Note: The following article contains major spoilers for COLDLINE. The game is "name your own price" on itch.io and only lasts about ten minutes, so consider working through it and coming back.

Ten. The moment that COLDLINE's gameplay starts so does the countdown. You have six hundred seconds to defuse a metaphorical bomb without knowing anything about the environment you're entering or the mechanics you'll be manipulating. Games with time limits don't always justify the inclusion of those limitations. A classic mistake in games with explicit narratives is to introduce a timer to a level to impart urgency but fail to have the narrative explain why the timer is there. In other words, the text can tell you that you need to complete a timed objective but can't tell you why it's timed. In COLDLINE, the case for the ticking clock is regrettably well made: You are the Chairman of the USSR in 1962, and your country has accidentally launched a fifty-megaton warhead on a direct course to New York City. Your only hope is to call the US President and have them intercept the missile. All you need to do to save the world is to make a perfect phone call.

Nine. COLDLINE's lean ten minutes of warning is the short fuse of nuclear warfare: a whip crack from launch to landing that kept people up at night. In a war, the rules of your life become the rules of your enemy's weapons and tactics. The siege blocks the entrances to a settlement, so the occupants have to live isolated and ration goods. The aeroplane could travel the distance of a few countries in a matter of hours, so when the bomber plane was put into production, a lot of Western Europeans had to hide in shelters and endured destruction and death even well outside of the warzone proper: the blitz.

The nuclear ICBM also disrupts lifestyles and communities. We might think of the invention of this munition and the move to "launch on warning" stances, as they were called, as enabling a hyper-blitz. You're talking about going from bombs that would yield under a ton to warheads that were rated in the megatons. A "megaton" is a measure of explosive power that is equal to one million tons of dynamite. COLDLINE's fifty-megaton missile is not fictional in that its entropic potential probably matches that of the most divine nuke ever tested: the tsar bomb. Detonated by the Soviets in 1961, the year before the game is set, tsar bomba, like the COLDLINE missile, is widely believed to have rated at fifty megatons. That's 3,800 times as powerful as the warhead the US dropped on Hiroshima.^[1]

And nukes weren't just an upgrade in power, but also distance. A plane in WWII was fast, but nowhere near fast enough to reach from the Russian mainland to the US in around 25 minutes, which an ICBM could. During the Cold War, the citizens of the USA, the Soviet Union, and their allies lived at the speed of the nuke's flight. The knowledge that cities could be wiped off of the map with mere minutes' notice made it impossible to exhale, motivated paranoid irrationality about where enemies were and the acceptable recourse to stop them, and moved militaries to enter states of hair-trigger readiness. The President began carrying around a satchel of launch codes, for god's sake. One of the most enduring images of the Cold War was that of the Doomsday Clock: a yardstick for humanity's existential precarity created by Einstein and key figures from the Manhattan Project. Its metric "minutes to midnight" implies that even on a good day, you are a short commute from some black finality.

Eight. I think living in that state of morbid anticipation for years on end warped some boomers' brains. Dwelling in the constant expectation of violence tends to leave expectants unable to leave that anxiety behind. If middle-aged or elderly Westerners or Russians seem overly susceptible to red scare or unfounded hints of incoming nuclear flocks, that's no doubt down to years of nationalist and military propaganda. However, it's also what happens when you live years of your life knowing that any ten minutes could be the ten minutes of COLDLINE. It leaves our culture reflexively returning to the adrenaline fear of the Cold War, even long after we've left the event itself behind, creating media like this game.

This has gotten pitch dark, so maybe we could use some levity because this is also a comedy game. That might sound outside the realms of possibility; the problem the game presents is as bleak as it gets. The solution to this problem is also disturbing, but it is ridiculous. When your call is connected to the White House, it's answered by one of those automated customer service systems. You must climb a phone tree to prevent the apocalypse, and as we all know, those menus are insultingly slow and barely navigable. The gag that developer papercookies pulls here is partly in the pleasant roboticism of the prerecorded voice that accompanies you through the worst scenario imaginable. It's partly that papercookies made the whole game out of the settings screen. But it's also the mismatch between the tool and the work. COLDLINE is trying to eat your soup with a fork or wrap a present with the lights off. The game gets across the turtle crawl these telephonic systems move at by having you call one at the moment you most need someone to respond with haste.

Seven. You've no doubt experienced media that is grim at some points and funny at others, but COLDLINE is both at the same time. And it wouldn't get across dread or comedy if it didn't have a realistic grasp of just how disastrously designed phone menus are. One reason designers present users with written text instead of the spoken word is that the former accounts for different users processing language at different speeds. Of the people who can read, some do it faster than others, and if you've already visited a piece of written text, you can skip over parts you've memorised to get at the information or options you need. That's not the case in an auditory medium that forces you to parse at its rhythm. And naturally, the faster the tempo of speech, the more people you exclude from being able to interface with your systems. Therefore, the creators of phone menus sedate their speed.

Not only does this sluggish pacing test callers' blood pressure, it also encourages them to leapfrog over menu nodes without hearing all the options because they want to get where they're going now, not in half a minute's time. This behaviour increases the chance they'll barge into the wrong room of the menus and have to backtrack, wasting more time. We can imagine a system that finds the right pace for each user, allowing them to save their preferred speech speed, and maybe also, which menu options they've heard recently, but per COLDLINE, that's rarely the system we get. To save and retrieve your user data, you need a unique login, and that's probably a tattered scrap of paper hidden at the bottom of a drawer.

Even without saves, designers can limit a caller's exposure to the same soul-draining speeches by designing an efficient menu that stops the caller from visiting one node more times than they need to, but how often do you encounter one of those? I called these menus "labyrinths" up top because they are composed of nodes that each have points of entry and exit that can only be reached via other specific nodes. Replace the word "nodes" in that previous sentence with "rooms", and you have a description of a building. Really, any space is a series of points where each point has access to adjacent points but not non-adjacent points. So, I say menus are spatial, and I've not argued with me yet.

