Production 2

The Incredible Machine

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Rube Goldberg’s cartoons depict the contraptions of Professor Butts, in which the simplest of tasks such as wiping one’s face with a napkin, or putting postage stamps on an envelope are needlessly complicated by a sequence of complex cause and effect interactions. In the stamp machine, somewhere in the sequence a dog tied to a hat rack, frightened from a sneeze, runs frantically, allowing the hat rack to tip over and break a water cooler containing ice water, which would then be transferred down a trough into a bucket and so forth, and following many more such events, it all ends up in the application of a stamp to a letter. It is said that Rube Goldberg, who started drawing his famous machines in the 1920s, intended his works as a commentary on industrialization, specifically that it was “intended to simplify people’s lives could have the opposite effect” (Wilson, 2018)

Jeff Tunnell’s The Incredible Machine series for Sierra Games positions the player as Rube Goldberg machine maker, whose job is to realize convoluted mechanisms to complete tasks, such as getting the mouse to eat the cheese, or the light to turn on. Each puzzle begins with much/or perhaps little of the machine already set up, requiring the player to complete the machine parts to a fixed placement of objects. Through considering the ways in which the objects interact, the player uses the supplied extra parts to create a causal sequence of events that achieve the desired goal. A tutorial invites players to learn the basics mechanics of the game, enabling instant competency. As the puzzles progress, however, they become quite perplexing.

The Incredible Machine series situates the player as designer/engineer, exploring possible relations between objects interacting within rudimentary physics laws, such a gravity and inertia. However, the performative learning opportunities, and other educational affordances of the instant mechanical/engineering/design competency are somewhat usurped by the game’s reliance on its own idea of physics and the cartoonish function of its machines’ parts, such as a monkey cycling frantically (a motor), after being activated when the screen in front of him reveals a banana (a downward pulling action, usually using a pulley). Still, the core idea of the game could be employed effectively to emulate real physics and perhaps even investigate real problems. But set against a background of nothingness, the machines of the game exist only for their own sake, and neither their mechanisms nor their function does anything beyond the immediately self-referential. Incidentally, a predecessor to The Incredible Machine, called Interactive Physics did branch off into viable mechanical simulation models, including a 3D version, Working Model, that “could simulate complex mechanical devices like motorcycles or copy machines, and it went on to become a volume leader in mechanical engineering simulation” (Baszucki, 2011).

Lost also is Goldberg’s playful criticism on industrialization, needed more now than ever when you consider the amount of resources and effort and materials that go into the design, manufacture and distribution of throwaway products such as inflatable hot dogs and foam Nativity scenes. The game more celebrates industrial absurdity, seemingly inviting us to increase our sense of wonder of the machine (depicted, or in some sense metaphoric) in correlation to the excessiveness and frivolousness of its parts. Every sequel, including Tunnell’s most recent iteration, Contraption Maker, has taken the complication of the mechanisms to an even further degree, but each iteration of the game remains essentially the same. Goldberg, it happens, was astoundingly prescient on the effect of ubiquitous screens. His 1967 cover for Forbes Magazine, depicting “The Future of Home Entertainment” is a pretty accurate depiction of not only the everywhereness of people buried in in screens, but of how that personal absorption is considered quality time, illustrated by the father who while absorbed in his own screen is providing a screen for each member of his family, including his toddler, affixed to the bottom of his reclined foot. None of this commentary exists in The Incredible Machine.

Still, The Incredible Machine is an important game for a number of reasons. It’s one of the first “casual” games (not based on card games), which allowed the player to minimally invest yet still make meaningful, saved progress. In The Digital Antiquarian, Jimmy Maher point outs that this model of game “much more so than elaborate [games that] demanded hours and hours of practice just to rise to the level of competent — would prove to be the real future of digital games as mass-market entertainments.” He also suggests that the game’s use of general physics processing was instrumental in influencing other physics-based casual games, including the enormously popular Angry Birds. He writes “...the series proved quietly but significantly influential as more than just one of the pioneers of casual games in the abstract: it became the urtext of the entire genre of so-called “physics simulators.”

Works Cited

Family Entertainment: This "Rube" saw the future and its foibles. (2018, April 10). Retrieved from https://ipcloseup.com/2018/04/10/family-entertainment-this-rube-saw-the-future-and-its-foibles/

Wilson, E. (2018, May 01). The Story Behind Rube Goldberg's Complicated Contraptions. Retrieved from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/story-behind-rube-goldbergs-complicated-contraptions-180968928/

Baszucki, D. (2017, July 14). A Brief History of Physics in Video Games. Retrieved from https://blog.roblox.com/2011/12/a-brief-history-of-physics-in-video-games/

Mahar, J. (2018). The Digital Antiquarian:The Incredible Machine. Retrieved from https://www.filfre.net/2018/06/the-incredible-machine/