At the end of this summer I took a trip to “Amici Adventure” - an outdoor activity park of sorts, at the base of a mountain - and was lucky enough to get to try my first ever High Ropes course! In Japan they call it ‘tree trekking.’ If you’ve never done one, it’s an obstacle course of mostly balance challenges (rope-walking, etc). The catch is that it’s quite high up in the trees.

(Video of me sitting in the tree.)

Unlike more dangerous activities (driving, rock climbing,) with a high ropes course, you’re connected to a metal wire which catches you if you fall anywhere. So it’s fairly hard to get hurt beyond muscle soreness or mild strains from overexertion.

The result of this was a very game-like experience:

• There’s level design in the layout of obstacles, with clear emotional and entertainment-focused arcs - some obstacles are easy but flashy (ziplines), others are grueling and long (tightropes)

• There are different difficulties - in this place, they had Beginner, Easy, Medium and Hard - corresponding to increasingly high and long courses. Like a well-designed game, all of the difficulties were good, because the fundamental activity (balancing) was so interesting.

• Like picking up a new action game, you soon develop microstrategies to help you successfully navigate. For instance, tightropes demand different thinking than wobbly boards. Being able to identify obstacle patterns you recognized earlier is satisfying.

• There’s a fast cycle of failure and learning: if you slip and fall you learn how to avoid that.

• There’s a sense from the park’s staff that there are patterns to how people experience the high ropes courses: sometimes the parents get more scared than the kids and turn back! Sometimes kids freeze up before the leaps of faith and have to be persuaded (or pushed!) forward, so as to not hold up others on the course.

• There’s a high focus on the aesthetic experience - depending on the season you go you’ll see different leaves. Near the end of summer, the weather was slightly cooler and the leaves were full and green. Like games, even if the set dressing isn’t directly interacted with, the audiovisual experience has a huge influence on how we perceive the game.

• There are techniques you can use to cheat a bit, such as trying to go really fast (to save stamina), or holding onto the your carabiner’s safety line (instead of just the obstacle).

• There’s a sense of fear, but you’re not really in danger. I found that the sort of whoa factor of being really high up felt analogous to the sense of fear you might have in an action game: you don’t want to die (in a game) or fall (in High Ropes) - but neither have mortal consequences. Compare this to driving, which has pretty serious consequences for failure.

  • Like a game, this feeling of stakes is a little addicting. I did the three main courses in one go… the staff even tried to talk me out of the last one but I did it anyways (barely!)

Generally speaking, I loved how high ropes felt both immediately understandable and widely enjoyable, compared to something like Golf, which, while fun, requires high amounts of technical knowledge, practice, and financial investment. You don’t need to know much to enjoy High Ropes - so long as you’re not too scared to get up on the tree, ha ha! It seemed like people of all ages were enjoying the courses. I saw a young girl doing the Advanced course, while my partner enjoyed the Easy and Beginner courses. While it’s true that having a high Upper Body Strength to Body Weight ratio gave you an easier time (and let you move faster), even someone who isn’t athleticly built can enjoy the activity.

This is different compared to say, Tennis (a personal favorite, but hard), which is grueling unless your cardio and dexterity is up to snuff - or Bowling, which is a sore-wrist-prone activity unless you’re actively weight lifting - and if you don’t know the technical side, can feel pretty random to how well you do.

Level Design

I really liked the creativity of the obstacles. Let me highlight a few.

I loved how deceptive this was. When you try to walk across by holding the yellow ropes, the planks swing deviously outwards, meaning you’re left trying to awkwardly balance that plank close enough to let your other foot reach the next step. All the while you have to grip these tiny little yellow ropes!

The bottom is a bridge of vertical wooden cylinders. Along the top is a line of ropes. This is a very weird balance challenge because of how small and wobbly the footholds are… and you’re trying to reach to the next rope!

