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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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 3rd
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 3rd 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
