metaphorical skateboarding, and my obsession with motion
there's a habit I have which I find really difficult to explain to most people. the best I can come up with is using skateboarding as an analogy:
Metaphorical Skateboarding
given a skate park, or an obstacle, or really any kind of space you have access to, skateboarding generally works like this:
- explore the given space,
- interpret your findings,
- and execute some trick or series of tricks.
metaphorical skateboarding is the same, with the only difference being that the execution step doesn't need to be done with a skateboard. this turns out to be a very big difference, as the possibility space now includes (but is not limited to):
- cycling
- climbing
- driving
- quake (yes, that quake. and yes, this applies to source engine games too)
- a large number of other video games
I don't believe I'm the only person with this interest (hence the "most people" in the first sentence of this post) but it seems fairly uncommon outside of communities focused on movement, like those for speedrunning or for competitive fighting games.
my obsession with motion
I've been obsessed with motion, or movement, or whatever word or phrase you have for it, for as long as I remember. I couldn't tell you why, but nearly all of my interests have something to do with movement:
- music on it's own is fine, but listening to music while moving is the best :)))) 1
- I find video games uninteresting if there's no complex movement to be had. most game designers don't create that type of gameplay intentionally but it's very fun to find programming mistakes and emergent gameplay that cause interesting motions:
- the quake acceleration bug that makes bunnyhopping and surfing work 2
- wavedashing in melee 3
- rocket jumping
- I currently only bike out of necessity, but I've always loved the way countersteering and leaning feel. there's so much complexity in the dynamics of something as seemingly simple as a bicycle, it's so so so good.
really the only exception to this pattern is reading, and that one is easy to explain: books rule !!!
footnotes