Player Movement

Vya, the playable character of my thesis game, can walk left and right. Eventually, the script that contains this movement will include others: definitely crouching, maybe kicking, possibly some hand gesture that suggests grabbing an object. But walking is the most important movement in my game, as it is for many narrative games. It is consequential in ways that go beyond the mere conveyance of Vya from one point along the x-axis to another. In Vya, walking into invisible colliders triggers narration, branching dialogue, animations, and scene changes. In a word, walking is eventful.

This script also activates Vya’s “walking” animation. As she shuffles her feet across the screen, the rest of her body remains fairly still, entombed in the heavy winter coat she wears. Her feet seem disconnected from the rest of her body, and they kind of are, since I basically sliced her feet and repositioned them to create the animation frames. When I describe Vya, I often characterize her movement as “janky”—broken and inelegant. What started as a preemptive apology for my animation skills I now present as a deliberate design choice, one that reflects how a body moves in middle age.

“Is ‘janky’ really how middle-aged women walk?” a friend asks. I think about that question for a long time. Sometimes, when the crosswalk light starts blinking, I’ll pick up my pace and walk-run to the sidewalk. This drives my kid crazy. “You’re not actually moving faster,” he tells me. A year ago, I pulled a muscle in my leg. While it persisted, standing up from a sitting position—something I do many times a day—was slow and painful. The funny thing is that no one said anything about this. Maybe I am at the age when it is normal to be unsteady on your feet, to look a little stupid when you run across the street. But I also think that by the time a woman reaches middle age, she has spent most of her life scrutinizing the way she moves in the world, in no small part because her movements are—have always been—relentlessly under scrutiny.

Earlier this month, I attended a lecture by Bennett Foddy at the NYU Game Center. His talk, “Why Did I Make This?” was a detailed retrospective of almost two decades of game making, from his early experiments like Many Ninjas (2007) to Baby Steps (2025), a reimagining of the walking simulator genre. Foddy’s games are known for their “difficult” playable character movements, which have influenced my own thinking about player movement and uncomfortable game design. In Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy (2017), an extraordinary study on persistence and failure, the playable character, Diogenes, is a white man with a lean, muscular torso who the player maneuvers up a mountain with the help of a climbing hammer. Diogenes has a climber’s physique, but the catch here is that the rest of his body is encased in a black cauldron. To move him, you need to adjust the angle and position of the climbing hammer to push your cauldron body over the mountain. Failure risks repeating the tedious effort from the very beginning.

But in Foddy’s other games, like QWOP (2008) and Baby Steps, the playable character’s body is designed to make basic game movements, like taking a step, laborious and error-prone. In a 2014 GDC talk, Frank Lantz, who was then chair of the Game Center and Foddy’s colleague, observed how QWOP’s tricky movement mechanic encourages the player to think about what it means to move: “Here’s this thing that we take for granted—walking. We do it with a fluid grace, a natural, instinctual behavior. What happens when we make it deliberate, conscious?” For Foddy, these words illuminated a major thread that continues to run through his games: “You have to take what is automatic to you and make it intentional,” he tells us.

The word “intentional” unsettles me. I start to feel my heart racing, and a familiar feeling creeps in, the one that I have never been able to name but lies somewhere between sadness and rage. I am wondering what it would feel like to experience walking as a movement one can take for granted, as unintentional. I try to recall a time when I moved through the world in this way, and I can’t think of a single one.

I am watching clips of QWOP play on the large lecture screen and thinking that this tangle of flailing limbs is how my body must have looked that day, two summers ago, when a man punched me in the back on Nassau Street. In my memory of this moment, I am standing outside of my body, watching it lurch forward. Somehow, I managed to stay on my feet. This man I didn’t know punched me with such force that his handprints clung to my shirt. The muscles that kept me from falling on the pavement hurt for days. But the thing that really stays with me and hurts the most is that he called me a fucking bitch.

“[QWOP] takes you way back, to the point where you can’t do the world’s most normal thing, which is to walk,” Foddy says. I am struck by Foddy’s universalizing framework. Who is the “you” he is addressing? How a player experiences the game’s “difficult” movement mechanic may be conditioned by the body they inhabit and their experience of movement in real life. For instance, women, people of color, queer and trans individuals, and people with disabilities do not have to go “way back” to feel far from “normal” in their everyday movements. Even the whole notion of what is “normal” movement is fraught, given how insistently patriarchy encourages women to normalize behavior that inhibits how they move in the world. Getting Over It is an astonishing game, not least because the white male body needs to be put into a cauldron in order to experience movement as difficult.

Vya’s walking animation encodes years of guarded and careful walking, and I want to continue thinking about how her movements in the game can reflect where she is in her journey through “midlife hell.” I don’t hold out hope that the world will change for women in my lifetime, but the truth is that I love walking. If I am drawn to games like Getting Over It, it is not because they ask me to be “deliberate and conscious” in my movements; rather, in the awkward and tormented movements of the characters I am playing, I recognize my way of walking.