Six. Like many spaces that are frustrating to navigate, phone menus are understocked with direct routes between points the user is likely to want to move between. In their place, we get extra stops blocking the path from node A to node B, each with its own little speech and protocols like you're being processed by port authority. Here are a few familiar examples of direct navigation being impossible, as presented in COLDLINE:

• Being able to move down a level in the menu hierarchy but not up. If you think of the phone menu like a Windows directory tree, you could progress from C:/Program Files/ to C:/Program Files/WinRAR/, but you couldn't backtrack from C:/Program Files/WinRAR/ to C:/Program Files/.
• Being unable to cancel out of "hold". The user cannot predict how long they will be on hold before getting into this configuration, and so, cannot tell whether it will be faster to try and talk to a person or continue menu navigation. Once they've found out that hold is a time sink, they have no ejector seat from it.
• Being unable to jump "sideways" through the menu tree. For example, in COLDLINE, there is a menu from which you can order a nuclear interception, but the codes you'd need to request the correct interception method are hidden in another menu, both of which branch down from the main menu. There is no door between the interception menu and the codes menu.

The prying stick to clear any of these logjams is to admit defeat and go back to square one: the main menu, often the farthest point from your destination. Automated phone systems are a bit like Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. COLDLINE and the trees it depicts are also like other poorly designed spaces in that they're often poorly signposted. For instance, any number of services we need to access might hide in the inscrutable raffle of "More options". Or clicking the auditory link to learn more about offensive nuclear weapons may not actually help you find the code for your offensive nuclear weapon.

A bad tool makes us work harder to compensate for its weakness. A blunt knife forces us to cut with a firmer hand; if a cable frays, we must replace it; if phone menus can't clearly tell us where an option will go, we're forced to do the labelling for them. One of the jobs of a UI is to remember for us: store our points count, the item in our left hand, or the paths ahead from our current location so we don't have to memorise this data. When UIs don't remember, we have to write all that overwhelming information to our grey matter. With the White House's automated receptionist being so lazy, we must build the menu tree in our heads to get anywhere, and it makes me feel like my skull's about to burst.

Five. The existence of any phone menu in COLDLINE is, of course, an anachronism, one blatant enough that it reads as symbolic. The red phone piercing through the centre of the screen sticks out like a bloody injury of the timeline. Like most symbols, the automated system can stand for a few different things. For one, it uses the incompetence and miscommunication of customer service systems to discuss where the same themes may arise in the management of atomic arms.

The ubiquitous image of nuclear threat in the West has been one of a commissar foaming at the mouth with his finger on a big red launch button. But as I touched on when talking about the RTS, DEFCON, the reality of nuclear close calls has not been one of malicious volition. It's been a cavalcade of improperly issued orders, misunderstandings, and computer glitches. The speed at which the nuke can sprint towards your door motivates militaries to ready retaliations that place response time over the lengthy process of verification. And while the premonitions of psychologically brittle Soviet generals were used to manufacture consent for permanent nuclear readiness, I also think those images have been used to comfort. There's a humanity in being killed by the commander of a nuclear stockpile; at least someone got to exercise their ambitions. The alternative: being vaporised in your chair by a domino chain of protocol failures is more like sketch comedy. One is Hannibal pointing his sword towards the mountains and letting loose a cry to slaughter. The other is the world ending because your cat knocked your Pepsi onto your laptop.

COLDLINE is also comparing disorganisations of East and West. In the West's review of the Soviet Union, the country's sin was as much inefficiency as it was human rights violations. According to the capitalists, the free market is overclocked to give you what you want when you want; in the USSR, it was all formal requests for formal requests and psychosis-inducing wait times for bread. But in COLDLINE, we make a telephone call westward and find the same frictional bureaucracy awaiting us in the capitalist system. In gentle tones, a gremlin in the wires tells us that our call is "very important" to them, but how important can it be when we are stuck in this mirror maze of menu prompts? If we must spend an eternity on hold to book doctor's appointments or get our electricity turned back on, is Western capitalism really the efficient alternative that we were promised?

Also represented in our phone call: the speed of international relations lags well behind the pace at which global crises proliferate. Genocides are waged faster than assemblies can agree on a plan of action to condemn them, let alone stop them. Arming yourself with unimaginably cruel weapons takes a few weeks, but ratifying peace treaties seems to take a lifetime. This order in which violence comes first and peace comes second is the wrong way around, just as, for Westerners, everything in COLDINE is backwards. We don't see the Cold War from the perspective of the North Americans or Europeans; we see it from the perspective of a Soviet. The Chairman of the USSR doesn't make the call to launch the arsenal but to stop it. It's not a hotline; it's a COLDLINE. We expect frenzied celebration from a Soviet Union launching a nuclear payload but are reminded that the country didn't want to launch anything at all.

Four. Societies can benefit from wars, but not global thermonuclear war. Wars abroad can be useful for extracting resources or reordering the world so that you come out on top. Any direct damage happens to someone else's country. War in your nation incurs more collateral, but to some, civil war or revolution has been desirable because your country could be in an improved state post-war or post-revolution. The hellfire of the ICBM changed the whole game. Nuclear war would take place in your country, no matter which side you were on or where you were. The theatre of war had been expanded so that the same battle could be happening in Washington, DC, and Moscow. And it would render your whole country, even the planet, scarcely inhabitable in the aftermath. A 2020 study found that even a nuclear exchange between the relatively modestly armed India and Pakistan could cause a famine that would kill 2 billion. Even as world leaders set up the scaffolding for nuclear armageddon, they knew they could never cut the ribbon. Yet, that didn't mean they had a solid plan that would avert the war either.

Three. COLDLINE, set in 1962, is an echo of the '62 communications between John F. Kennedy and Nikita Kruschev to defuse the Cuban Missile Crisis.^[2] The Cuban Revolution took place in 1959, axing the dictator Fulgencio Batista. Shattered by Batista's authoritarianism and the long rule of colonialism before it, Cuba stood with few pennies to its name. It reconstructed itself with communist principles and aimed to revatlise its economy by forming a financial relationship with the major, ostensibly socialist world power at the time: the Soviet Union.

