Double jumps are bad, and I hate them. Life is exhausting enough.
If you grew up playing video games, you’re probably used to double jumps. They've been a mainstay for ages–you see that too-far platform and know you can double jump to it, or you see that side path in the early game that you can’t reach and know you’re going to get a double jump later. If you’re a normal person, this probably fills you with excitement. As our former Kotaku colleague Harper once pointed out, double jumps are fun. They add a little extra spice to a game and give you something mechanically pleasurable to look forward to.
They're also terrible.
For starters, what even are they? Literally what are you doing when you jump and then… jump again in mid-air off of nothing? It’s not physically possible! I’ll give games a pass if they have a jetpack or magic boots or something, but there is no real world equivalent to this action. In real life, when something’s out of reach, you might say, “Oh, I wish I could fly, or were dating someone tall, or had purchased a bigger ladder”-- you don’t say, “I wish I could hop, and then hop again the same distance,” unless you are cursed with a modest imagination or low self-esteem. Want more for yourself than being able to jump twice. You deserve it.
Apart from their faulty concept, double jumps themselves also suck. Sometimes they’re finicky, or require precise timing. This means every time you see a big gap, say “I bet I could jump this,” and then repeatedly fall to your death, you’re either fucking up your double jump, or you aren’t supposed to be able to make the jump at all and just don’t realize it because double jumps trick you into thinking you can. I’ve lost hours of my life repeatedly attempting a jump, only to finally look up a walkthrough and learn it’s impossible. “Am I bad at this or am I stupid?” is a debate I regularly have in my real life when doing things like fixing my bike or paying my taxes; I don’t want to feel that way in video games too!
In some games you start with a double jump, but in others you get it later, by leveling up or finding an object or defeating an enemy. I really hate these sorts of games, which you can tell you’re in when you’re wandering around the early part of a game and see some spot you’re clearly supposed to go to, only you can’t. Maybe you see one of these forbidden paths and get excited for the future promise of double jump, but that promise is a sham. The real thing you’re being offered here is the opportunity to spend the next who-knows-how-many hours thinking, Shouldn’t I have a double jump by now, I wonder when I’ll get it, oh no what if I missed it? Not only that, but you also have to remember all those places you passed that seemed to require double jump, and then you have to backtrack through the whole map to return to them, surely forgetting a couple and missing a bunch of stuff in the process. This is not a gameplay opportunity, it’s just a list of obligations, and don’t we have enough of those already?
Finally, there’s my most pedantic complaint: people just don’t jump that much! I’m saying this as a rock climber, an activity that actually involves a lot of jumping, and even I don’t jump very much! My favorite video game, Hinterland Studio’s snowy survival game The Long Dark, has long divided players for its absence of a jump. When I spoke with Hinterland’s founder Raphael van Lierop in 2019, he put into words my own feelings on video game jumping:
How many times do you jump in your day-to-day life?... If I have a really heavy backpack with 35 kilograms of gear and I’m really tired and I’m in knee-deep snow or deeper, am I going to jump over that thing? Probably not, because it’s dangerous and I might hurt myself.
He’s right! You don’t generally move through the world by jumping, do you? Many video games that feature jumping obviously aren’t based on traversing the real world, and a platformer without jumps would just be a game about, I don’t know, finding really long boards to walk across all the time, so some jumping is required for the suspension of disbelief, fine. But gamers probably think about jumping more than Olympic hurdlers or pole vaulters, people who professionally jump, and that’s weird! Of all the actions to obsess over, video games give us the one that is the worst for your knees, those horrible little hinges that have to last you your whole life but probably won’t. I’m only 41, and one of my knees is already going. I know I should be doing my physical therapy exercises instead of playing a video game; you don’t have to remind me with all this jumping.
There is a solution to all of this: Just give me the right-sized jump for the game from the get-go. Don’t make me backtrack, or fiddle with timing, or squint at some gap with my aging eyes to try to figure out if it’s just ever-so-slightly too big to be jumped. Just give me a jump big enough to meet the jumping needs of the video game and let me move on with my life. Shit’s hard enough as it is.
