‘GoldenEye’ — Video Game Deja Vu
by Frank Martin
Video games are a strange medium compared to the others. Unlike movies or even reading a book, video games are an extreme form of active storytelling. This means the audience has to place themselves within the world. However, video games are also rigorously structured. Newer games have a system of AI that randomly generate things such as enemies and level designs. But games aren’t always like that. Older games have levels that always remain the same and can form a kind of muscle memory. This phenomenon becomes evident when going back to an older game that had been played repetitively, such as GoldenEye.
Besides being an extremely popular multiplayer game, GoldenEye’s campaign was lauded as incredibly fun to play. It even encouraged players to beat the levels in a set amount of time in order to unlock cheats. As players encountered the same levels over and over, they began to memorize enemy spawn locations, where weapons are located, and how quickly to achieve objectives. A remastered version of the game recently popped up on Xbox Game Pass. As players revisit the title decades later, they will find how easily it is to fall back into the same routine of completing levels. All that muscle memory kicks into gear so that players can clear levels without even thinking about what to do next. Their fingers seem to move on their own almost as if their hands remember what to do.
This form of video game deja vu isn’t limited to GoldenEye. It’s really applicable to any sort of game built in this manner. Fighting games that rely on set combos to perform special moves can also give players a form of muscle memory that allows them to play swiftly and efficiently, practically eliminating the need for them to think about what to do next. Audiences can get familiar experiences if they watch the same movie over and over again to the point where they can recite dialogue. But nothing compares to video games when it comes to being reinserted into a world years later and picking it back up as if they never left.
GoldenEye is now available on Xbox Game Pass.
