space, sat high on the landscape while the channels of homes splintered into narrow streets on a gentle slope to the surrounding landscape.  Although this piece is somewhat modelled on a North-African / Moroccan setting, is does have a polarising view from residents and architects alike.  For me, I find it interesting because it reminds me of a prison bloc in that you have the central guard tower high up against the rows of cell-blocks cowering underneath it forever under its watchful eye.  With all these views taken into account it did make me think about vistas, viewpoints and the use of height in architecture, which naturally brought me to the man-made mountain theory and finally to here. 

So for a game, what does a hill do?  Gives height to an area for the purpose of a vista; a defendable position that needs to be held from an encroaching horde; a natural border to the landscape to push the player to another objective; or an objective itself to overcome in a varied numbered of ways.  When I looked through my time playing games, I considered a mixture of these views, but what commonly came up were that of the antagonist and that sense of overcoming an obstacle which has been presented to us.  Here are a couple examples of what I’ve experienced over my time in gaming:

MediEvil (PSX) – Level 3 Cemetery Hill

Rocks slow your progress as you climb the hill to complete the level (Image from Medievil Wiki)

MediEvil is one of the games on the PlayStation that I loved playing many times throughout my childhood; being a mix of combat, plat-forming and mild RPG mechanics that many games of the time used.  I have never owned a Nintendo console, so I never got to play games like Mario, Banjo Kazooie, or the Legend of Zelda so MediEvil holds that feeling that these games may have for you.  In regards to hills, MediEvil has an early level called Cemetery Hill that tasks the player (Sir Daniel Fortesque) go after the antagonist (Zarok) up a steep hill upon which sits an asylum.  Zarok turns to animate nearby stone gargoyles that start chucking boulders down the hill’s path to impede the player in their progress.  The player then must use a combination of movement, safe-spots and attacks with a club to get around these obstacles and reach the end-point at the entrance of the asylum which features the game’s first boss.  The hill in this case has a visual representation as something to climb up to achieve a goal and overcome a challenge to which physical obstacles are placed much like a feudal encampment with its raised sections, wooden walls and elevated keep. 

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare – SafeHouse and Heat

Heat and the hill featuring both going down the hill and up it while the chaos ensues  (Image from google search) 

I did originally put down my experiences of earlier war games charging up the beaches in Normandy, but I feel like that example is a bit too similar to the MediEvil one.  With CoD however, I feel it still has that feeling of the charge and a challenge to overcome with the physical representation behind a bit more subtle.  I understand CoD and subtlety aren’t usually connected with its Hollywood-esc action scenes but in this context I feel it does it well.  The first mission (SafeHouse) is a stealthy approach up the hill at night to find one of the antagonists of the game hiding in Azerbaijan.  The movements are slow and the gradient change has a similar feeling going through the set pieces.  The players have a similar experience next with the brilliantly designed “All Ghilled Up” but upon returning to the present timeline we’re met with a frantic reimagining of “Safehouse” called “Heat”.  This mission deals with the player having to take on enemy reinforcements coming up the hill to clear a suitable area for extraction by helicopter.  At this point, going up the hill has been replaced by the notion of getting down the hill while dealing with the presented challenge via a couple of different means (guns blazing, stealth, etc).  Being at the top, one could imagine we have the sight advantage, but much like the earlier MediEvil example, those enemies have things to hide behind and fortify giving us a kind of a role-reversal situation where this hill that we achieved has been turned against us.  When playing this game, I played it on its hardest difficulty setting (if I remember correctly that was veteran) so the mass of enemies combined with the limited health-pool was met with a challenging experience that took me a decent number of tries to accomplish. 

Dear Esther – The Tower

The Tower and its glow an ever present hill to climb (Image from steam screenshot library)

I have mentioned Dear Esther in my previous man-made monuments piece but it has some bleed over to this.  Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to play “Journey” on the PS3 as I haven’t owned a console since the PS2 but if you have you will probably see some similarities.  The Tower is an ever-noticeable symbol in this game in that it represents an objective to attain at a foreseeable future to the player.  It is this game’s hill (beyond its natural hills that are present throughout the time of play) in that the visual representation is something to overcome while the story narration builds –up to an event like a peak. 

With all this being said, I come back to my post-war residential block of Bishopsfield and think ‘where do you fit in all this?’  To be honest I’m not sure where to place it, but if I had to it would probably align itself with a stealthy piece of gameplay like Metal Gear Solid.  That being said, I may be thinking too literal with the guard tower design theory I mentioned earlier.  Hills are challenges that can manifest themselves as both physical and physiological items and I task you to think about it next time find yourself interacting with such a space both in-game and in the world we live in.