Marble Madness!!!

Try to find an example of a digital game which truly takes advantage of the traits of the medium, and could not be successfully implemented in a non-digital form. In particular, think about the traits of digital/computer games as listed by Crawford. Describe the game, and identify the core gameplay mechanic.

My game of choice is Marble Madness, by Atari games, released in 1984.

It’s a simple arcade game where we take control of a marble and complete a course of three dimensional labyrinths within a strict time limit. The three-quarter overhead view actually gives a sense of depth, and with all the shadow effects, it really gives a nice illusion of 3d space. The screen actually scrolls downwards, and reveals the level as the marble progresses down. There are various small enemies scattered through the levels, but the player's greatest challenge is actually the controlling of the marble throughout the levels itself, which feature many peculiar passages and obstacles. This controlling of the marble is essentially, the core mechanic of the game.

Responsiveness

The game can be played in one player or two player modes. The home console versions let you choose the difficulty levels. In terms of the game interface itself, the game does not have any action button, simply because the only action available is moving around the levels. Although the version I played was the Sega Genesis port, the original arcade version actually features a trackball as the controller, but I find the directional pads sort of work quite well also. But it is interesting how a trackball is featured in the arcades, as it reflects the affordance of the ball and thus enhances the sense of control of the marble in the game.

Automation of rules

The purpose of the game is to control the marble to reach the goal in the shortest period of time. A play time was set, and a timer starts to count down as soon as player takes control of the marble. Should the marble drops off the edges of the level, or breaks due to falling down to a lower level, or got eaten by the enemy, then the time it takes for the marble to respawn and to resume control is the penalty imposed to the player. Remaining time gets carried over, while game ends if player fails to reach the goal within the specified time.

Immediate interactivity

With every push of the button, there is this inertia which the marble carries, and it will pick up some speed if the player continues to direct it towards a certain direction, so interactivity comes out of trying to balance the flow of the marble to avoid dropping off the edges or the enemies.

Intelligent opponent

Although there are no real artificial intelligent opponents, the level design itself provokes enough challenge to the player. There are some a.i controlled opponents like this enemy marble that moves around the level and try to bump into the player.

Control over visibility of information

As mentioned, due to view the perspective of the game, the screen scrolls down, and thus only certain parts of the level is visible at one time. This unpredictability of what lies ahead is what makes the game interesting.

What is it about the core mechanic that makes the game truly a digital game?

I guess what makes this game truly digital is fact that the level design is quite difficult to implement physically. Although I would imagine somebody could come up with a Lego version of it, it's still kinda hard to implement the core mechanic of controlling the marble with all the inertias/ gravity, not to mention the mechanism to control it.

The thing about digital game is that computers can convert physical user input (through the game interface) into certain mathematical computations to simulate the effects of a rolling marble as it interacts with the environment, and represent these effects using pixelated graphics. The levels themselves are not static, they are dynamic, the computer using the same calculations, simulate the obstacles for the player to overcome, and automatically keep track of the rules, such as the time limit and penalties.