Skip to main content

Diegetic prototyping: lavatorial mode

2 min read

From a piece about video game toilet design:

Toilets are valuable precisely because they have no real relevance to the game at hand,” says Fullbright’s Steve Gaynor. “They exist as interactive objects to flesh out the ‘realness’ of the game world as a functional place. It’s about supporting player expectation. If there’s a bathroom, there should be a toilet. And if there’s a toilet, it should flush. It’s these little pieces of seemingly pointless interactivity that maintain the illusion of being inside a functional other place, not just a place-shaped box.


"Many of the environments we go through in games are supposed to have been inhabited by humans. A game might be set in a laboratory, but it needs to make sense for people to be there. And if there are, or were, humans in your environment, you certainly need to fulfil two needs: eating and shitting. Food can be handled simply with, say, food containers littered around the place. But unless the situation is really dire, humans require a specialised place to do their business. So in a way, toilets are part of the justification for having that cool laboratory.