In the 50s, the US placed nuclear warheads in Europe aimed at the USSR, including a deployment of nukes in Turkey in 1959. The western border of the Soviet Union felt the hot breath of Uncle Sam. Back west, the United States would oppose socialist uprisings all over Latin America but was particularly alarmed by islands so close to them financially allying with an enemy and embracing anti-capitalism. Their response was repeated assassination attempts on Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, acts of terrorism inside Cuba, and in 1961, a bungled invasion of the country. So, now Cuba was motivated to defend itself against the Americans, and the USSR wanted to station bombs close to a United States that had done the same thing to them. The mutually agreeable arrangement was for the Soviet Union to ship the parts for weapons of mass destruction to Cuba. So they did, and the Cubans began assembling their nukes 90 miles south of Florida.^[2]

Two. You might think the US would treat this atomic mousetrap with some care, but Kennedy's military chiefs wanted to shove their hands right in, pushing for an air attack on Cuba, and, if necessary, a second invasion. Fearing that directly engaging a country with nukes could lead to a launch, President Kennedy opted for a blockade of Cuba instead, although he publicly threatened a second invasion.^[2][3] Kruschev declared the blockade an act of aggression and emphasised the potential for a nuclear skirmish to break out. The US's strategic air forces prepared for war, for the first and only time in history moving to DEFCON 2. It's also around here that we get the close-miss launch of nuclear armaments from Soviet sub B-59, granted by two military officers but averted by another.

But then, something strange happened: Kruschev and Kennedy came to the negotiating table. The two agreed that if the Chairman withdrew the nukes from Cuba, the US would never invade the nation again and would remove its batteries from Turkey. On the record, the US would say it did not capitulate to demands to remove its missiles.^[2], but each country upheld its end of the bargain. The following year, the so-called "red phone" was installed: a direct line from Moscow to Washington that could be used to diplomacise through future conflicts.^[4]

The apocalypse was averted, but only just. The time scale of the Cuban Missile Crisis is shocking. The catastrophe took place over just thirteen days, but prior to the introduction of the red telephone, it could take hours for the US to send the USSR one message or vice-versa.^[4] And when it came to trying to lull the global order back into a state of relative peace, both Kennedy and Kruschev were also racing military chiefs eager to enter the room bayonets-first and potentially provoke ICBM deployments. COLDLINE is the fear that formalised diplomacy might be too slow to save us from mass extinction. Even the Doomsday Clock could not always keep pace with contemporary threats. During the Missile Crisis, it did not move closer to midnight, a subject of common criticism. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists maintains that too little was known about the conflict at the time to make an accurate update.^[5]

One. Since 2007, the clock's setters have expanded its mission. No longer simply a prediction of how close we tip-toe to a nuclear conclusion, it is now also a spittle-soaked thumb in the air of general existential risk.^[5] During the Cold War, the closest the clock came to midnight was two minutes. It reached this setting in 1953, the year of the first hydrogen bomb test, but this is not the closest it flirted with midnight overall.

In 2023, the Bulletin moved the Doomsday Clock to one minute and thirty seconds to midnight, citing the potential for nuclear ignition in the Russia-Ukraine war, as well as international failures in preventing the COVID-19 pandemic and human-made climate change. It's not the case that there haven't been global assemblies vowing to guard us from these restructuring events. The UN was founded in 1945, the World Health Organisation was set up three years later, and the first World Climate Conference was held in 1979. But wars and viruses travel faster than diplomacy, and while a response to the environmental collapse and a contingency for the next international epidemic are beyond urgent, navigation of these issues has been painfully slow. As it stands, we're still on hold. Thanks for reading.

Notes

1. Tsar Bomba by Amy Tikkanen (August 10, 2017), Britannica.
2. Cuban Missile Crisis by History.com Editors (January 4, 2010), History.
3. JFK vs. the Military by Robert Dallek (September 10, 2013), The Atlantic.
4. Hotline established between Washington and Moscow by History.com Editors (November 16, 2009), History.
5. FAQ by Kennette Benedict (Date Unknown), The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

All other sources linked at relevant points in article.

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Atomic Heart, The Catcher in the Rye, Fight Club, and Goodfellas.

If you want to criticise Atomic Heart, there's no shortage of unprotected flanks for you to stab at. There's an open world that is hemmed in and devoid of side tasks, there's its history of bugs so severe that you wonder how it ever launched in its initial state, and there's a plot that keeps spinning its wheels instead of making headway. But that's a lot to bite off, and I'd like to see more close reading of games. So, today, I want to put just one problem with Atomic Heart on the stand. His name is P-3, and don't worry, he is going to give us a lot of material.

Atomic Heart's stomping ground is an alternate techno-utopian Soviet Union in the year 1955. The country has traded the hammer and sickle for a syringe and a servo. When a robot uprising ravages their research colony of Facility 3826, politician-scientist Dmitry Sechenov dispatches a WWII vet to bring the automatons to heel. That soldier is Major Sergey "P-3" Nechaev. Based on looks and genre conventions, you might guess P-3 is one of the gruff, personalityless strongmen who has always found work in video game plots. Instead, developer Mundfish makes him a kind of Rick & Morty Chris Kyle.

Sometimes, after engaging with a flawed piece of media, I'll suspect that I exaggerated the problems in my memory, but after my return to Atomic Heart, I can confirm that P-3 really is that annoying. He's everything players labelled him as: whiny, arrogant, and embarrassingly unfunny. He has a snide putdown for every person he meets and every task he's assigned, which could be darkly funny if he was witty about it, but P-3 is dumb as drywall. Here are just a few choices lines:

"[When his sidekick tells him he must pick locks himself] In other words, you're basically useless, as always!".

"[When a robot tells him that you can't ride a train if you have signs of pregnancy] I'll show you signs of pregnancy, you piece of shit!".

"Where's the shit-ass way out of here?".

"Rescue the bitch whose fault it is that I'm wading knee-deep in gore? What the fuck?".

"[To his sidekick] Are you friggin' deaf or something?".

"Cripsy critters, now I gotta deal with another crazy-ass lock! Fuck, I'm a magnet for annoying bullshit".

