Player characters are glorified mouse cursors

In secret the mouse cursor have influenced nearly everything we know today about interacting with digital worlds. Let me change the way you think about player characters.

You move your mouse cursor across your desktop and launch the web browser. You did not realise it, but you just left the tutorial area and entered the biggest open world ever built.

At 5 trillion gigabytes it’s an absolutely enormous world to get lost in.

Games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild, Elder Scrolls: Skyrim and The Witcher 3 are heavily influenced by the interactions between the mouse cursor and web browser. At first it might be hard to see because of their vibrant, fully realised three-dimensional worlds and the keyboard or gamepad input methods.

But the interaction between the web browser and mouse cursor consist of moving from point to point and clicking so you can interact with more content. This is the basic principle open world games adhere to as well. They iterated on the idea by making the cursors look human and by changing their movement and behaviour to feel more relatable. Enemies, encounters, weather conditions and other obstacles have been placed between the content to mimic the random variability you get on the internet through algorithms. Such as Youtube autoplay, popup ads and messages.

However, the influence of the mouse cursor doesn't stop here. It goes further back than that.

Instead of focusing on content like open world games do, Super Mario Bros. focused on the concept of “how hard can we make it to move the mouse cursor across the screen to click on an icon”. They added gravity, made obstacles for the Mario-cursor to collide with and fail states return it to one side of the screen. Another more subtle innovation of theirs, was to make the backgroud scroll with the Mario-cursor to give you the impression that he's moving fast even though his movement speed across the screen remain largely the same. At the same time this allowed more obstacles to fit inside what would otherwise be a very limited screen-space.

Even the more obscure aspects of the mouse cursor’s move set served as a source of inspiration in the early days.

Classic Pokémon games use the same tricks as Super Mario Bros. with collisions and scrolling the world within the screen. But it’s main inspiration is another function entirely. When you walk in tall grass there’s a 15-25% chance that you will enter an automatic right-click menu where you get some options for attacks, items to use or a chance to escape. These options have different chances of success and impact. Adding randomness to a right-click menu proved to be a brilliant solution to make the player feel invested in picking between these options.

As you can see none of these games and most modern games wouldn't even exist if wasn't for the influence of the computer arrow. It's been right under our noses and we have taken it for granted for far too long.

The truth is that the Mouse Cursor is the most overlooked video game character of all time.