Irrational Games: Thinking deep thoughts and brutally murdering people at the same time.

I discovered, in the aftermath of BioShock Infinite, that I have relatively little to say about it that is interesting without criticizing it or defending it against criticism, which is a shame, because Infinite is a great game that is both fun to play and features an intense, moving story. If Infinite were any other game, I'm not sure I would even have played it, which is telling: I played this game because of its lineage, and I knew going in that it would be impossible for it to live up to its predecessor, so while it wasn't actually disappointing to me, it was nevertheless not what I wished it would be, either.

SPOILERS: The game is inconsistent with it's internal rules for parallel universes, a limp hand-wave is the best we have as justification for the existence of vigours and various special enemies, and the bad guys are heinous, unambiguously evil people who are beyond sympathy — but assessed for what it is trying to do, I think Infinite succeeds extremely well. The criticisms that I encountered online saying that it is overly violent and even racist are fair and legitimate too, but these properties are mostly mishandled components of a focal story which, in itself, is solid.

BioShock Infinite is about a horrible, murdering brute – Booker – who is trying to redeem himself, crossing into a parallel universe to kill Comstock, an alternate version of himself who, in that timeline, tried to deny his past. Parallel universes being the core conceit of the story, it is set in 1912, in the cradle of modern physics (just as BioShock was set in the cradle of modern genetics, the late 1950's). Comstock, the villain, must be vile both for the player to feel motivated to kill him, and because he must symbolize that Booker cannot overcome his past by denying it and "reinventing" himself. Comstock plays off of the evils of the setting time period: American exceptionalism, religious zealotry, racism, classism. He is unambiguously horrible, but he is not supposed to be a complex villain, he is supposed to be part of Booker's self-loathing.

This makes the story of Booker a story about a murderer who knows no other means of overcoming his problems, thus he slaughters his way through a conflict that is, by virtue of the properties of the villain, a story about defeating racists. Those race issues are dealt with poorly in a bid to make the morality of the conflict less obviously one-sided, resulting in Daisy Fitzroy and the Vox becoming absurd baby-killers for no good reason (although I must admit, hatred begetting hatred didn't strain my suspension of disbelief at the time). The violence in the story, on the other hand, is both excessive and unavoidable: the fact that Booker is a murderer is perhaps his most critical quality to the story, and it is why both he and Comstock need to die.

Imagine a game where you instantly die if you see yourself? The enemy is reflection.

— petermolydeux (@PeterMolydeux) October 22, 2012

For this one, I think the player needs to literally be Medusa. Aside from the fact that using a well-known myth reduces the need for exposition, this sets up an amazing horror story that I would really love to tell, and can really only be told through the eyes of the monster. It will be a very different species of horror, though: we can pull a jump scare the first time or two that a player gets to see themselves, blasting Medusa's dying scream through the speakers and flashing a properly horrific visage (fractal images of violence and suffering that collage into a contorted face, maybe?) onto the screen, but once the player has a grasp of their ability to control whether they see themselves or not, we need something more than the player's own reflection to scare them.

Gameplay-wise, this one must either be first-person, or it needs to be an extremely-tight over-the-shoulder view. The latter might be useful since it would widen the player's periphery (allowing them the chance to see reflective surfaces before actually seeing Medusa's face in them), but I feel like it also diminishes the effect a bit. We can also make use of the snake-hair thing as a warning device – having the snakes become more agitated as reflective surfaces get dangerously close to revealing her reflection. From the first-person, the snakes would show up on the screen edges, and might also help the player by obstructing the periphery (to help avoid accidental glances).

Any other entities Medusa encounters in the game have to turn to stone the moment they cross in front of the player's view. The ability to create instant, line-of-sight-blocking statues has me thinking about navigating mirror mazes, but such challenges would be mostly for changes of pace from the game's real focus: Medusa's search for a place of comfort, safety, and, most problematically, community. Throughout, Medusa will interact with other characters, sometimes trying to befriend them, other times (accidentally?) killing them. This would, given her condition, frequently be via speech and sound alone, so one might want to make sure that whatever system governs those conversations is appropriately deep, even if it just means extensive dialogue trees.

