Baby Steps

The man stands at the bottom of a hill in a onesie, and to make him walk you must lift one of his legs. A trigger raises the thigh; the foot leaves the ground; the leg hangs in the air, and above it the whole apparatus of an adult body, hips and torso and head and their accumulated weight, begins to lean. You set the foot down somewhere ahead, or somewhere not quite far enough ahead, and the man tips past his own base and goes face-first into the mud. He has produced roughly half of one step. Baby Steps, the 2025 game from Bennett Foddy, Gabe Cuzzillo, and Maxi Boch, is built almost entirely from this single unit of humiliation, and for the first hour it is close to unplayable in the exact way that the first year of a human life is unplayable. The task is walking, and you do not know how.

Except that you do, and you have known for decades, without a conscious thought ever spent on the mechanics. You have walked while reading, while arguing, while half asleep. The competence is so completely yours that the game's central joke arrives as an insult: a capable adult, fluent at a thousand difficult things, reduced to a heap by the first skill the body ever learned. But the joke and the insight are the same object seen from two sides. You have forgotten how to walk. Not the ability, which is intact, but the account of it, the telling. You kept the doing and lost, entirely, the description, and that loss is not an injury. It is the very thing expertise is made of.

The frame is small and durable, and it will outlast the game that delivers it. Expertise is automation, and automation is a kind of forgetting. To master a skill is to remove it from awareness, to make it run without the mind attending, and the reliable sign that you have truly learned something is that you can no longer say how you do it. Baby Steps exists to make that ordinarily invisible law briefly visible, by taking the most deeply automated act an adult body owns and dragging it back up into the light, where it promptly stops working.

To see why forgetting is the right word, begin with how hard the forgotten thing actually is. In the 1930s the Soviet physiologist Nikolai Bernstein posed the problem that still organizes the science of movement. The body has far more ways to move than any task needs. Count the joints, then the axes each joint turns on, then the muscles crossing them, and the number of independently variable parts runs into the hundreds; a movement as plain as reaching for a cup can be carried out by an effectively infinite set of muscle activations, nearly all of which reach the cup. Bernstein called this the problem of the degrees of freedom, and saw that it made control, in the naive sense, impossible: the nervous system cannot be sending a separate instruction to each variable, because there are too many and the arithmetic never resolves to one answer. Coordination, in his definition, is the mastering of the redundant degrees of freedom, their conversion into a system small enough to steer. The body manages it by refusing to control muscles one at a time; it binds them into synergies, packages that fire as a unit, so the controller handles a few bundles rather than a mob. Walking is such a package, or rather a tall stack of them, assembled over the first years of life and running ever since without supervision. Bernstein had a phrase for skilled movement that explains why it resists description: repetition without repetition. The expert never makes the same movement twice, because the ground and the body are never twice the same; what repeats is not the motion but the fresh solving, each time, of one coordination problem. The solving is the skill, and the solving is exactly what you cannot catch yourself doing.

Then there is what the task physically is, about which the game is unusually honest. Standing is a stalemate with gravity; walking is the decision to lose it. A step begins when the body lets itself fall forward, allowing its center of mass to pass beyond the supporting foot, and ends when the swinging leg is flung out ahead to catch the fall before it completes. The other leg repeats the move, and this sequence of arrested topples, each caught at the last instant, is what we politely call gait. The standard description of human walking is a controlled fall, and the phrase is not decoration: through the single-support phase the body vaults over the planted leg like an inverted pendulum, trading height for speed and speed back for height, tuned so near to instability that much of the work is done by physics rather than by the brain. The clearest proof belongs to the engineer Tad McGeer, who in 1990 built what he called a passive dynamic walker: legs with no motor, no sensor, no controller, nothing resembling a nervous system, which when set at the top of a shallow ramp walk down it, gravity powering each fall and the geometry of the swinging legs catching it. The machine has no idea it is walking, and it walks, in its narrow way, more gracefully than the computing robots of its day. Much of the intelligence of walking, biomechanics concluded, is not in the head at all. It is loaned out to the shape of the legs, the spring of the tendons, the pull of the planet. The walker cannot introspect the computation for the simplest of reasons: a great deal of it is not happening anywhere a mind could look.

This is the sense in which the title is precise. Baby Steps returns the adult to the condition of the infant, and the science of how infants come to walk explains why the return is so complete. The developmental psychologist Esther Thelen spent a career dismantling the idea that walking is a program the brain switches on. She began from an old puzzle: newborns held upright with their soles against a surface make clean stepping movements, which vanish at around two months and return near the end of the first year as walking approaches. The long-standing explanation was maturation, a higher brain center coming online to suppress and later release a reflex. Thelen showed the truth was closer to plumbing. In the months the stepping disappears, infants gain fat faster than muscle, and their legs simply grow too heavy to lift; submerge a baby to the chest in warm water, unloading the legs through buoyancy, and the stepping returns, while small weights strapped to a still-stepping younger baby make it go away early. Walking, she concluded, is not stored anywhere as a plan. It is assembled in the moment from the cooperation of things that individually know nothing about walking: the mass of the legs, the strength of the muscles, the give of the surface, the pull of gravity, the arousal of the child, the wish to reach a parent across the room. Change one and the behavior reorganizes. Set a seven-month-old who cannot walk on a treadmill and the legs produce alternating, coordinated steps; run the belts under each foot at different speeds and each leg adjusts to its own. No module is being executed. There is only a solution that the whole system, body and world together, keeps finding. Learning to walk was not the downloading of a file. It was the tuning of an orchestra, after which you forgot you had ever heard silence.

