Tapping at my Chamber Door

All things considered I’ve been having a pretty sweet time of it recently. System Shock 2 is now occupying much deserved space on my hard drive as part of an ongoing campaign to play seminal games that I missed first time around. My social gaming regime has involved generous doses of CoD4 and Geometry Wars 2, and in the wake of Trials HD the battle for the joypad has become something akin to zoo tigers fighting over the one unsupervised child that really wanted to stroke kitty. With this bounty of A-grade time-sinks at my disposal you will forgive me for having almost forgotten about things like bad level design, arbitrary choice systems, poor collision detection and retarded AI.

So thank you Batman: Arkham Asylum. Thank you for brushing all the awesome-dust from my eyes so that I might be reacquainted with the leering visage of Lame.

Now, before you stop reading this article, skip straight to the comments board and see how many expletives you can cram into 50 characters, I’m not condemning Arkham Asylum. Despite falling victim to delays and suffering from acute ‘hype-up-the-arse’ syndrome, it looks like Gotham’s favourite sociopathic insomniac has found himself in the middle of a rather entertaining little stealth ’em-up. What I am doing is highlighting a particular mechanic of game design that I believe is fundamentally broken, a mechanic that many games, including the Bat’s latest interactive outing, embrace with undeserved affection.

So, I’m exploring the corridors of Arkham, sweeping gracefully from floor to rafter, rafter to gargoyle, pausing occasionally to look menacingly at the camera or Batarang a psychotic in the face. I’ve cleared a room full of particularly aggressive lobotomy victims and am now using the cowl’s ‘detective vision’ to search for a way out. Not afraid to milk an established cliché for one last drop of predictability, the HUD highlights that stalwart of escape routes, the ventilation shaft. My goal in sight, I swoop over and hit the action button to remove the metal grate. It doesn’t open. I look at the instruction on screen and see a flashing button. My heart sinks, my shoulders slump and my palm travels face-ward.

My problem with the tappy-tappy approach to game interaction (the pressing of one button repeatedly to perform an action), whether it be pulling off grates in Batman: AA, turning cogs in GoW or re-fertilising an entire continent by firing petals from between your thighs in PoP, is redundancy. I might be able to understand these tappy-tappy interludes if they were incorporated as dexterity tests, echoes of the joystick waggling games that kept the Managing Director of Competition Pro in sweat bands and shoulder pads during the late 80s. I still wouldn’t enjoy them, because furiously mashing a button just to see how fast I can mash it before my index finger splinters into bloody, bony shards is not my idea of a good time, but it might at least justify their presence within the framework of the game.

However, these are not dexterity tests. To overcome these ‘obstacles’ you only have to tap one button for a couple of seconds at a relatively slow rate. The designers are not intent on flummoxing you with the task, nor anticipating you will need practise or honing of any kind to successfully accomplish it. You are expected to open that grate first time. Save putting the joypad down and going to sleep (or misreading the instructions and vigorously tapping your own forehead for 15 minutes) defeat is impossible. And quite right too; it is a flimsy metal grate and I am Batman.

So, other than padding the length of the game at the rate of five seconds per grate, what is the point of including this type of access-related mechanic? Having eliminated skill and challenge, what are we left with? Well, a reasonable counter-argument to my whiny nitpickery might focus on immersion and realism. After all, forcing a grate open in reality would require a sustained period of physical exertion, not entirely unlike what the tappy-tappy mechanic requires from players. Games are doing more and more to incorporate real-life physicality into their control schemes, for better or for worse (see light guns, dance mats and the entire Wii library). Perhaps tappy-tappy is an extension of this, a quasi-simulation of what it would feel like to force open a metal grate with your bare hands, a way of drawing you deeper into the game-world.

Trouble is, this argument falls down somewhat when the controls assigned to other physical interactions are taken into account. For example, to make Batman perform a slow motion somersault kick powerful enough to knock a ‘roided-up lunatic unconscious, you press square once. To fire a grappling hook up to the ceiling, ascend at high speed whilst avoiding scenery and perform a 10.0 perfect landing atop a stone golem, you press R1 once. It seems that these two actions alone would require more input than a single button press if the game was genuinely trying to emulate lifelike physicality. If I can fight like a Spartan and soar like a ba… butterfly at the touch of a button, why do I have to do the Fingertip Charleston to open every poxy grate I come across?

Just for the record, I am aware that this may be a bit of an over-reaction on my part. I’m not suggesting that offending games should be boycotted and their developers immolated for crimes against my right thumb. But when I first approached that ventilation shaft and saw the flashing icon appear onscreen I was so disappointed that I actually moaned out loud. It immediately sucked me out of an experience that I was otherwise enjoying by reminding me that I was playing a game, a game that was following the same pointlessly redundant convention as other games. The tap-button-to-open-door mechanic sits in an awkward no man’s land of gameplay: slightly more effort than a single button press, but nowhere near enough to be considered an entertaining diversion or legitimate challenge. It feels strangely cynical, the same way that back-tracking through sections of already completed levels often feels cynical, included only to extend shorter games beyond their natural lifespan.

The way I see it there are two solutions. Firstly, turn tappy-tappy into a decent mini-game that actually contributes to gameplay a la Bioshock’s turret hacking system. Given the stealth-centric nature of Batman: AA perhaps the mini-game could be based around opening the grates undetected; you could tap a button to raise a pressure gauge and then push another button to begin the forcing action – too little pressure and you damage the grate beyond the possibility of quiet removal, too much and you smash it noisily to smithereens, alerting inmates to your whereabouts. Failing that however, keep it simple: recognise tappy-tappy as the pointless, flow-breaking non-event that it is, replace it with a solitary button press and let me get on with mashing up my enemies, not my control pad.

Coming up next time: why I hate the orange Skittles.