I first heard of Bennett Foddy's game QWOP via a 'demotivational' poster posted on one of the many meme
sites I incessantly stared at while writing my dissertation last summer. The
image displayed a picture of Modor with a strangely primitive rendition of a
man falling backwards in a running position; the lower text read 'One does not
simply QWOP into Modor'. After chuckling in a confused and self-conscious way I
quickly typed the word 'QWOP' into Google, hoping for a simple answer to my
apparent internet illiteracy. I then spent the rest of the day struggling to
play QWOP, a game in which the player
has the apparently difficult task of making a man run 100 metres.
In many ways QWOP is
simply a funny game in which the basic faculty of running - possibly the most
popular and simple modes of transport either in life or represented in computer
games - becomes a task of immense difficulty. The ridiculousness of the actions
on the part of the game's runner as the player tries to negotiate the utterly different controls generally results in either
fits of hilarity or bewildered frustration, or both. Whereas pressing a
directional arrow had sufficed throughout gaming's history, QWOP forces the player to reacquaint
themselves with the human body as a means of propulsion. The Q and W keys are
assigned to the character's thighs while O and P are the calf muscles. Pressing
these keys causes the character to move each muscle and, hopefully, the body
forwards. Whether this occurs in stiff spasmodic jolts or smooth strides is
really down to the player's familiarity with the control scheme and seeing as
it's a scheme which belies all our collective knowledge of 'how games
work' it generally requires a great deal
of practice.
