The core pleasure of Boy’s stretchiness is the kind of thing that is, in videogames, sometimes loosely called a ‘mechanic’, but that word implies a sense of linear rigidity belied by Boy’s twangy and twirly acrobatics. It’s more about the simulation of a recognisable material quality, like my preference for blue denim when I am Sackboy (a texture I in some way stroke with my eyes), or the peculiarly satisfying way in which Metal Gear Solid’s iconic cardboard box flops down around Snake. Some kind of stylised ‘physics’ had been around in videogames for a long time, of course (think of the crucial role played by versions of ‘inertia’ in Asteroids or the 2D Mario games), but gradually more interest was directed not just at how objects move but what they are like in themselves. This is one obscure thread, indeed, by which you could trace the evolution of videogames: from hard and rigid (the only halfway ‘realistic’ representations in games for a long time were those of shiny metal objects) to being soft and deformable.
Like its predecessor Katamari Damacy (and before that, Stretch Panic), Noby Noby Boy is an example of what we could call a physical-property toy. The much-lauded indie game Gish, meanwhile, was built on the physical property of viscosity (a ball of tar), paving the way for the delightful squishiness of LocoRoco. There appears to be something inherently thrilling about bounciness (not just for the obvious psychosexual reasons to do with the stereotypical videogamer demographic): the word (64 or 128 bits long) is made flesh (of a naturalistic or surreal kind). A curious joy is awoken in witnessing a representation of what is attractively tactile, locked away or even sublimated to a realm where you can’t actually touch it, as with Salvador Dalí’s famous soft clocks.
To call it a ‘toy’ is to recognise the most radical aspect of Noby Noby Boy, which is that there is nothing to do. Or, if you prefer, there is everything to do. It’s just that, aside from sending statistics of your length increases to Girl, the system does not predetermine some set of actions as a win and another as a fail. Similarly, a child’s plastic truck comes with no rules, strategies or definitions of success that are extrinsic to how the truck actually works as a physical thing. You play a game, but you play with a toy.
If playing with a toy sounds somehow like it might be an ‘immature’ pursuit, we ought to recognise that it fits into everyday adult life very nicely. After all, huge numbers of non-gaming grown-ups play with toys, too: it’s just that the toys in question are cunningly disguised as sports equipment, or vehicles, or ‘productivity’ devices. (The dazed masses who cannot stop fiddling with their iPhones in the pub or at the bus stop or over romantic candlelit dinners are surely entranced as much by the functioning of the device itself as by whatever they are ‘doing’ on it.)
As a toy, Noby Noby Boy also takes a polemical position on what we call ‘freedom’ in videogames. It ought to remind us that there are actually two sorts of freedom we care about. The more restricted kind can be called ‘freedom how’: the game gives you an objective or issues you an order, and you then explore the freedom of combining tools and tactics to accomplish the mandated task in your own way. ‘Freedom how’ is what we value in MGS or Far Cry 2. But those games offer very little of the other kind of freedom, ‘freedom to’: the liberty to define your own tasks in the first place, or just to act in a way that isn’t task-oriented at all. Often, the more a game tries to give us a little taste of ‘freedom to’ – as in GTAIV – the more frustrated we become by its limitations (you can’t go into that building; you can’t wander off and try a pottery class).
Noby Noby Boy splats gaily down into this argumentative space by showing us an extreme execution of ‘freedom to’, not telling us what the hell we are supposed to be doing in its ridiculous universe, and relying on no other motivational structure to keep the player going than its innate charm and the vague feel-good communalism of sending Girl further out into space. It is a gauntlet that has been thrown down to videogame designers and players, demanding that we ask what we want out of videogames, whether it is even a videogame at all, and whether the pleasures of the form, like Boy himself, are able to be teased and stretched in surprising new directions.
Steven Poole is the author of Trigger Happy: The Inner Life Of Videogames. Visit him online at www.stevenpoole.net.