Here Baby Steps stops being a joke about clumsiness and becomes an experiment on consciousness. The philosopher Shaun Gallagher, in How the Body Shapes the Mind, draws the distinction the game weaponizes. There is the body image: the body as you perceive it, picture it, hold beliefs and feelings about it, the body made an object of attention. And there is the body schema: the system of sensorimotor processes that runs posture and movement beneath attention, the pre-reflective know-how that carries you out of a room while your mind stays fixed on the argument you are losing. In ordinary life the two are integrated but separable, and walking lives almost purely in the schema; you do not perceive your walking so much as get carried by it. What the game does is force walking out of the schema and into the image, making each placement of each leg something you must notice, decide, and command, a deliberate object of consciousness, which is precisely the wrong department for the task. Gallagher discusses the rare patients who have lost proprioception, the sense of where the limbs are, and who must then walk by watching, running under conscious visual control the postural corrections the rest of us never feel ourselves make; let their gaze leave their legs and they fall. Baby Steps installs, for a few hours and by way of a controller, a crude copy of that condition. It severs the schema and hands you the image, and asks you to perform with slow, serial, effortful attention the one thing that works only when nobody attends. The discovery it delivers is not that you walk badly. It is that the knowledge was never yours to consult; you had the use of it, not the possession.

Michael Polanyi gave the whole condition its motto. In 1966, in The Tacit Dimension, he opened with a line that has outlived most of the argument around it: "We can know more than we can tell." His examples are the ones anyone recognizes once they are named. We know a face among thousands and cannot say by what features. We ride a bicycle and cannot state the rule that keeps us upright, though there is one, and Polanyi supplies it: turn the handlebars into a fall by an amount that falls off with the square of the speed. The knowing is genuine, demonstrable on demand, and closed to the knower's own inspection. Walking is the first and deepest of these tacit competences, learned before there was any language in which to lose the account of it, and Baby Steps is a machine for making its tacit dimension briefly, comically felt.

Hold the frame and it travels to every skill you own. This is the general shape of expertise: the migration of a performance out of awareness and into the body, the conversion of something you once had to think about into something you now must not. The touch typist cannot say where the letters are except by moving the fingers in the air. The pianist fumbles the passage the instant attention lands on the hands. The native speaker keeps grammatical rules they could not recite and would break if they tried. The driver reaches home with no memory of the road. Each is a small forgetting, and the forgetting is the accomplishment; to become expert at anything is to sink it below the waterline of attention, where it can run fast and unwatched, and the fee for that speed is the surrender of the account. Fluency and transparency cannot be held at once.

Athletes know the underside of this by other names. The yips, choking, paralysis by analysis: one accident under three labels, the sudden return of the body image to a task only the body schema can perform, conscious attention flooding back into an automated skill and seizing it. The golfer who can no longer sink a two-foot putt has lost neither strength nor knowledge; he has begun to watch, and the watching is the affliction. Baby Steps produces that state on purpose and in full, for the most basic motor skill there is. It is the yips reconceived as a wilderness to be crossed, the exact malady that ends careers handed to the player deliberately, from the first minute, as the very medium of play.

It is also,, a theory of the whole class of games about getting good at something. The skill game, from the arcade onward, is a formalized version of the same migration: you begin unable, thinking hard about inputs that feel foreign, and end able, the inputs having sunk into the hands, the game now played by a body schema the game itself installed. The pleasure on sale is the pleasure of automation, of watching from inside as a competence you lacked becomes invisible. Fighting games, rhythm games, the platformer whose jump you no longer decide to make are all engines for manufacturing forgetting. Bennett Foddy has spent his career on the perverse inverse. QWOP, in 2008, put the four muscles of a sprinter under four keys and let players feel how impossible running becomes when it must be run by parts. Getting Over It, in 2017, turned climbing a mountain into the management of failure. Baby Steps completes the sequence by choosing the one skill so deep that its difficulty had become literally unimaginable, and making it imaginable again. The genre ordinarily sells the acquisition of automaticity; Foddy sells its removal, which proves the more revealing product, because you cannot watch a thing turn invisible unless someone first makes it visible again.

So you play for an hour, and something happens that no other kind of game arranges. You set the controller down and stand up for a glass of water, and for the length of the walk to the kitchen you can feel it: the fall and the catch, the fall and the catch, the weight tipping forward over each foot in turn, the whole improbable arrested tumble you have been performing without a witness since before you could speak. For a moment walking is in your body image, and it is strange, and faintly frightening, because you can sense how much of it is being handled by something that is not you in any sense you can reach. Then, by the time you arrive at the sink, it is gone. The schema has taken it back. You are walking again, and again you have forgotten how, the forgetting closing over the knowledge like water over a dropped stone. That closing is not a lapse of memory. It is the mercy that makes an expert body possible, and the small, funny, unsettling gift of Baby Steps is to hold it open an hour, just long enough to let you see what you have been standing on all along.