This image features my all-time favorite video game character ever.
That's right--
it's the reticle.
The reticle is this little dot or crosshairs or aiming circle
that's so common. you probably haven't thought much about it. You might
think that it's just there to help you aim and of course, that is a big part of it.
[CRASH!]
But the reticle has other incredibly important, mostly hidden purposes that
are easy to take for granted.
Not on my watch!
No longer will we dismiss the hardest-working cluster of pixels on our screens.
Our pixelated friends showed up
early in arcades, mostly in submarine games like Sea Wolf, and later on in
light gun games like Sega's Jurassic Park. These were basically just real
crosshairs, moving around the screen as you move to the controller - like a cursor.
This is in the purest sense a reticle, although it doesn't serve the same
purpose as modern reticles, which means it's basically garbage.
Battle Zone featured a legit stationary aiming reticle, which feels like overkill
because you could only pan left or right so like... how are you gonna miss even?
But I mention it because the reticle was dynamic; it changed when you hovered over an enemy.
Using reticles to communicate gameplay information is something that's
pretty standard now, but it was something first-person shooters just... forgot about!
For like a long time! That's when they had a reticle at all, which a lot of the
earliest FPS did not bother with.
Of the early games they did appear in, they were
often transparent. So like not entirely useless, but not really a feature.
Kind of like hair dye on a horse.
Outside of Halo, which perfected the crosshair in 2001,
FPS' generally didn't get wise to using the reticle as a form of
communication until the mid 2000s. Which is WILD because it's right there, in the
middle of the screen, where your eyes are already looking. That makes it a great
vehicle for communicating when you're, say, hovering over an enemy,
where you can or can't shoot a portal,
what ledges you can grapple onto,
or what gun you're currently equipping.
But that's not even the best service the reticle provides!
because if you're like me and have tried to circle back on those first-person
shooters, you probably experienced
the Gamer's Sour Curse....
Motion sickness!
Or more specifically, simulation sickness.
Scientific research still doesn't totally know what causes simulation
sickness. The best idea we have is something called "sensory conflict theory,"
where the input that you're getting visually and aurally differs from the
information in your vestibular system. That's the part of your body that
controls motor function and balance
and lots of other stuff
and also is that weird spiral ear part
you might have recognized from Uzumaki.
So some of your senses think you're moving, and other senses think you're not.
Which is confusing!
But we don't really know why the body responds by donking up your guts.
The best bet is that your lizard brain reacts to the conflict by going "ah!
I must be hallucinating. It's either from playing this video game, or from eating
those weird berries I found growing on the subway. But regardless! I should hurl
up all these toxins or I might die."
[MASSIVE GURGLE]
Sensory conflict theory doesn't account
for why some people suffer from it and others don't, or why some people can
train themselves out of feeling it and others never will. What it does explain
is why the reticle is so important to preventing simulation sickness.
That freckle is a constant, unmoving point on the screen - something to focus on while
your avatar is in motion. It helps to remind your brain - hey actually, I'm not
doing cool stunts over rooftop air conditioners.
I'm almost entirely sedentary,
eating subway berries on my couch, alone.
It's the same practice that backs up spotting, a technique where a dancer will keep
their eyes trained on one spot as their body executes full spins. In fact the
creators of Mirror's Edge actually consulted with ballerinas to figure out
how they can do like eight spins in a row without decorating the front row
with their lunch. Of course the reticle isn't always enough to stop you from
feeling motion sick; there are a lot of other factors like the shakiness of the
camera, whether there are any other stable UI elements, how big your screen
is and how close you are to it.
And some modern games still, somehow, don't include
reticles, even when they REALLY need to.
But it's only a few pixels of screen
real estate so it doesn't seem fair to demand it solve
all our problems.
Instead the next time you crack open your favorite
first-person game, say a quick thank you to your old friend, the reticle.