When I Grow Up

There are some video games that play more like a dance than a traditional game. There may be some improvisation, or varying levels of planning and decision making, but once you know the route the real game lies in performing it. You need to practice until the keypresses burn themselves into your muscles, until the independent motion of each digit no longer crosses signals in your brain, but the most import thing, always, is the rhythm. Timing is everything.

TrackMania is a game you play on a server with other people, even though each of you remains effectively wholly locked into your own world. You can see the other cars on the track but cannot touch them - can’t even compete with them head-to-head, since every player will restart at random times and your best runs will be staggered out of sync. But the online provides an essential component of the game despite having no tangible effect on the outcome: it changes what you are doing into a performance.

My favorite way to play Mirror’s Edge is in a room full of people going round-robin style. Someone plays until they fuck up, then the next person grabs the controller and gets their chance to show off. The feeling generated when the whole room keeps on dying to one tricky jump until your turn comes around and you’re able to nail it perfectly is a great one. Roles start to emerge - some will ace the combat sections (this is never me), others will do great with the traversal, and some will be best at the indoor spatial puzzling sections. When people hit one of the other sections, they start to fail until the controller naturally moves around to the one who is good at those bits, who then gets the opportunity to proudly save the day.

I think the link that immediately formed in my head between Dustforce and those other games is that element of performance. This is a game that a robot could play perfectly, given the exact buttons to press and millisecond perfect times for each. There is some amount of thought to it on your first few tries of a level while you work out the best route, but once you have the layout down it is all about playing until you get it right. Until you can not only plan out the dance but perform it as well. And a big driver of that is that your Steam friends list is watching, able to call up a replay of your best run at will and compare themselves to it, or try to beat it.

Some levels become battlegrounds where you defend your turf from people who come in and challenge you. Someone came in to Server Room and beat my time, I watched their replay and tuned my own run until I was able to bring it to 1 second faster than them. On one level I spent two hours to come in 0.067 seconds below a friend’s fastest time. There is something captivating about fights over hundredths of seconds, where the tiniest detail of every movement starts to matter, and the high precision of the controls becomes absolutely essential. You can feel their eyes watching you as you get that string of jump-dash-run-jump-attack-dash down to a science.

Dustforce certainly isn’t the first of its kind, but it is one of the best. For all the things that video games give you to show off, for your towering skyscrapers in Minecraft, or your immaculately kept-up FarmVille plots, or your perfectly timed super-move parry in Street Fighter 2, or your Super Mario Brothers speedrun, now you can add to the list your balletic aerial display of pushbroom prowess.