"Crispy critters" is literally his comedy catchphrase. P-3 sounds like he was written by a 13-year-old, and he comes off as a buzzkill in a game that's largely meant to be about the fun of demolishing frenzied robots. He has nothing to say, but he never shuts up, and the most irritating thing about the guy is how smug he is about his warmed-over, flavourless humour. Media audiences are more willing to accept a character's pride if they're entertaining or relatable; this is generally true of personal faults. We can forgive a character for some lies if they're an ingenious manipulator. We can become invested in their stealing if it's a product of pain that has a dramatic weight. We can also empathise with a character doing something we don't approve of if there's a recognisable emotional impetus behind it or if they have redeeming traits. Or we may feel a character's self-confidence is justified if they're acting in a moral interest.

Think about Jimmy McGill in Better Call Saul. He's a chancer and a cheater, and yet, most viewers can't help but root for him because his schemes are so elaborate, and we understand that he is driven in part by an inferiority complex. Firefly's Malcolm Reynolds smirks with self-congratulation, but he generally does the right thing, and he's a fine action hero. In the biopic Shirley, author Shirley Jackson uses her words to deeply wound the people around her, but we also understand that she is chronically depressed and appreciate her attempt to produce great literature even under a cloud of melancholy.

Atomic Heart, however, doesn't have a likeable personality feature to counterbalance P-3's smarm. His jokes also don't serve an important function to anyone and are more complaints than gags. His kvetching is never shown to derive from anything other than bone idleness. He also reserves the same rancour for electronic locks and safety announcements that he does for mass murderers, making him come over as extraordinarily petty.

Your main characters don't have to be endearing. While media that glamourises immoral individuals is fair game for criticism, there's also a shallow read of fiction that's been kicking around recently that says that you have to get on with a character for a story to be worthwhile. "Catcher in the Rye is bad because I couldn't be friends with Holden Caulfield". "Fight Club is poorly written because the narrator is a thuggish fuckboy". I get it. Sometimes, a person, even a fake person, can be so grating that all you're doing by exposing yourself to them is making yourself pointlessly frustrated. And I don't think people saying that they loathe a character by itself are calling for unlikeable characters to be banned or even saying that the writing they appear in is substandard.

But some people are grading stories by the personability of the protagonist, and we can't default to assuming that the morality of a piece of fiction is the morality of its characters. Nor that the quality of a piece of fiction is determined by the moral scruples of its cast. Additionally, by divesting ourselves from media with characters we can't get on with, we block off art that makes valuable points or that could find a new way to engage us. Garth Marenghi in Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, Tommy DeVito in Goodfellas, and Lily Reynolds in Thoroughbreds are just some characters who enrich their stories by being thoroughly unpleasant and allow writers to explore and discuss negative characteristics like selfishness, hubris, and a propensity for violence.

At first, I wondered if Atomic Heart was trying to take the Archer route of generating humour and indicating what kind of person you shouldn't be by forcing its characters to rely on someone conceited and thoughtless. Secret agent thrillers like James Bond say hyper-confident womanising men are the height of cool. Archer says they're manchildren, allowing us to laugh at the title character and the effect of his behaviour on his coworkers. But in these cases where a text succeeds in condemning an unscrupulous main character, it clarifies that it views that character as stupid or despicable through context. Audiences are unlikely to aspire to be Garth Marenghi because he's comically self-serving, and his work is hacky. When Tommy DeVito shoots a waiter in the food for getting the wrong order, the disproportion in this response and the vulnerability of his target mean that DeVito doesn't come off as an action hero but an unhinged sadist. And we know that most of the time, we're meant to laugh at, not with Archer, because the show surrounds him with colleagues who have more maturity and common sense than him, reflecting poorly on the agent.

A text may also ward against the imitation of its characters' malicious behaviours by having those characters get their just desserts. The fight club turns against the narrator, Holden Caulfield ends up estranged from his peers, Tommy DeVito gets whacked. Sometimes media employs both the technique of making the character look unpleasant and having them get their comeuppance at the same time, but Atomic Heart implements neither. P-3's grouchiness is constant enough to feel like gravel in my shoe, but it's also inconsequential enough in the grand scheme of things that it's not like he's evil or going to get into trouble over it. And the other characters in the game echo P-3's tryhard one-note comedy back at him. So, instead of excitable misanthropy being just the Major's way of speaking, a mode and tone of commentary that the game could upbraid with its own voice, it becomes the game's voice.

Nechaev's only joke is that he's irritable and mean-spirited. Granny Zina's only joke is that she's an elderly woman with a filthy mouth. NORA's character is that she's obsessed with having sex with P-3. Keep in mind, these are not setups for getting the characters into farcical situations. You can imagine how P-3's temper might leave him between a rock and a hard place professionally or how NORA could end up embarrassing herself by awkwardly trying to engineer social situations in which she can sleep with P-3. But Atomic Heart can't do situational humour; it's an open mic for these characters to do their one bit endlessly.

Atomic Heart's style of humour has no setups, only punchlines. When a lot of comedy succeeds in leading you in one direction and then suddenly diverting you somewhere unexpected, Atomic Heart's humour leads you in one direction and considers that a destination. And besides its jokes falling flat in their construction, they don't work because the characters are hitting their "funny" button with the same fervour of a Skinner box rat requesting sugar water. The characters never hold back their humour, so they can't deploy it with a sense of comedic timing. Given that the non-P-3 humourous characters are made in his image but with less whining, my guess is that Atomic Heart was looking for P-3 to elicit a "he's such an asshole but you've got to love him" reaction. But the game only manages to get as far as "he's such an asshole".

P-3 reflexively deprecates the work he appears in, deriding many of the objectives he's given and the people he interacts with. Like a lot media that pokes fun at itself, Atomic Heart does it as a defence mechanism. About a month before Atomic Heart came out, Austin Walker wrote an apposite blog post on Square Enix's isekai RPG, Forspoken. Clips of Forspoken's cutscenes showed a protagonist who sarcastically mocked the treacherous mythological plane she'd been transported to, and it left online viewers cringing. In Walker's article, he interprets Forspoken's self-mockery as it getting out in front of the audience's criticisms. If a player thinks the whole story is ridiculous, Forspoken is saying that reaction is okay because it thinks it's silly too. But Walker also says that by taking all these opportunities to dress down its characters and setting, Forspoken reduces the player's belief in their quality and tells players who are genuinely excited to engage with its world that they're stupid.

