Liquid Design

Water, water, everywhere. That about describes the situation in most video games, where water and other liquids make for interesting permutations in gameplay and visual design. Even the earliest days of video gaming made use of water as a part of gameplay, primarily to denote the places your character can be killed.

Super Mario Bros. comes to mind for one of the earliest games I can remember from my own childhood, where water was a bad thing. The funny thing is how I never noticed until just recently that, due to hardware limitations, water on your average side-scrolling Super Mario Bros. level is a painted-on decal. If you should fall into a hole or trap where you can see water, you simply fall as if the water was never there to begin with; it was just a cute way to make a death trap look more fancy than it actually was.



Super Mario Bros. took things a step further though, by introducing levels to mix up the standard platforming in which Mario could actually SWIM. Yes, it was revolutionary, it was fun, and it really did provide a welcome distraction from all that running to the right and goomba stomping. As I can personally attest to, my own brother's 4 year old step-son loves the water levels; every time I manage to get to one, he is very quick to grab the controller, and ram me into a blooper squid, or one of those mindless fish. Thanks, Vinny!

The usage of water in video games has long been a staple of gameplay, and has become ever more so in the years since I first picked up a controller. I can still remember the frustration I felt on the water level from Earthworm Jim. I'll never forget the panic I felt as I ran out of air, desperately searching for an air bubble in the watery zones from Sonic the Hedgehog games (like Labyrinth Zone, Chemical Plant Zone, Aquatic Ruin Zone, Hydrocity Zone, etc).

With the advent of 3D graphics, the use of water seemed to take on a different kind of meaning; it went from a gameplay mechanic, to a benchmark of sorts. The complexity of water in a three dimensional space meant that, at least for awhile, the better-looking a game's water, the better the game. A shallow way of looking at a video game of course, but for an 11 year old marveling at 3D graphics for the first time in 1996, the alluring flow of digital liquid felt so amazing to see. Flat textures, ground and grass textures and the rest just weren't as impressive...but the water was a crystal-clear pool of possibilities. Perhaps the first game that sparked this sensation was again a Mario game; Super Mario 64.



Of course by today's standards, Mario 64 isn't anything too terribly impressive. At the time, stepping Mario's foot for the first time into that invitingly calm water in Jolly Roger Bay felt like a revelation, and then came the actual fun when you learned to swim in a three dimensional space. And there was so much to DO underwater, and so much room to move! The way that game handled water just felt right. The actual way a game handles water in a three-dimensional sense is far more complicated than it had been in a 2D game. For a game like Sonic the Hedgehog, water involved an effect painted over a portion of the screen, in which anything behind that effect would appear tinted blue. Bubbles would rise from the bottom portion of the screen to the top, and the physics of jumping, momentum, and speed were altered. You could jump higher, but your speed was handicapped; it was a different sensation, it changed up the gameplay, but in the end it was just an effect that the system cooked up to make the player feel more immersed. The objective, even in those watery levels, was to get out of the water and keep moving to the right.

With Super Mario 64, water felt more real than it ever had before. It became an animated, ebbing and flowing surface that contained its own fluid dynamics, that presented concepts like buoyancy and current. Mario could swim in ANY direction; not just up and down, left and right. We had real, true depth to worry about now. Things could be obscured or hidden by the silt in the water, and added a layer of exploration and discovery to the underwater world. In fact, one of the first objectives in the watery world of Jolly Roger Bay had Mario, and hence the player, discover and then finally enter a sunken ship to discover a hidden power star. The entire experience felt completely different from how water had been treated in games previously, in which the objective of water levels was either to get as far to the right as possible, or to simply avoid the water altogether.

Water was quickly coming into its own as a gameplay mechanic, but it could still go further. As beautiful as the water in Super Mario 64 was, it was static. It could not splash, it could not fluidly MOVE unless it was programmed to do so in a specific, pre-determined path. A waterfall, for example, had to be a specially-programmed object in the world, coated with a texture that made the solid object appear as if it were moving water, when in reality it is only a visual effect.

Mario's next game, conveniently enough for this subject, was ALL about water and liquids and fluids. Super Mario Sunshine is a game in which Mario's acrobatic repertoire of moves is replaced by a backpack watering unit called FLUDD. With this backpack, Mario has to clean up after Bowser Jr, after he coats the picturesque vacation spot of Delfino Island in goopy paint. Not only is the paint a liquid new to gamers at the time, but the ways in which the paint was removed proved a great way to make a Mario game fun.



The water splashed, it sloshed, it sprayed, it flowed, it did all of the alluring yet simple things a fluid is supposed to do, and at the same time all of it was directed squarely at gameplay. FLUDD could spray water straight ahead, it could use water to suspend Mario in mid-air, like a hovering jetpack. It could use water to propel Mario at crazy speeds across the surf, it could propel him deep underwater, and it could even let Mario jump ten times higher than normal in a supercharged burst of water pressure! Water was no longer simply a tool to change the pace of gameplay; it had BECOME the gameplay. And true to 3D's use of water proving as a graphical benchmark, Mario Sunshine's water was appropriately beautiful to look at; it sparkled, shimmered, and looked warm to the touch. Everything about it screamed "Play with me! I'm fun!". And despite Mario Sunshine being considered a low point of the main Super Mario platformer franchise by many, Mario Sunshine was still a damn fine game, in large part because the water really was so much fun to mess around with.

Where did water have left to go? What more could it do for us, to enhance and change the way we play? The answer would come in a 2007 title developed by Irrational Games, Bioshock. Water was going to take on a whole new meaning, not to mention a whole new level of beauty and sophistication.

Bioshock is the tale of paradise lost beneath the ocean; the city of Rapture, designed by the most brilliant minds on Earth as a means to escape the expectations of the land-based nations of the outside world. As scientific practice continued unhindered by the troublesome ethics and morals of the outside world, genetic engineering gave birth to a new kind of drug unique to Rapture; a tonic that could rewrite genetic code, known as a "plasmid". These plasmids could grant an ordinary man the powers over electricity, or give him the ability to lift objects from a distance with nothing but the power of thought, just to name a few. Although the plasmids had the potential to turn ordinary men into superhumans, the drugs had a terrible effect on the populace of Rapture however, twisting their minds and bodies until they became nigh-unrecognizable as human beings; they became known as splicers. And as the city of Rapture fell apart, its citizenry tearing each other to pieces, the city began to buckle under the pressure of thousands of feet of water...and the city began to flood.

Water in Bioshock is pure atmosphere, and rather than providing an entertaining distraction or fun gameplay, the water in Bioshock evokes claustrophobia and inevitability. That water will continue to seep in; it will fill the city, flood it, and drown all its inhabitants, and all you can do is watch.

I have read in one article, although the exact article escapes me at the moment, that a group of developers at Irrational worked for a solid year on perfecting the way that water behaves. The way it sweeps across a room, or flows in small waterfall-lets down a flight of stairs. The way it soaks into carpet, or the way it refracts the light of fire. The way it can extinguish a burning pile of trash in the corner of a steadily-flooding room, the way it raises and sloshes and sprays and flows...

To show off the wonderful fruits of their labor, a video was even created before the game's 2007 release! Have a look at it below, and see how far we've come from those early days when water was little more than a decal stuck onto the background. There is design in water, and that design has evolved.




I wonder where the next evolution in the presentation of water will take us? If Bioshock, a game released three years ago is capable of such beautiful effects, then what might the future hold?

(Gah, I have no idea why blogger.com decides it's such a great idea to clip YouTube videos like that. Just click on the video, then click again to view it on YouTube, and you'll be set :) )