This is just a tightrope. I would say this is reality’s equivalent of a game’s hallway of spikes and mines where you have to move really carefully or you die in one hit… I found the tightropes to be interesting because of the physical property where - the longer the rope is, the harder it gets to move when you’re near the center! I found that elegant. I actually fell on this one. An exciting experience! However thanks to my carabiner’s coyote time I just pulled myself back up and continued on. I don’t really like the tightropes because of how slow you have to go, but you do have a great sense of relief once you cross it. (Like the Anor Londo Archers. Ha ha.)

The tire bridge… this wasn’t very hard, but it was kind of funny. Your footholds are super squishy, sometimes they sink in ways you don’t expect.

This is a bridge where the footholds are all hanging ropes. Very swingy!

This is a rock-climbing-esque challenge where you have to shimmy along a wooden plank. You know, like that really slow and boring mechanic a lot of 3D adventure games include where you shimmy along a wall! Except in real life it’s more fun and you feel cool, even though this is on the easier side of the obstacles.

I found this one to be kind of weird. You have to sort of angle your feet to be diagonal because it gives you better grippage of the wires as you awkwardly slide along. However, you look very cool walking up there like a power line technician violating safety standards.

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There’s one I don’t have a photo of but you just grab a rope and slide down. Oh, that’s called a zipline… I think there are places where you can do this across a canyon. These were a fun and flashy way (think Mario flagpoles) to end the courses, but not as ‘interesting’ as the obstacles themselves. They have a funny quality where you start to rotate partway through and desperately try to realign yourself…

Lastly, I can’t find a video of this one, but there was one where they just stuck a skateboard to a wire bridge and made you jump on it and skate across a gap. I wanted more of those ones. It’s interesting how in real life, like a game, it’s hard to judge how the moving platforms will react to you until trying it.

Game Mechanics in High Ropes

I really enjoy activities centered around rebalancing, like skateboarding, biking. High Ropes felt like a fun middle ground of very dynamic, but not with the risks of something like skateboarding (an activity I’d love to try if I didn’t need my wrists…). A level higher in intensity might be something like parkour? High Ropes also gives the feeling of doing parkour - balancing and moving - but removing a lot of the danger and technique needed for parkour.

It felt like the core of each obstacle in High Ropes was how they incorporated rebalancing your center of gravity. When we think about navigating the linear obstacles of High Ropes, the goal is to move your center of gravity from one side to the other without falling. Different obstacles require different styles of transfer. On a straightforward tightrope, you have very tiny movements of your feet while trying to keep your center of gravity really still. In the first wobbly plank obstacle I describe, you have to weirdly move your center of gravity from one side to the other while almost jumping. Then you have to manage to balance yourself after landing on the wobbly plank, because your momentum wants you to fly off to the edge. Obstacles that incorporate weird styles of rebalancing were more interesting.

I think some other fun ideas would be rotating barrel platforms (maybe a rotating log?). Of course, if you were designing one of these courses, there’s interesting constraints to consider: you’re constrained by the natural environment of trees and their strength. But you also have to consider that if the course is simply too long, people could get exhausted and stuck up there! There have to be ways to ‘rescue’ people through ladders or the like. There are likely practical considerations to the obstacles too - weatherproofing, maintainability, and health risks. Maybe something rotating too fast has ankle-spraining capabilities. The act of level design in a game always has a bit of an engineering feel to me, so it’s interesting to see that a lot of practical engineering issues pop up when applying game logic to a real life physical space.

Issues with Sports and the Gym

When we think about physical activity and exercise, people likely think of the gym or something like jogging or a sport. As someone who has done all of these for a while, I feel like they leave much to be desired… this hasn’t been something always on my mind, but something this year with working on a Bumpslash Action game, visiting the Site of Reversible Destiny, and doing this High Ropes thing has got me thinking about what’s lacking in common forms of physical activity.

Overall I think the main forms of physical activity feel too much like work. This is interesting because you find the same problems in the common designs of many modern games: you clock in, do your dailies, grind a few levels, clock out. Physical activity has been framed as this moral imperative to prevent us from Dying Bad Deaths, so it has this weird air of something we do to hone our bodies. Rather than just doing physical activity because it’s fun to have a body that can move around.