It's important to remember that the flashes of Forspoken's protagonist in these videos don't represent the whole game. But within those clips, it is clear that Frey's voice is intended to sync with the player's. While other characters in Forspoken's setting use dramatic pseudo-historical vocabulary, Frey speaks in 21st-century American idioms, much like the game's core audience. Similarly, in Atomic Heart, P-3 gripes with a casual tone and turns of phrase that are unmistakably modern. Like, "Get the hell out of here", "This place is bright, man", or "Why couldn't they just put regular, more reliable locks everywhere, like with codes and shit?".

Trying to lampshade problems in a text is often a hopeless endeavour, whether the problems are real or fictionalised for the sake of the joke. If an element of your media is unpalatable to your audience, then mocking it doesn't fix the fault, does draw attention to it, and makes the creators look like they aren't taking the quality of their work seriously. If the game complains about an element of itself that isn't actually that bad, however, then the joke can fall flat because it's inaccurate observational humour. The latter is mostly where Atomic Heart ends up.

Atomic Heart's brainteasers and mission structures are passable to enjoyable, but the game keeps reinforcing the idea that they're soulless busywork, particularly because, like Frey, P-3 is a player insert. So, when he complains about the meat of the game, the script imagines that the player's attitude towards the experience is a negative one. Like Frey's cynicism, P-3's comes off as an attempt to preempt poor reception to his game but ironically encourages it. In the examples of both P-3 and Frey, the games also end up insulting the player by presenting a unlikable protagonist and then telling the person in front of the monitor that that person represents them.

You can have a scumbag audience surrogate that inspires constructive introspection. Kane & Lynch and Max Payne 3 did a fair job of it. But again, P-3's savagery towards his game misses the mark, and he doesn't have a meaningful point to make. Atomic Heart isn't correct that I hate getting all the balls into the receptacle or deciphering door codes, and if it was, so what? Worse, the game thinks that I'm not just a person that dislikes video games but that I'm a crotchety, smug asshole, lashing out at every target in sight like a bumper sticker Dad. That's a hell of an assumption that reveals that the game has an inexplicable disdain for its players. I mean, I am a smug asshole, but Atomic Heart shouldn't know that.

For as much as those Forspoken clips get on my nerves, Frey does have something going for her that P-3 doesn't: The distance between the content and delivery of Frey's speech and those of the figures around her is supported by the narrative. She is a contemporary trespasser in Athia. We can't say the same for P-3. He helped decide the outcome of a world war for his planet, and he is the trusted servant of a Soviet ruler, but in what he says and how he says it, he comes across as a stranger in this strange land. He speaks anachronistically, and it's hard to imagine someone who finds tiny requests a massive imposition to be one of his country's most adept soldiers.

Atomic Heart gets caught up in the allure of amusing and titillating the player and doesn't care what continuity or theming it might have to shed to get there. There's an offputting desperation every time the game drops its aesthetic goals to try and curry favour via the lowest-hanging comedic fruit. Its comedy exists extra to its world instead of within it, which serves neither its humour nor its setting. There's no joined-up explanation of how Facility 3826 engineered a clinically horny vending machine or how P-3 survived a war when he groans every time he's told to eat his vegetables.

In the title of this article, I did say I'd assess P-3 and not just his whining. I understand if it might sound like I'm doing him dirty by spending so long scanning this one defect of his personality. But there's not much more to this protagonist beyond rolling his eyes at objectives. His only other consistent trait is his blinkered fealty to his boss. The game features dualogues between P-3 and his AI assistant, CHAR-LES, in which CHAR-LES encourages him to think critically about how his commander, Sechenov, might abuse his power. P-3's response is always zealous naivety. It's one more trait that makes him inappropriately childlike, but the bigger problem is that the game pulls from a bottomless bag of these conversations because it seems to think that we won't get a point unless it's made ad nauseum. See also: the bi-hourly lectures on how there's a backdoor into the Soviet computer network or that P-3 hates the mission objectives. Again, the assumption is that we're as thick as P-3, and it's not pleasant to be treated like that. It often feels like Atomic Heart is uninspired by its own premise and at a loss for topics to talk about, so it keeps flipping through the same three ideas.

It doesn't help that the shooter throws back to the old "protagonist with amnesia" trope. It sorely needs backstory to fill up the half-empty cup that is its main character, but that detail doesn't arrive until well into the second act when his past is dramatically revealed. Of course, the script needs to feed information to the player even when P-3 and CHAR-LES are on their lonesome, and it needs P-3 to eventually reach the revelation that he's a pawn in a conspiracy of backstabs and cover-ups. So, it takes some of the downtime to have P-3 ask CHAR-LES about the history and plans of the big players in his world. This always feels out of character because P-3 is otherwise as duteous and incurious as the robots he battles.

There are all sorts of lessons to draw from P3's writing, but the one that keeps cycling through my head is that any character is a statement not just in itself or about its world, but also constitutes a statement about their media's intended audience. As such, there's no one correct character to write because there's no one audience. However, if you execute on your characters correctly, you can make the people you're speaking to feel seen and sometimes even flattered. And if you don't, you get P-3. Where the entertainment of a sci-fi, open-world, item-looting game like Atomic Heart would seem to be in its exploration and experimentation, a shiftless, closed-minded protagonist like Nechaev is the last person we want to control. Thanks for reading.

Lo-Fi Plays is a series in which I look at a grab bag of ultra-low-budget independent titles you probably haven't played before. With any luck, we can find some new games and new ideas among them. Here are five wee, weird, and wonderful finds.

