The Impact Factor

Evolutionary Imperative: Conserved Building Blocks in Biology & Games

Article, Parallels

Abstract: Biology and games have a lot in common. Conservation and iteration are at the heart of both. While not necessarily bad, conservation can lead to adverse effects. In biology, utilizing minimal components reduces resource consumption, but results in biological processes prone to perturbations as well as presents serious obstacles to curing human disease. In games, building upon a genre’s well-established mechanical foundation is efficient and effective at creating functional gameplay, but an overreliance on iteration has led to stagnation in new genre creation and a repetitive AAA gaming experiences. Hybrid genres and a rapid evolution in the independent scene, however, has ameliorated some of gaming’s conservation pitfalls.

The world’s most intricate complexity is built upon a simple foundation. When you boil a process, a system, or an object down as far as you can, you’re left with relatively simple building blocks. Blocks that have been long established as fundamental to the existence of the more complicated thing it constitutes. As you my beloved reader know well, I’m a biological scientist first and games writer/podcaster/personality second. I’m always looking for parallels between my two biggest passions, as disparate as they might seem. A particularly stimulating lab meeting prompted me to quickly jot down an idea for parallels. That idea? Conservation. This article will touch on some examples of conservation and potential adverse affects in both biology and games.

Biology, games, and perhaps all life has a conservational imperative—to utilize what has been previously established in a myriad of ways. Speaking first of biology, it is remarkable that life on Earth exists at all. The spontaneous formation of RNA, into DNA, into proteins in the primordial soup of early Earth is one of the most intriguing events in the world’s history. A lot of work (i.e. random events happening in ideal conditions that primed for the formation of) went into the generation of life’s building blocks. All living organisms stem from this origin point: the formation of Earth’s first RNA molecule. The hundreds of millions of years of evolution have operated using life’s most basic building blocks: RNA, DNA and proteins. Human life, if reduced and oversimplified as much as possible, is just the right combination of the three. But even if you were reduce less dramatically, a variety of different biological processes rely upon a simple foundation to enact their complex functions.

You would think would be better images for "primordial soup."
You would be wrong.

My recent experience in a predominantly immunobiology research laboratory offers me a specific perspective on this phenomenon. The human immune system is notoriously complex. The delicate dance between antigen presentation, MHC complexes, myeloid cell recruitment, germinal center formation, and T-cell single positive selection is mankind’s defense against an invasive microbial world. Understanding how our immune cells communicate not only with each other, but with pathogenic material, is essential to our understanding of and fight against a number of human diseases. Studying the immune system is not without its complications, however, not the least of which relates to this notion of ‘conservation.’

Biological processes, immune response included, are based upon the creation, recruitment, and activation of proteins. Cells are made of proteins, signaling molecules are frequently proteins, etc. Proteins are so important that even as recently 80 years ago, scientists believed proteins were the genetic material of life (we now know that DNA is our genetic material). What might surprise you is that there are only 21,000 protein coding genes in the entire human genome.  That’s 1% of our total DNA. Life is excellent at conserving our biological and genetic resources as much as possible—the fewer kinds of proteins you have to make to carry out different functions, the less energy / resources your cells spend to get their job done. It’s about efficiency. What that means in terms of specifics, be they organs or processes or otherwise, is that a large majority of our protein building blocks have multifaceted roles. Sometimes a particular protein will act in a variety of similar ways in different processes, but other times it can be a little bit (read: a lot bit) more complex.

If you think 21,000 proteins is few, what about nucleotides?
DNA is made up of just 4.

There are a number of examples in biology where the same protein can have multiple and opposing functions. This is great for the body as it conserves resources, but can be both confusing and bad for human health. Immune proteins are a perfect example of this phenomenon. Let’s take one of my favorite immune proteins, interleukin-2 (IL-2). IL-2 is a cytokine protein secreted by immune cells, which can bind to specific receptors on immune cells to stimulate inflammatory responses. In fact, IL-2 is just one of many interleukin proteins that are key regulators of immunity, as they bind and activate/suppress immune cell activity. But IL-2 is of particular interest because it was first identified as a potent anti-inflammatory protein. This is important because a number of terrible human diseases occur as a result of an overactive immune system, like sepsis and autoimmunity. IL-2 functions to stop effector T cells, a workhorse cell of the human immune response. It was hypothesized that IL-2 administration would act as a wonder drug for these hyperimmune conditions. But that wasn’t the case. In fact, in nearly all cases, giving patients IL-2 made their hyperactive immune disorders worse. Why? Well, it turns out that IL-2 has more than one function. Sure, it helped to block effector T cells. But it also activated regulatory T cells. Once activated, these “T regs” induce an even more pronounced immune response. Which would then worsen the illness. Ouch. And this phenomenon isn’t unique to immune cells or interleukins. In nearly all biological processes we’ve identified proteins with dual opposing functions, complicating not only our understanding of said processes but also making it increasingly difficult to find ideal approaches to treating human disease. Though biologically efficient, conservation has serious pitfalls.