This is a game about loneliness, abandonment, futility and existential crisis. Medusa doesn't necessarily hate the other humans she encounters, but they nevertheless fear her and shun her, and they ultimately die as soon as she encounters them in person, leaving her alone and bereft of a meaningful life. Medusa is a modern symbol for nihilism: she represents the horrible "truth" that we don't want to acknowledge (that life is meaningless and the world is uncaring), because proverbially looking that truth in the eye feels, to us, like death. That's why, after overcoming the challenges of the game, players should find themselves utterly alone in the game world, their efforts ultimately without reward, and with nothing left to do but look into a mirror and end the game.

Game where you play a day that lasts 1 second. Need to find elements that stretch time by 1 second. You win when you live a 24 hour day.

— petermolydeux (@PeterMolydeux) March 12, 2013

This one is an iPhone balancing game in which the player must guide (by tilting the phone) a sphere that moves at its own, constant speed along a precarious system of narrow rails, and if the sphere falls off the rail on either side, then you restart from the last checkpoint. Think Labyrinth, but no stopping and there are more holes than paths. The sphere's pace is set such that reaching the first checkpoint, which is just a straight beam requiring that the player only hold the phone level, takes pretty much exactly one second. Between the first and second checkpoint, however, the sphere slows down and the length of the beam extends, such that that stretch takes exactly two seconds. Each stretch takes 1 additional second to complete; so the player has to maintain balance for increasing durations between checkpoints. In addition, the slower sphere becomes less responsive to the player's inputs as the levels roll on, requiring the player to become a better judge of how much force they need to apply to the sphere, and for how long they must apply it, in order to keep the ball steady in the face of increasingly frequent, randomized complications like curves, obstacles, and balance-disrupting events like sudden gusts of wind.

The game can be paused at any time (otherwise it never stops), and from the pause menu the player can purchase Rescues: any time you are about to fall and lose, the game auto-pauses and asks if you want to use one of your Rescues, in which case you are placed back in the centre of the rail and you lose any lateral momentum you may have had, resetting your balance but saving your progress. You also earn one free Rescue any time that you reach a new checkpoint. Furthermore, the game tracks all of your total real-time spent playing (paused time doesn't count), and for every few hours that you play you earn another free Rescue. Rescues make it so that your last-second fall at the end of a 30-minute-long stretch won't force you to start all over.

The game ends when you pass a single 24-hour-long run, which means the whole game should take 118 years and change to finish… except that everyone playing, everywhere, contributes their total "earned time" (the duration of the stretch they are currently playing) to a global tally, which unlocks benefits for all players as the player base passes certain milestones. Some possibilities:

• Total global earned time ≥ 24 hours = All checkpoints passed now add 2 seconds to the duration of the next stretch instead of one.
• Global clock ≥ 1 year = All checkpoints are now worth 1 minute. This should help the players reach the 24-hour stretch much faster.
• Whenever an individual player actually achieves the 24-hour goal, all players everywhere get a free Rescue, everyone's levels are worth an additional 1 second, and that player gets to start a new profile to add even more time to the clock.

Yager Development: Because shooting dudes should… wait, who?

I had a wonderful time with Spec Ops: The Line, both because I have no problems at all with the fairly basic shooter formula it follows, and because I love Heart of Darkness. Like its primary influence, Spec Ops tells a story about the brutality of which humans are capable when stripped of any sense of restraint; when we are freed from consequence, or pushed to severe desperation. At the same time, it is an incredibly self-aware experience about the nature of violent games, which are themselves examples of scenarios of zero restraint: there are no consequences for actions taken in a video game, there are no lines a player must not cross.

SPOILERS: I wrote an article summarizing a key moral choice from the game, along the lines of a few other reviews I've written, but I found the article hollow and inadequate: although I could justify my course of action, it was far from decisive, and even my own pragmatic code suggested that quitting the game would be more "correct" than my course of action. The drive to stop playing altogether was something of a trend – Spec Ops, unlike any game I have ever played, actively hates the player and wants to make him or her quit.

