Gameplay Journal #6 — Glitches can change how you experience a game — Metroid Prime’s Out of Bounds Glitch.
Video above made by Youtuber, DPadGamer.
Glitches in games can drastically change how a player experiences said game, making the game something completely different than what it was originally in terms of gameplay. Metroid Prime’s speed-run community proved this fact as the introduction of the out of bounds glitch in the game. This glitch allowed for many players to bypass much of the game using precise platforming, even to the smallest of pixel to achieve such a feat. Out of bounds, for those who do not know what that may mean, is a glitch in games that results in the player character being outside the bounds of the intended play area. It takes a lot of dedication and memorization to play the game in such a way due to the precise jumps and positioning required by the player.
An experience like what the “out of bounds” glitch can give to a player is akin to playing a game of virtual parkour. Each jump, climb and movement pushes the player farther to the end goal but not by the game’s rules. The visuals are a bit jarring too due to the fact that the next rooms don’t reload until some conditions are met, which results in empty spaces before those environments load in. It definitely changes how the game looks and feels when the person is staring at it from the outside in. According to the paper, Post-Digital Aesthetics in Contemporary Audiovisual Art, “The critical role of Glitch in promoting awareness of the materiality and infrastructure of audiovisual media”(Ferreira, Ribas ch.2, p.5). This quote suggests a lot of ideas related to why and how the glitch in Metroid Prime can happen, mainly in relation to how the game developer designed the game in the first place. Terrain most of the time in many 3D games is usually just for show, the real magic happens in the game engine. Box colliders are just one example on why this is possible. In short a box collider is a collider in the engine space that is supposed to map the usable moveable spaces and what is also off-limits. In this case, because all the colliders were made in different variants, for even the tiniest ledge, and the terrain in the game is interconnected for the most part in each area, that allows for the out of bounds glitches that we see in the video above. The quote from the paper explains this, relating the use of its development infrastructure.
Ferreira, P., & Ribas, L. (2020). Post-Digital Aesthetics in Contemporary Audiovisual Art [PDF]. Graz, Austria: XCoAx 2020Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X.
