Bumping the Lamp
Kristian Williams has a fantastic video discussing the aspects of blending live-action movie footage with animation, and why Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is maybe the best example of the art.
In it, Williams discusses just how much work went in to making this movie and having it look good. Particularly, using light and shadow to really put the animated characters into the same world as Bob Hoskins. Not many other movies (Cool World, Mary Poppins) bothered with this amount of effort.
In one scene in particular, Eddie Valiant is finding a saw and a box to cut himself loose from a pair of handcuffs chaining him to Roger. He’s talking with Dolores, and Roger is bumbling around the scene like normal. And in the commotion, Eddie bangs his head into a overhanging lamp, causing the lighting to bounce around the room constantly for the remainder of the scene. And the amount of work to make the shading on the animated Roger look good jumps up tenfold.
They didn’t HAVE to do this. But it makes the commotion of that scene all the more chaotic (and it’s funny). So they did all the extra work to animate all the extra light and shadow effects on Roger to handle the light constantly shifting around the room. They put in the extra effort to really do something well. On top of that, the whole point of their work was to put Roger into the world so well that he wouldn’t stand out; if they succeeded, audiences wouldn’t notice.
Apparently “bumping the lamp” became a phrase at Disney to pay attention to the minor details and put in the extra effort to get them right. But a key part that I would personally add is of putting in that extra effort even when you don’t have to.
More often than not, my experience with boardgames are the opposite. I see constant lack of attention to detail. Frustration with poorly designed components and UI. Big releases of popular games that don’t have enough stands for all the character tokens (oh, but stands are sold separately...). Rulebooks. Just rulebooks in general.
But are there any boardgames where the designers, developers, publishers really bumped the lamp?
My first response is Xia: Legends of a Drift System.
The game is definitely not for everyone, it’s long and sandboxy and quite random (if you’re mashing reply right now to tell me all about how bad this game is: save it).
But regardless of whether or not you enjoy the game, it’s hard to deny the work that went into this thing:
- Each ship, each separate ship, has its own painted mini that matches its layout on its sheet. I’ve played the game a ton and I still don’t think every one of those minis have hit the board. Most games would have put in one ship per player and that’s just your ship token. But not Xia.
- Each ship has a fully realized backstory and victory text. Unique and often hilarious, there has been a ton of work done just to write up text that most players won’t read.
- Each planet, in the back of the book, has a whole writeup about it. I haven’t even read all these yet.
- The metal credits. Just slide a couple of ‘em around in your hand. You’ll see.
- The fact that ship upgrades aren’t just tiny stupid little cards, but are actual differently-shaped tokens that you tetris into your ship just so to build it out the best way you can.
- So much detail in the rules (yet still handled pretty simply). There’s bounties, running planetary shields to escape bounty hunters, earning fame by doing crazy stunts, exploration, science missions, mining and harvesting, establishing trade routes, combat, NPC ships, blindly jumping into the sun, getting sucked into a black hole, one giant “etc.”
And on and on. Playing the game you can FEEL the love that was put into this game because you can tell that someone paid close attention to details, and that people went above and beyond for this game in a way that they did not have to do. And that most other publishers wouldn’t have bothered.
I’m finding more and more that I really appreciate games where I can tell they tried to bump the lamp. Not all of them can grasp where they’re reaching, in fact I’d say most fail in some way or another. But for games like Xia, HEXplore It: The Valley of the Dead King, a Phil Eklund design, The 7th Continent, Android, and a few others, I read over the credits of the game and think “I love this because I can tell you did.”