You do too much, IL-2. Seriously. Too much.

I’ve seen a similar evolution in video games. Certain ideas took hold during the early and primordial days of game development that still act as the basic building blocks of modern games. Games emulate biology in how strongly dependent they appear to be on a limited number of essential elements, whose origins nearly all go back to the earliest days of household gaming. It’s fascinating to see the macrocosm of carbon-based life recapitulated in the microcosm of evolution in a roughly forty-year-old industry. Developers rely on these building blocks in much the same way biology relies on RNA/DNA/protein—they work and they’re efficient. For example, much of the foundation for what a 2D platformer is was laid out in 1985 with Super Mario Brothers and again in 1988 with Mega Man 2. The building blocks for a first person shooter were established by DOOM in 1993. Or adventure games with King’s Quest in 1983. Or real-time strategy with Dune II in 1992. A handful of titles like these indelibly shaped what we perceive of as video games and still serve as the foundation for most games we see today.

Call of Duty has DOOM DNA. DOOM proteins.

Are game developers wrong to repurpose the groundwork laid before them to make their own titles? Absolutely not. That’s nearly as ridiculous as blaming a stomach cell for using the same DNA as a brain cell. The conservation we see in games can be a little disheartening at times, however. Because some of these building blocks are so strong, so good at what they were desigedn to do, we’ve seen decades of the same kinds of games being made. Each game possesses its own identity, sure, but especially on a mechanical level games in the same genre can often feel very similar to play. Gears of War and Binary Domain and Uncharted are all great, but their cover-based 3^rd person shooter combat all left me feeling a certain way. The same way. In part because their gameplay is all based upon the same foundation (Kill Switch, 2003).

Conservation, while not inherently a bad thing, has put AAA game development in a tough (and uninteresting) spot. Big budget game development is totally shackled by established gaming conventions of the past decade or so. While fun and functional, Call of Duty and Battlefield do little to reinvent themselves or the genres they represent. Assassin’s Creed, once established as a brand people care about, has done little more than lightly iterate on the basic 3^rd person action open world foundation since Brotherhood. Exceptions do exist, but playing most AAA games gives the player a sense of sameness, of repetition, that exists in part due to an over-reliance on mechanical foundations.

A little too much conservation, Assassin's Creed. Maybe that is why
the franchise is taking a year-long hiatus.

Innovation on a macro (genre) level has traditionally been slow, in part because games are such an iterative pursuit. Ideas are conserved, ‘improved’ upon, and then re-released. Instead of seeing new genres, you’re much more likely to see new hybrid genres pop up. Or at the very least, that’s what we have seen in the industry recently. There’s the first-person shooter, RPG, loot hybrid with Borderlands and Destiny. The rhythm roguelike hybrid Crypt of the Necrodancer. The rhythm visual novel hybrid Persona 4: Dancing All Night. Or even the real-time strategy fighting game hybrid genre—MOBAs (a topic for another time). These syntheses can create something new, like in biology, though not ‘new’ in the truest sense of the word.

 

Crypt of the NecroDancer was a combination I had never seen before.
And oh did it work so well.

Unlike biological evolution, however, games have made great strides in the past few years to reanalyze this conservational approach. Game developers, predominantly in the independent scene, have been working to make games that aren’t as reliant on gaming’s long established building blocks. The very definition of games has been evolving, expanding, to include a much wider swath of interactive experiences. Take Robert Yang’s Stick Shift, in which the player engages with homosexual intimacy via operating a car’s manual transmission. Or Fernando Ramallo's Panoramical, a game in which you compose visual art and music simultaneously and in-real time. Panoramical has learned from the long lineage of game development, but has created something we’ve never seen before. As one game personality put it: Panoramical is the future. Many of these experimental games can be found on itch.io, a font of creative work from independent developers who have moved away from conservation & iteration in their titles.

 

The future? Who knows. But Panoramical has me excited.

Conservation makes sense, but it is not without its downsides. What is efficient and effective may not always lead to the best outcome, be they for human health or creating compelling video games. At least evolution is relatively quick in gaming. Biology is working on that, though. It makes me excited for the future, for both games and biology. There’s a lot on the horizon.