The Gravity Bones of the First-Person Shooter

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This is an essay about Gravity Bones, a free video game from Brendon Chung of BLENDO Games. I recommend completing the game before reading.
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If judged by current standards, Gravity Bone is a pretty awful video game. It lacks a cohesive narrative. Its ending is completely beyond understanding. The denizens of its world have blocks for heads and are rendered with decade-old graphics technology. It has no character development, no meaningful objectives and almost no content. Hell, I’ve watched cutscenes longer than this game. How, then, does Gravity Bone have more to say in its fifteen minutes of gameplay than almost anything else out there? Game designer Brendon Chung has crafted—primarily through the game’s design itself—a scathing commentary on first-person shooter video games and their limiting and often trivial conventions.

Fundamentally, Gravity Bone is a first-person video game, but it couldn’t be further from traditional expectations of the genre. In contrast to the dull shades of gray and brown, “realistic” gunmen and high definition graphics of modern first-person shooters, this game has colorful, almost surreal environments, stylized block-people and simple geometry. There actually are security guards in the first environment that mirror those of traditional first-person shooters—they just (literally) have anything to say. The game also differs with its use of weapons: you don’t have any. Only in the second of two scenarios do you actually have usable items, and even then they consist of relatively harmless objects like a pressurized Freon spray can for freezing copious amounts of locks, a hammer for breaking those locks and a camera for photographing five birds. If the tasks you complete with those items sound menial and pointless it’s because they are. They’re designed that way.

Breaking locks is an act of necessity; you need to in order to progress in the game. At first there is only one lock per door, but soon you will encounter two locks in front of doors guarding the birds you have to photograph. This game intentionally spites the player, giving them even more of the same repetitive task that blocks their progress. Spray, smack, spray, smack, switch to spray can, click, switch to hammer, click. Once those doors are open the player must take a picture of a misshapen avian creature, which proceeds to explode and disappear from sight. Now, what could be significant about that? It’s simple: by “shooting” a picture of the bird, it dies! Gravity Bone mocks first-person game developers and their insistence on using weaponry and violence in their games by forcing the player to commit familiar violent actions—just with a camera instead of a gun.

These two reoccurring actions highlight the repetitive and inconsequential goals and obstacles of many first-person shooters. There’s no reason those locks need to be there and there’s no reason to take pictures of those birds (except to gain access to the exit). Without any kind of narrative context for those actions, they are meaningless. Gravity Bone perpetrates the failings of many FPS games in providing weight and meaning to players’ actions, but does so in a satirical manner that accentuates the genre’s weaknesses.

The game even comments on the genre’s overreliance on cinematic storytelling and its heavy use of cutscenes. The protagonist of Gravity Bone is Citizen Abel, an obvious play on the title of the esteemed film Citizen Kane that ties into the biblical story of Cain and Abel. Cain kills Abel in that story, and if you apply that relationship to Citizen Abel and Citizen Kane one can infer that—according to the game designer—the use of cinema in games kills them. Citizen Abel, as a video game protagonist, stands as an opposite to one of the most widely renowned films in history to depict Chung’s desire for games to escape from the conventional overuse of cutscenes in first-person shooter video games. The relationship of death to the convergence of film and video games is further seen at the end of the game. As Citizen Abel falls to his death, a scene from The Godfather (another film of great notoriety) is recreated as a cinematic in the game. Film—even great film—is seen as a threat to video games, and is portrayed as a killer rather than a savior.

Film is not the only force of game-related death seen in Gravity Bone, however; characteristics of typical first-person shooters are symbolically portrayed as a force of death, too. The only character in the game with a gun is (not so coincidentally) the woman who sends you to your death, and her depiction in the game is reminiscent of the characters seen in a stereotypical first-person shooter. She is about as cool and intense as a bipedal block can be, and when she pauses to smoke a cigarette during an extended chase sequence she easily resembles the archetypical action heroine. That she steals your camera and kills you to keep it is symbolic of the largely unchanging genre stealing away progress and preventing the medium as a whole from advancing. And as the player hurtles towards death, nearing train tracks and incoming locomotives, the woman appears on a running track victorious in her race.

Gravity Bone doesn’t want her to win that race. This game speaks out against a tired genre that sees far more iteration than innovation, and satirizes its conventions. This game wants the “gravity bones” of first-person shooters—the widely accepted, omnipresent, and supposedly critical components of the genre such as guns, blood, gore, cutscenes and cinematic presentation—to disappear. Gravity Bone wants differentiation in gameplay and purpose for players’ actions beyond mindless shooting at whatever moves. It’s sad to say, but in fifteen minutes Gravity Bone has more to say than most games do in fifteen hours, and it would be wise for other game developers to listen to its message.