BEAR with me: Breakdown

BEAR with me (BWM) was originally just going to be a throwaway project I created in a day to build my game making confidence. However the game quickly evolved into a thought exercise for myself as well as a mechanical one. It got me thinking about the way that our minds have been trained to subconsciously interpret games without us even knowing it. Through generations worth of precedent we have built up certain notions about games that haunt us no matter how far we may roam in terms of advancement.

Firstly, I wanted to address how we interact with the game world. Starting off, my guess is that you did one of 2 things when the game first booted up: either you focused on the falling carrot in the foreground OR you started walking right. Those guesses almost certainly account for a vast majority of players with previous exposure to games. The carrot gives a subtle and yet incredibly informative clue when it drops into the world: It’s interactive. Whether we are conscious of it or not we are able to silently communicate the idea that an object is more than just a piece of set dressing just by a small and otherwise un-notable display of physics. On the other hand the idea of walking to the RIGHT in video games has been so deeply ingrained in our collective psyche that its often one of the first things we do if not instructed otherwise. Thus, the first objective of the game is set off to the left, just off screen. Players will often struggle for the first minute or so of play while searching the right side and getting distracted by the bee.

The other part of this experiment that I find most interesting is how it tests people's ability to put together a sequence of events and continue it. You are able to observe as people slowly piece together that the carrot goes to the rabbit, and the rabbit dispenses a reward. From this point some people understood that they needed to give items to animals to get rewards and didn't think past that point. So they would begin brute forcing it, first trying to give the flower to the bear before moving on to the bee. However, others paused and tried to piece it together. Both strategies are valid and have uses in different kinds of games, such as platformers requiring perseverance and the ability to re run a problem over again until you make the pixel perfect jumps required, whereas a strategy game may require you to sit back and think more.

All together this wasn't a difficult game to create and can be completed in seconds. However, I think it illustrates an important point. A game doesn't have to be complicated to have meaning.