Baba Files Taxes

In its difficulty, Arvi Teikari's Baba is You holds no punches. It's only thematically consistent that its sequel, Baba Files Taxes, puts the fluffy rabbit protagonist to another confounding exercise: reporting our finances to the government. And Baba Files Taxes isn't an unlicensed fan game; it's an official spin-off by Teikari. This comedy sends up the cryptic and strictly prescriptive language of tax documentation. Everyone knows what a tax form is, but no one knows what they're saying, leaving us feeling like we all have a tiny bunny brain. Putting its finger on that inscrutability, Baba Files Taxes does mark you on aptitude, but you won't find out what it's scoring until the end.

The game is short and simple, meaning it would be easy to spoil its surprises in a couple of clumsy sentences. But without giving too much away, this bitesize experience understands official papers as an exam on syntax and language comprehension. And it keeps you cycling through this activity of writing Baba's signature. Video games rarely grill our handwriting skills, but trying to scrawl out something approaching text with my slippery mouse, I end up doing a pretty good impression of the protagonist. The game jokes about how our signature is accepted as a proof of our usness even when no two signatures are identical. Plus, Baba Files Taxes is an excuse to look at more adorable pictures of Baba, and that's a win in my book.

Baba Files Taxes is "name your own price" on itch.io.

A Date in the Park

Last year, gothic folk adventure, The Excavation of Hob's Barrow, earned itself a tight-knight but fervently supportive fandom. And there's more where that came from. Developer, Cloak and Dagger, has a whole back catalogue of point-and-click adventures, including a few free appetisers. Of the freebies, A Date in the Park is probably the most lauded. Its protagonist is Lou, an optimistic lovebird who has spent a week in Lisbon without a lick of Portuguese. He is following up on a beautiful woman's invitation to a local wildlife spot. Hapless and tactless, Lou is the epitome of the oblivious adventure game lead. As is par for the course, the cluelessness of the player character means they need our help to decode the riddles around them. In this case, it also forcefully pushes the game away from straight horror into black comedy.

While most horror audiences find themselves screaming at the protagonist to escape an obvious trap, there's a sympathetic resignation in knowing that Lou isn't bright enough to do that. In comparison to the graphics of Cloak and Dagger's other fare, A Date in the Park is more realistic but is still distorted with a pixelating filter. Crawling up my spine throughout the game was the uncomfortable feeling of looking at real events through a cypher. The experience enters an uncanny valley in which a full comprehension of the world is as unattainable for you as it is for Lou, and that creates a wariness of the unknown.

Even players acclimatised to the fetch quests and hidden breadcrumbs of adventure games may find A Date in the Park meandering. Nerd culture communities can be hasty to declare "nothing is happening" in a work when really there's plenty happening on a personal and subtle level. However, in this one case, the game does stretch its exposition and character interactions until they're translucent. Yet, I can't imagine a version of it that doesn't put its whole ass into its slow pacing and tranquil atmosphere because the mundanity is part of the horror. The park is quiet; too quiet. It's also naturally ideal; too ideal. Its pathways and ponds are garlanded by locks of overgrown foliage that I feel could reach out and strangle me. The visual style makes full use of the human eye, which sees more shades of green than any other colour. Off the park's winding trails, there are statues referencing mythological deities and barely maintained buildings that contain... Well, I'll leave you to find that out for yourself.

A Date in the Park is free on Steam and "Name your own price" on itch.io.

Machinaria

Not to be confused with Amanita's Machinarium, Machinaria is a VHSpunk dystopian drama. Following in the footsteps of Papers, Please, it's a game pulling back the curtain on the full scope and skullduggery of authoritarian regimes. It does that by stationing you at the desk of one essential job in a repressive administration. In Papers, Please, your office was passport inspection; in Machinaria, it's news editing. Every day, orders clank down the chain of command, telling you what public opinions to launder. You then must then place video tapes into the proper slots to produce a programme that tugs hearts and minds in that direction.

Machinaria's CRTs are peepholes into anti-democratic coercion. We might call the game an analogue horror experiment, but that badge is usually reserved for titles that disturb through 90s-era polygon counts or tape artefacts. In Machinaria, the horror is an uncomfortable reminder of the propagandistic powers that arose with electronic media distribution. Here, you are detached from the targets of your psychological weaponry, and there's inhumanity in that distance. The lack of modern software tools that let you click and drag your way to political control also means that Machinaria is very hands-on. Papers, Please had us shuffling manuals and identification in a bid to organise our workspace, and Machinaria does the same thing with storage devices, likewise creating an air of busyness.

I do wish that the play of this game more closely resembled TV production or twiddling the knobs of political power. Rather than weaving national illusions, Machinaria is about getting to play with a Fischer-Price Consent Manufacturing Machine. It lets you hear the clunk of the tape as you push it into its recorder and the tinny whirr of a dot matrix printer, both of which sound brilliant here. Above all, by involving us in the editing of current events programming, Machinaria instils that news isn't something discovered, but constructed, and that even objective records of real events can be exploited in the name of disinformation.

Machinaria is "Name your own price" on itch.io.

The Password Game

The website neal.fun is an animated science, history, and philosophy magazine. It's keeping the spirit of Flash alive with HTML 5 toys. There's an interactive scale diagram of the sky and a personalised stats screen that tells you, among other details, how many red blood cells your body has grown since you were born. It's a site for the XKCD-heads out there. Neal's latest creation is The Password Game, a comedy about trying to twist and squeeze a prospective password through all the security rules a site can come up with.

The requirements start off undemanding: Your passcode must be at least five characters in length and contain an uppercase letter, which sounds pretty reasonable, but before you know it, you're entering today's Wordle answer and doing sums with Roman numerals. Like Frog Fractions, The Password Game is pushing the boundaries of how silly one game can get, sending you on a scavenger hunt that keeps one-upping expectations for its absurdity. Even when it was frustrating, I found the temptation to keep playing irresistible because I had to know what dumbass surprise was next.

What makes The Password Game tricky is that all the rules for your string are in play at once. You can make a modification to your password to obey a new law and realise you just broke some article from five steps back. It's a structural departure from the other puzzle games out there. Storyteller or Manifold Garden might have you spinning multiple plates at once, but in those titles, you usually complete one level and move on to the next, able to put the systemic configurations from the last level behind you. In The Password Game, every puzzle is stacked atop the previous, soon leaving you at the top of a tower of conditions, suffering from linguistic vertigo.

