Is Oobing in Sky Glitch or Gameplay?
“Sky: Children of the Light” is a free-to-play mmo mobile game by Thatgamecompany (TGC). In the game you play as a child that can fly and explore a world TGC’s small team has crafted. Because the team is small, the game is also fairly small, and the main storyline can easily be completed in a few hours. Even though the game is quite small, the draw of friendships facilitated by the game, cosmetic items to unlock, overall artistry, and daily tasks have garnered the game a dedicated following of players, many of which play daily. You might imagine that in a small world full of repetitive tasks, that some players might find themselves bord or looking for new ways to enjoy the game. This has lead a sizeable portion of regular players to explore the boundaries of the game world with glitch.
« Elder rooms »: How to get to vault elders — (By Jojo) — Sky: children of the light — YouTube
One of the primary glitches Sky players use to expand the game world is called oob or oobing (out of bounds). Players use various movement glitches, or just find invisible holes in walls to move or clip outside of the original intended area of play. Once outside the level players usually find themselves in a vast void where they can observe the outer structure of the game level (which is usually masses of bounding clouds with some interspersed land) and other visual phenomenon that show interesting elements of the game’s inner workings. Some popular oob locations are areas that are usually only shown during cutscenes. Oobing is so popular that TGC actively protects and has even unpatched popular oob locations. They even drew a distinction between hackers and glitters, by calling the ways people reach oob areas “normal game mechanics,” even though that includes using emotes to fly infinitely upward. Which begs the question, at what point does oobing stop being a glitch? To answer that, we need a definition of glitch.
Rosa Menkman defines a glitch as a form of noise, or disturbance, or “a break or addition within the linear transmission of useful data” (p. 340). Interestingly, even though she acknowledges noise usually has a negative connotation, without it, much like sun without rain, we would not have a true understanding of what makes something useful/relevant. In that sense noise, and therefore glitch, because an important part of understanding our world, a bit of a paradox for its perceived uselessness to be useful. She postulates that although many people think of glitch as primarily technological, glitch should be studied through technical and social lenses, because it is society and human perception/intent that determines whether or not something is expected, intended, desirable, etc. She also discusses ways in which glitch can be intentional, such as when it is used in art to explore human relationships with technology.
The TCG team likely didn’t originally intend for players to go oob, and going oob doesn’t progress players through the storyline or toward other game defined goals. A player stumbling upon an oob area, may be very confused. All of that sounds very much like Rosa Menkman’s definition of glitch, but since players have started to explore oob, TGC has made choices about how to program the game with the intention of players oobing, and the helpful attitude of most vetrain players, means that new players might be introduced to these areas in a way that is not confusing. The game is also primarily about exploring the world, and oobing is a form of world exploration. All of this possotive intentional activity around oobing doesn’t seem to mesh well with Menkman’s definition of noise or glitch as something that disrupts transmission of useful data. I would argue that oobing is still a glitch, because it does not progress in game goals and some of the pleasure derived from it is discovering things that are not originally intended to be seen. The fact that there is intention around oobing doesn’t disqualify it from being a glitch. But if the community starts talking about it a little differently, or TGC decides to add goal progressors in oob areas, the line between glitch and gameplay may blur until it is indiscernible, then it would just be a matter of the language the community chooses to use for these actions.
Here you can find a list of popular oob locations in sky and direction on how to reach them: The Out of Bounds (OOB) | Sky: Children of the Light Wiki | Fandom
Menkman, Rosa. “Glitch Studies Manifesto.” Moving Images beyond Youtube, by Geert Lovink and Rachel Somers Miles, Institute of Network Cultures, 2011, pp. 336–347.