Critical Play: Race Games

For this critical play, I played two instantiations of the race genre: Temple Run, and Tiny Wings.

In Temple Run, the player races away from a threat: from the first moment of the game, one is chased by a monster, and must hurtle at full speed in order to avoid the maws of death. In Temple Run, one begins at full speed, and the objective is to maintain it.

In Tiny Wings, the player races towards a distant goal, tactfully choosing to tuck and dive or unfurl one’s wings, controlling one’s speed. Unlike in Temple Run, here one begins with no speed, and the objective is to gain and maintain as much speed as possible.

These diametrically opposite mechanics produce rather different experiences. Playing Temple Run is more stress-inducing than Tiny Wings: if the player makes a mistake (misses a jump, or slide), they will be devoured and the game will end. In order to prevent even a single slip-up, the player must be continuously alert. They survive, at high speed, by responding instantly and infallibly to an incessant stream of obstacles. The gameplay experience in Tiny Wings, on the other hand, feels opportunistic rather than stressful. The worst that a player can do is time a dive poorly, with an innocuous outcome: slowing down. There is no losing; there is only playing well––timing one’s dives as well as possible, therefore moving through the level as fast as possible. While in Temple Run one strives for reactivity, in Tiny Wings one thrives from precision and practice. By developing the race genres into distinct themes, and leveraging appropriate mechanics for those themes, Temple Run and Tiny Wings therefore produce quite dramatically different experiences.