It is, for example, impossible to proceed past the game's most outstanding "moral choice" moment without performing an staggeringly vile deed: dropping white phosphorus bombs (albeit unintentionally) on unarmed, innocent civilians. Arguably, this is not even a choice, which the impeccable dialogue of the scene seeks to highlight: after determining that the white phosphorus is the only way to bypass the mass of soldiers before them, Lugo objects: "There's always a choice," he says. "No… there's really not," is Walker's reply. Both are correct, in a sense: there is no way to progress through the game without using the white phosphorus, yet the player is only forced to perform the deed if he or she insists upon finishing the game.

At some point, most other players of the game disconnected from Walker and started to see him as a separate entity rather than an avatar of themselves. I, however, continued to identify with him, continued to try to rationalize my actions, and learned something about myself in the process. I told myself that survival and progress toward comparatively noble goals could justify all of my actions, from the white phosphorus, to the occasion when my itching trigger finger caused me to shoot and kill an innocent civilian who ran out from behind a corner in the middle of a firefight. I didn't mean to kill that person, and regretted it deeply, but I still kept playing because like Walker, I was driven to see the conflict through to its resolution, regardless of the cost.

Game about an assassin trying to make a hit on a target. You control everyone else in the area, finding creative ways of keeping them apart

— petermolydeux (@PeterMolydeux) March 5, 2013

I'm reminded, funnily enough, of Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, where the player is able to possess objects in order to create changes in the environment. Supposing, say, that the player can suddenly cause the toilets of the house to flood, thus forcing someone to leave the room to go deal with them – there's one way the player can manipulate the environs in order to control the flow of people. But there, you're only indirectly "controlling" the people, and although one certainly requires creativity to do so, while this is a handy idea to keep in mind, it won't be the whole picture.

What about issuing direct commands to the people, but limiting commands to those that seem reasonable? They will only eat when hungry, and only talk to people that they know and like, and so on. Picture a building full of people with various goals, fears, and other traits: Move the repugnant person into room A and the sensitive person automatically decides to leave it, and their friend opts to leave with them. Once separated into another room, you can have the sensitive person obsess over a cute animal, leaving the friend bored enough to wander off toward the cafeteria, giving the assassin the opportunity to kill that target while they are travelling through the hall. Combine this with the previous idea to create more varied challenges, and we have a nice puzzle game working, but let's do even more.

Enter the "herd control" mechanic, based on games like Patapon or Pikmin, wherein the player can't send specific orders, but can deploy area-effect directives like "attract" to make nearby people congregate at a particular location, and "repel" to force them away from a single point, "hasten" to make them move faster, "slow" to make them become sluggish. By default, the people behave according to some regular rules: stopping to chat with other people they approach, engaging in interactions with usable objects, and otherwise milling around in fairly random fashion, but follow the area-effect orders if they are in range of the origin point where one was given. Now you have to repel the repugnant person into the room, then hasten the sensitive person out and attract them to the cute animal, and so forth.

As for the story and theme, I'm thinking a science fiction setting, where the player is the assassin's hacker teammate who cracks into the environmental controls of the buildings the assassin infiltrates. He or she is remotely controlling all of the appliances (although security guards become suspicious if too many machines are malfunctioning) and venting mood-altering chemicals into the air to direct the flow of people. The hacker can also access personnel files for tips on how to best manipulate specific individuals in the area.

If you die your last body turns into a brick. You can then pick that brick up with new body and use it towards making a bridge. Repeat

— petermolydeux (@PeterMolydeux) January 25, 2013

I adore the notion of having insurmountable obstacles where dying is part of progressing, but if all we're doing with this is building a bridge, I don't see a lot of gameplay variety on the horizon. Maintaining the spirit of the GAME, however, I would suggest a platform game where the player builds the platforms and structures they will use out of these bricks. In each level, the goal point (a door or flag, etc) will initially be totally inaccessible. Whenever the player dies trying to reach it, however, their body becomes a brick, they respawn at the nearest checkpoint (often the start of the level), and can then return to the place where they died, pick up the brick, carry it to a useful location, and set it down, at which point it becomes a permanently fixed platform that they can use to bypass hazards and reach the goal.