The Password Game is free on neal.fun.

KIDS

KIDS's Steam blurb is only four mysterious words: "A game about crowds". That might sound too vague to rest a purchasing decision on, but you can find other products that describe themselves in whole paragraphs and don't come as close to complete summarisation. To add a little definition, KIDS is a game about how people organise themselves into, within, and away from crowds. Inside its minimalist packaging is a reel of interactive cartoons about featureless monochrome people. Clicking or dragging on one of them can cause any of these meeple to change their pose, the direction they're running in, or some other aspect of their character. These metaphorical stick figures gather into crowds to create superorganisms whose characteristics can't entirely be found in any one member. They move with a nerd instinct or applaud as an audience.

KIDS's scenes don't usually have a resolution; they each cut hard and without warning into the next because they're cross-sections rather than stories, all sating the developer's anthropological curiosity. When the game does teleport us between gatherings, it's often from raucous clamours to pregnant quiets and back again. The characters speaking in the voice of children is a commentary that learning how to relate to collectives is an essential part of childhood development, which child psychologists have been reporting for a long time. With individuals churned through bulging tubes and emerging from wet membranes, the game sees the organising and migration of crowds as something biological.

KIDS is an animators' animation. There's no scripting to speak of, no three-act narrative in sight; it's all people moving on a page, and they do so predictably once you learn the patterns. For most, the social groups are fate: a stream that delivers each pebble from spring to sea. But that's not to say that the game is indulgently cynical about crowds. Sometimes free will gets lost in the shuffle, sometimes people push each other into a hole, but the groups are also impressive examples of spontaneous organisation, and there are loners who swim against the tide.

KIDS is $2.49 on Steam and $2.99 on itch.io.

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That's us done for another week. Thanks for reading.

When we deconstruct one type of game, we learn something about all types of games, but Magic: The Gathering is a particularly instructive candidate for analysis because it's easy to predict how the abilities of entities in this game will affect other entities. In MTG, when you cast a sorcery on a player or have one creature fight another, you don't have to worry about aiming or positioning as you do in map or grid-based battles, nor do you have to guess how dice rolls will randomise their effects. If a card says "Does 3 damage to target" and your opponent cannot block it, it does 3 damage. That makes Magic a lot simpler to talk about and allows us to deconstruct it as an exercise in strategy. We don't get too caught up in the action, spatial, or dice roll mechanics of most other competitive games.

Because of the certainty you have in the application of your Magic cards, quick fingers can't save you, and at least after you've drawn your cards, you're unlikely to get a reprieve from luck. Threats are immediate and real, meaning that you must take them seriously, and the game can turn on a dime. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. To understand Magic, or any game, we must ask why they give us the tools they do. Why can we pick up the ball in basketball when we can't in football? Why does Puyo Puyo allow us to rotate pieces? Why can we jump in Donkey Kong Country?

Abilities, Restrictions, Obstacles

Many of our abilities are chosen by designers because they let us directly achieve our goals. In basketball, we need to be able to pick up the ball because we must be able to shoot it at a small raised target. In Puyo Puyo, if we can't rotate pieces, we often can't fit them into place to clear them. We can also turn these ideas on their heads and say that the objective flows from our basic tools. Why is the goal in basketball an elevated hoop? Because that matches our ability to pick up and throw the ball. Why is clearing the blobs the objective of Puyo Puyo? Because that's something you could do with the power to drop and rotate coloured pieces.

Games will also include restrictions on our abilities so that we can't complete the goal trivially. Sports inherently have restrictions in that you can't change the laws of physics, and there's a top end to what any human body will be capable of. In the video game space, Puyo Puyo imposes simple rules of bounding, so we can't phase pieces through each other to complete the board. Note that in both cases, it's the restrictions that cause us to stop and think about how to solve problems.

In basketball, you can't throw infinitely far or infinitely accurately, so you must make judgments every time you could shoot about whether you can score the point from your current position. In Puyo Puyo, whatever your ideal placement for your pieces, you must look at what space is available at the top of the pile and determine where the piece you currently control best fits. These principles are pretty straightforward, but they lead us to a more complex realisation about game rules: obstacles in games and many non-fundamental abilities and restrictions are reactions to these base abilities and restrictions. When I say obstacle, I mean anything that keeps us from reaching our goal.^[1]

In Donkey Kong Country, we have the ability to walk from the left side of a level to the right, which is logical from the perspective that the goal is always on the rightmost side of a stage. The game responds to that ability by placing obstacles in our way: crocodiles, mice, and other villains stand between us and the end of the level, thwarting our walking ability. The game's jump is then an ability that responds to these obstacles, allowing us to arc over these troublesome critters if used correctly. But so the jump doesn't drain all the challenge out of the game, we get the bee enemies. They're obstacles that move back and forth through the air on fixed paths, potentially preventing us from jumping past them if we're imprecise. For both the walk and the jump, there are boundings and limitations that prevent us, say, just leaping over the whole level or running through walls. These are restrictions.

For an example within the strategy arena, take Advance Wars. In this turn-based strategy title, we have the ability to create Infantry units and move those troops across the field. Infantry can also capture a facility on its current square or attack adjacent units. We can use these powers to reach the win conditions of either capturing the enemy HQ or defeating all units on the field. Restrictions such as limited funds with which to train the Infantry and a maximum movement distance for the units clamp them.

The game responds to the Infantry abilities with a new kind of unit that has a better movement ability (or a less restricted one, depending on how you want to see it) and a high effectiveness against Infantry: Recon. Recon is an obstacle. To counteract the Recon, the game gives you the ability to dispatch Light Tanks, which also have long range and are super effective against Recon. The Medium Tank is then an obstacle with which the game responds to your Light Tanks. Note from the Advance Wars example that if you have a multiplayer game, the abilities of one player appear as obstacles to their opponent, and vice-versa. In Advance Wars, your army is an obstacle, and mine are the products of abilities and have abilities in themselves. But for you, my army is the obstacle, and yours have the abilities.

