Most gamers know this story. Nintendo wanted a distinctive mascot to appear in various games. When Jumpman started to take on character traits, like a bulbous nose and mustache, he stopped being an anonymous vehicle for the player. He wasn't any jumping man, but Mario.
Everyone knows that Mario jumps, too; that would be stating the obvious. It's accepted that Mario is literally an overweight plumber who should hardly be able to jump at all. Having Mario jump is like watching the tires turn on a bicycle. It is a law of physics.
Samus jumps, Kratos jumps, and Master Chief jumps. Alucard double-jumps. Jumping in a game is a basic skill, like playing the C-major scale on a piano. It is always embarrassing to be bad at jumping. Jonathan Blow tried to dissolve this in Braid by letting you rewind your mistakes -- but his point was that a missed jump was an important mistake.
Niko Bellic jumps. My hands touch the controller, and he explodes into life. Within five minutes of setting foot in Liberty City, Niko was doing footplants on his cousin's kitchen counter and knocking over chairs. That was when he was still excited about America, I thought. Gordon Freeman jumps, too. For the duration of Half-Life, I entertained the thought that Gordon's HEV suit had come with booster springs. I was relieved when, late in the game, a physics expert actually handed him a Long Jump Module for the suit. It had been made solely for navigating an alien world.
"I think it might remind you that what you're playing is interactive," says Adam Saltsman, designer of one-button jumping game Canabalt. "And it also solves a lot of technical or level-design problems. You don't have to have special, awesome mantling animations. The player can just sort of jump up onto a thing."
So jumping persists -- not only in platform games, but also in first-person shooters and games with exploration (read: many) -- as a proven, eminently practical way to move in virtual space. Sprites and polygons are, after all, not actual objects, but images. When you see a box in your way, you don't think to climb it. You just want to clear it.
On the other hand, the more games appear to reflect reality, the more jumping struggles in broad daylight. You only need to last three minutes in Counter-Strike to have your suspension of disbelief ruined by the sight of terrorists bunny-hopping through a courtyard.
According to Kepa Auwae of Rocketcat Games -- the studio behind grappling-hook platformers Hook Champ and Super QuickHook -- jumping is easier to justify in a flat world:
"Some way to maneuver through the air is very important in 2D games," Auwae says. "Otherwise, you're missing out on an entire plane of movement, and you're really a 1D game. It's less important in a 3D game. In Half-Life and Grand Theft Auto, you basically just do little hops through most of the game. Your maneuverability in 3D games, where you're on the ground constantly, just comes from your ability to turn and move around things, rather than through them. It's funny to think that most 3D games are essentially just 2D games, in the sense of their planes of movement."
"I think it's out of place a lot, but for technical and psychological reasons, it's the solution to problems," Saltsman says. "But it's kind of a bad one."
Picture the first time you saw Chell in Portal. What struck me first wasn't that she was a woman. It was the grotesque cybernetic implants Valve artists had attached to her calves -- like high heels for a Terminator -- to explain all those times she would jump through a portal, fall an incredible height, and not snap her legs in half. Portal without jumping is unimaginable, and yet Chell couldn't be imagined jumping through the otherwise-realistic Aperture Labs without a convoluted narrative device.
Marcus Fenix doesn't jump, because, can you picture him doing that?