In the interest of keeping things challenging, the player should not be able to die easily on most levels. Typical hazards should be stationary, so that the player has to seek them out in order to die, and so that retrieving the brick requires wandering through the same dangerous territory: flames, spikes, swinging blades, living enemies confined in small spaces, projectiles that fire along fixes trajectories. Also, there should be some hazards that don't yield a brick: if you fall down an infinite hole, so does the resulting brick, so it is irretrievable. If the player dies before placing their last brick, that brick crumbles to dust; replaced by the newly created one.

We also get to have some fun with brick properties: The player can only place bricks in locations that are within arm's reach of the player character, and bricks must be anchored to the ground or some existing structure. This way, to create interesting puzzles, we can have slippery surfaces in the level that won't hold a brick. In addition, we can play with bricks that have unusual properties, where particular deaths result in unique bricks:

• Charred bricks that crumble under the player's weight result from fire-deaths.
• Elongated bricks result from being crushed.
• Bricks that float on water result from drowning.
• Bricks that form moving platforms once placed result from being killed by a flying projectile?
• Bricks that can float in midair without support result from… something. I'm not that creative.
• Bricks that can be removed and placed repeatedly come from that doesn't happen often.

A few more thoughts: there could be a challenge mode where the player has limited lives, and thus limited bricks with which to complete a puzzle. I am also pondering the overarching story, which I think should be about retrieving magical bricks from the end of each level, which are used at the home-menu area to gradually assemble a magic rainbow bridge, as described in the tweet. But a bridge to where? And who is our intrepid protagonist? These story details need some attention.

Welcome to "Gratis Amateur Molydeux Elaborations", a series of articles wherein I take a game design idea from a tweet by @PeterMolydeux and elaborate on it, fleshing out the core concept into a very brief design document of sorts. It's "amateur" because I have minimal game design experience, and it's "gratis" because I'm offering these ideas free of charge! I don't have the time, dedication or resources to make any of these games real, so if a reader who possesses those three things wants to implement one of my designs, I will gladly do whatever is necessary to rescind any legal rights I might have to it (you're on your own accomplishing the same with Adam Capone, though he seems the type to be amicable about it). For serious. But I digress, on to the first GAME idea:

Game where the ability to instantly change the difficulty of the game on the fly is part of the game's core mechanic.

— petermolydeux (@PeterMolydeux) February 19, 2013

It seems to me that for this idea to really work, we need to exploit players' prior knowledge of what is meant by "difficulty", which means going for a very familiar game format where difficulty is intuitively understood, such as the combat genre. Here, everyone knows what difficulty means: how much health the bad guys have and how much damage they deal. For many games, it means a lot more than that, but this simple definition highlights our key challenge in making such a game: how can one make a player want to change the difficulty? In practice, players set the difficulty to match their skill so that they will be challenged but not overwhelmed. We need to completely rewrite that policy; providing strategic reasons to change difficulty, creating advantages and disadvantages to every difficulty setting that make each one favourable in certain circumstances.

We might assume that the inherent "advantage" of easy difficulty is that it includes weak opponents, so our primary concern is probably going to be with incentivizing high difficulty. A few suggestions:

• Enemies become specialized in hard mode – they should get armour or shields and start using weapons that deal special damage types. This way, the player can exploit the vulnerabilities of those special defences, and acquire resistance to the special attacks of these hard mode foes.
• Elements of the environment become more hazardous in hard mode, for both player and enemy alike.
• Random-spawned items like health and ammunition are more frequent in hard mode, so that hard mode can help resolve a shortage of a particular resource.
• The player has allies that scale to the difficulty, so that their best abilities are only active in hard mode.

Balanced well enough against the inherent weakness of easy mode opponents, the player should be shifting all the time! We can further complicate their decisions by making hard mode more rewarding (more XP, better loot, et cetera) so that hard mode is preferable when fighting weak enemies. Crucially, though, hard mode should be hard enough that the player doesn't always want to be in it. Alternatively, one could force the player into medium difficulty by default, and limit their ability to switch into hard and easy mode – for instance, they might have to hold down a button to maintain a difficulty shift (a dexterity challenge), or shifting the difficulty might consume a resource (an economic challenge).

