"We're not perfectly replicating the real world, that would be crazy": The invisible design behind Firewatch's pine cones and picture frames

It's easy to look at a walking simulator like Firewatch and only see what's been stripped out.

After all, it's a genre that got its start when developers took the shooting out of first-person shooters.

However, look a little closer and you will see how much design can go into the simplest interactions.

In that difference, you can see the world that Campo Santo made in Firewatch.

"We're not perfectly replicating the real world," Campo Santo co-founder Nels Anderson says.

"That would be crazy." Instead, the team were doing what they could at the edges to make the world "tangible and grounded."
Turning a pine cone into an object that can roll around on a desktop and fall to the floor is simple, Anderson explains.

In Unity, you just need to give it a round physics shape and turn on simulation.

However, while it's easy, he also emphasises "it is a choice."
Likewise, it is a choice and act of restraint when deciding which everyday item becomes interactive.

You could just as easily turn on physics for every object in Firewatch's cabin.

Its chairs, books, tin cans, and picture frames.

Were you to do that, though, moving around the lookout tower would be like walking through a ballpit of everyday items.

If they treated every object as a physics object, he explains, the world becomes "over simulated in a way that itself becomes weird and not tangible anymore".

Henry wouldn't mind the pine cone falling to the floor, but he wouldn't drop the picture frame unless it were deliberate.

If you want to drop the picture to the floor, you can, you just need to look away from the spot from which you picked it up.

If they had made these items physics objects like the pine cone, players could get them into the spot they wanted but they'd have to do what Anderson calls "the physics fiddle hell", where you're trying to balance an item on the exact right pixel so it doesn't tip over or bounce across a surface.

With a pine cone, that feels appropriate, we've all had those moments where we've spent too long trying to balance something that refuses to stay put, but with a picture frame it makes Henry seem incompetent.

These decisions may seem minor, but they are the scaffolding that supports some of Firewatch's more poignant moments.

At a later point in Firewatch, you discover a child's hideout under the overhang of a rock.

Etched in chalk all over the back wall of the shelter, the boy, Brian, has drawn castle walls and spires, shields and dragons.

By this point in the story you've learned a lot about what brought Brian to the Shoshone National Park and what he went through while living there, so it's clear from the attention he paid to the hideout that this escape was dear to him.

As well as his drawings on the back wall, Brian strung clotheslines from the roof and decorated wooden boards to hang as bunting.

When you discover the hideout, the bunting is scattered across the hideout's floor but you can rehang it, returning the hideout to its former glory.

This is another moment where Campo Santo chose to use put back spots.

Dealing with the physics fiddle here would take you out of the moment, instead it can feel like a moment where you and Henry are paying respect to Brian.

Anderson says it's "crazy" how something so simple as how to hang a piece of bunting "could actually carry a bunch of meaning with it".

It was those small interactions and the world they built for the player that he says "was very interesting for a lot of us throughout the entire production."
In understanding the choices that go into a world and its interactions, we can better read the intentions of developers in other games.

After all, as small an interaction as picking up and putting down may seem, five years after Firewatch, in Unpacking, developer Witch Beam made that simple action into an entire game.

So, the next time you pick up a pine cone or a picture frame in a game, ask yourself what you think will happen when you put it down and wonder why that is.