I find the gym to be repetitive, whether you’re doing treadmills, stretches, free weights, swimming. It reminds me of logging into an MMO to do your dailies, except if you had to add a commute to the whole thing, changing your clothes, etc. It’s time consuming and the social aspect of being surrounded by others also working out kind of puts the whole activity into a productivity mindset, unless you’re fortunate enough to have friends at the gym, at which point it’s more enjoyable. But even when playing Runescape or FF14 with friends there’s still a latent feeling that demands you be productive!

I guess out of things in the gym, I do like the idea of walking around pools. You can sort of do whatever you want there, walking backwards or floating, and you’re still working out. It’s also easy to see what someone else is doing and try it out yourself. Also, the gym is a practical solution for stuff like physical therapy, etc…

Jogging is great as an activity, and this is no moral judgment of joggers, but I think it gets oversuggested for how intense of an activity it is. I like how flexible it is, in that you can sort of jog anywhere… but if I’m being pedantic it makes me think of a ‘speedrun’ mindset. How fast can I get from A to B? If I were making up an activity I would want it to be more tangibly connected to the physical environment rather than something that tends to push people towards listening to music or podcasts.

And sports! Well, it’s a wide category, and a complex subject. It’s nice the way it acts as a common talking point for people, and it’s something fun to just go hang out at, although sometimes the culture of idoltry, nationalism, and competition around them leaves a bit to be desired. I also think they too often are tied to these universal notions team building or confidence or something when they are often breeding grounds for bullying, discrimination, belittling, etc… They’re inherently very social, unless you want to play squash against yourself. Sometimes you’re social in other parts of your life and when doing physical activities you just want to be alone. Sports also demand a level of practice and commitment - things that aren’t very appealing depending on what you do outside of physical activity. It’s only natural sports have all these things - after all, they’re activities with a lot of rules applied. Sports generally work for most people who do them but they, like MMORPGs, do require commitment.

I want a physical activity that’s more drop in and drop out with little training required. That’s why I really like Walking and light hiking (< 2 hours), but it’s also why I think activities like High Ropes are neat. Or even clubbing: no one cares how you dance, and you can get ideas from others like swimming-pool-walking. The Radio Calesthenics done around Japan is a cute way to get people to socialize and be active in the morning.

I also think games like Bocce Ball or Minigolf are cool in their low skill barrier (although you don’t move much). Stuff like Frisbee Golf, too. I’ve heard Pickleball is growing in popularity as a less technical alternative to Tennis. There’s a physical activity game I dream to make called “Melos Ball” where you throw balls around a landsculpted course.

Why do I like these lower skill activities? High-skill competitive activities like sports have a latent exclusion effect where those who are less adept to a particular activity tend to be excluded or belittled. I’ve been on both sides of it, and there’s a lot about competitive sports that just doesn’t feel good or encouraging - being shorter when playing basketball, being weaker when bowling, being slower when playing soccer, etc. I feel like for every growth potential a high-skill competitive activity has, there’s a tradeoff with a way it can be sort of exclusionary…

However, I think physical activity is something important for everyone to enjoy, even if just in a small way. When there are more easily accessible, low-skill activities, I think it makes for a world where people feel more comfortable in their bodies.

Wrapping Up

Although High Ropes is a solo activity, it has a performative social element to it. You’re being watched by staff, your friends, random other park-goers. Try as you might to be cool and nimble, you’ll likely be humbled by a wobbly plank or two! There’s something funny about the shared experience of everyone kind of having their confidence eviscerated by falling to an obstacle or two. I had motion sickness during my first try which was a particularly funny experience to think about succumbing to it while standing 20 feet in the air. That would have been a trip to remember…

Lastly, I looked into the origins of the activity. Of course, it’s something tied to the military and training soldiers. There’s a weird parallel here with video games originating in science and military usages. At the same time I don’t believe this makes games or high ropes morally wrong - but rather that it’s worth pursuing a world where we can decouple these fun activities from their destructive origins or associations.

Some humans believe our ultimate goal is to leave Earth to go to the moon and mine materials, but I think we’re here to jump on skateboards suspended 40 feet off the ground before skating to a tree branch.