A final thought: boss fights might entail special designs that play up the difficulty shifting. For example, a combat where some of the enemies explode when they die, and some of the enemies are incredibly resilient and can acquire healing powers in hard mode. In easy mode, the exploders can be killed rapidly to deal splash damage to the healers, but once they've all been detonated, the player needs to shift into hard mode so that the healers will resurrect the fallen exploders, allowing the player to then shift back down and repeat the effort.

Obsidian Entertainment: Because fuck you, they'll shit on whatever IP they like.

Having finished Fallout: New Vegas, I have trouble deciding whether I dislike the game on its own merits, or whether a combination of being burned out on this style of game after Skyrim and my seething hatred for Obsidian spoiled me on it in advance. I had a good time with it on occasion, especially after I got my absurd sniper gun and the story started happening (this was about 50 hours in). That said, it was, for the most part, a boring story filled with frustrating bullshit that frequently had me committing mass murders rather than tolerate interacting with asshole NPCs for any longer than I had to. Ironically, this led to me legitimately role-playing much more than I had in Skyrim or Oblivion before it, so I decided to write a little journal about my character's descent into madness. Naturally, what follows is spoileriffic, but to be honest, the story doesn't have any interesting twists in it… or anything interesting at all, for that matter.

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Telltale: Keeping adventure games alive since 2004.

I've recently finished the Walking Dead video game, and I have high hopes that it indicates a turning point for the adventure genre: moving away from the irritating "combine inventory object A with B and then rub it on stationary environmental object C" style of puzzles, and toward a more straightforward form of interactive storytelling where rather than trying to present the player with challenges to overcome by skill, the player is expected to participate in a dramatic story, making the hard choices that define the very meaning of the narrative.

Spoilers ahead: The moment that I have in mind was a timed decision in Episode 4, that, thanks to a bit of lead-up, the player has about 1 minute to make: whether to allow a high school student named Ben to fall from the highest floor of a bell tower to the ground below, or haul him back up to safety. Context being everything, it's important to note that when Ben finds himself precariously dangling from this particular ledge, there's also a growing zombie herd making their way up the stairs nearby, and the rest of the group is evacuating through the window.

Barely hanging on, Ben asks that the player let him fall and run, rather than waste time rescuing him. Much more importantly: the zombie herd has only arrived – putting everyone in danger – as a consequence of Ben ineptly removing a hatchet that was being used to bar a door (Ben needed the hatchet to hack through a padlock elsewhere, and apparently did not bother to observe the active zombie horde before taking it). This is the most recent in a string of actions that Ben has taken that put every member of the group in immediate mortal danger.

Previously, Ben's largest crime has been stealing the group's medical supplies to trade to marauding bandits as part of a protection racket – all without discussing doing so with the group (in fact, actively hiding his actions when questioned), and ignoring the fact that supplies at the time were already stretched too thin for this to be viable. This ultimately led to a bandit attack when Lee unknowingly intercepts one of the deliveries, which in turn drew a zombie horde and resulted in the fatal infection of one of the group members, the murder of another, the suicide of a third, and the loss of the group's only available safe house.

I can argue for rescuing Ben on the same universal grounds I might argue for anyone: he's another pair of hands to have around; I would want to be rescued in his position, and it is important to set a precedent; he is well-meaning and might take this as an opportunity to correct his behaviour. But I can also simply point to his track record of constant cowardice, uselessness, stupidity, dishonesty, and lethality to justify leaving him to die.

If you are a Zero Punctuation regular, you have probably noted Yahtzee's aversion to "spunkgargleweewee", the modern genre of FPS with inordinate focus on cinematic, heavily-guided play instead of player-driven expression and freedom of choice. Guidance vs. freedom seems like a frequently occurring design problem – it's at the core of any Mac vs. Linux debate, for instance. Calling back to ideas like synthetic happiness, analysis paralysis, and to my own experience using Macs, it is easy to say that for a typical user, the guided experience will be easier and more enjoyable. But what is a cinematic, guided game but a movie where you have to constantly mash buttons to make the film roll? A user who is equipped to handle being dropped into the deep end will, according to both my own experiences with such games and simple intuition, get much more fulfillment out of forging their own path.