In Magic, every creature card has three important numbers on it: their mana cost, their "power" or attack, and their "toughness" or health. Players also have health values, which, in most formats, start at 20. The goal of each match is to reduce your opponent's health points to 0 before they can do the same to you. Technically, mana cost usually includes a colour or colours in addition to numbers, and sometimes, there are ways to win that don't involve damaging an opponent. However, we can't get too bogged down in details for now. These are the basics. The core attributes of these cards: the power, toughness, and cost, were not chosen from as large a pool of possible mechanics as you might imagine. Instead, they are how each card implements abilities that let us reach our goal, obstacles that prevent us or our opponent from using abilities without restraint, and a restriction on using such abilities.

If our mission is to whittle down our opponent's life points, each creature's ability to do X amount of damage lets us pursue our goal. The role of the ability to block Y amount of damage is also obvious through this lens, as we need to preserve our own health to win. Our creatures and their abilities to cause and block X and Y amounts of damage are obstacles to our opponents, just as their creatures, with their offensive and defensive abilities, are obstacles to us. The mana costs on these cards are then restrictions to keep us from playing a legion of very high-stat abominations out of the gate. Again, restriction leads to constructive play as we must make calculated decisions about what to play, knowing we can't just conjure any creature we'd like to the field. As in other strategy games, the cost associated with playing cards also expands the play so that we're not just toying with military systems but also economic ones. In Magic, players can be rewarded or punished based on how well they cultivate mana.

Attacking and Blocking

MTG can only squeeze the maximum potential from its power, toughness, and cost metrics by having the right rules to make them clash in complex but reliable patterns. In any self-respecting strategy game, the outcomes of our actions must be reasonably predictable. If you can't tell what will happen when you, say, attack an enemy unit or raise your theme park's budget, there's no tactical way to approach these actions, actions which allow you to reach your goals.

Recognise that how Magic implements "toughness" allows us to predict the outcome of battles over time. Other games have a unit's health value stay consistent between turns. Standing out from the crowd, Magic has each creature heal back to full toughness at the end of each turn. This means that when you summon a fighter onto the battlefield, you don't have to speculate about whether a player will be able to chip its health down over a few turns. You know that your Academy Wall with 5 toughness can only be destroyed by a creature with 5 or more power. Likewise, an attacking player knows exactly the capability and limits of your 2-power Deeproot Wayfinder. If players know where they stand, then they also know what they need to do to get ahead.

The game has another trick for making creature selection interesting: it advantages blocking players over attacking players. It does this through a few means:

• As already mentioned, all cards heal up at the end of a combat phase. So, if an attacker doesn't have the power to overcome a blocker's cards, that blocker can defend indefinitely and not take a hit to their player health.
• An attacking player can only choose to attack an opposing player; they can't target a specific enemy creature to lay into. The defending player picks which creatures block which attacks, and they may use any number of creatures to block a single attacking monster.
• Attacking "taps" a card so it cannot block on the next turn, but blocking doesn't tap. In other words, if you attack with a creature on this turn, it can't block an attack on your opponent's next turn.
• Creatures cannot attack until two turns after they are introduced to the battlefield, but they can block immediately after being played.
• It doesn't matter how much power a creature has; a creature of any toughness can block it, even if it dies to protect its controller.

Again, if you're a dyed-in-the-wool Magic player, you'll be jumping up and down to mention the cards that can break these rules, but the systems I described in those bullet points are the default. As a beginner to the game, you might think that two creatures with 2 power and one creature with 4 power are equivalently destructive. You quickly discover this isn't the case. If an opponent had a fighter with 4 toughness on the field and you could pick which creatures your cards attack, you could direct both your 2-power soldiers to hit that 4-toughness card, and simple arithmetic says they'd destroy it. However, because the opponent decides how damage is distributed between their cards, in that scenario, they could block only one of your 2-power creatures with their 4-toughness creature, and your attacker would still be 2 power away from defeating it.

If two 2-power creatures and a 4-power creature are functionally different, then we must engage our brain to play. In our strategising, we must be conscious both of the total power and toughness of our army and how those stats are divided between each warrior. We can make smarter decisions or dumber decisions that will affect the outcome of the play, giving Magic strategic depth and rewarding bright minds.

Note that because even a weak monster can block a strong monster, MTG can veer away from being a game about who has the highest numbers. Generally speaking, each player gets more mana as matches progress, allowing them to play more damaging cards with higher mana costs. In other games, implements with low attack and defence may be discarded as higher stat ones become available, but in Magic, low-end cards can have a part to play, too. Because preventing all damage means assigning one blocker for each attacker, both players must also consider the quantity of creatures on the field as well as the quality. If you have more attackers than they have defenders, it doesn't matter how powerful their blockers are; some of your strikes are going to fly through. Shifting to the other side of the table, we can see that if your goal is to stop damage, it doesn't matter what power or toughness your blockers are; you just need as many as there are attackers.

Because squishier creatures can still be useful, even as more powerful fighters become available, the number of potential tools you can use only increases as play progresses. With a broad array of tools at your fingertips, you have a wide gamut of strategic decisions open well into the game. Players are asked how they want to balance between quantity of creatures and strength of creatures. The game also queries combatants on how they might stop their opponents from reaching their desired balance of quantity and strength. This is players working within restrictions to develop abilities and place obstacles. Note that because a creature attacking taps it, players are discouraged from attacking on every turn, going into autopilot. Even letting yourself take damage can be the fitting move because the game is played across multiple turns, and cards have both defensive and offensive power. So, to sacrifice a creature to block an attack or to tap a creature to make an attack is not just a choice about preventing or causing injury. It's also a statement about which offensive and defensive abilities you want to have access to on future turns. Again, choices must be measured and relevant to the specific game state if you want to win.

In Magic, we find not just that games should include abilities, obstacles, and restrictions, but also what kinds of abilities, obstacles, and restrictions are interesting. Each ability, obstacle, and restriction should be able to affect others in a multitude of ways. Each of those effects should be significant enough to change how the player makes decisions.

What It Takes to Develop the Rules

Of course, while these three numbers (the power, toughness, and mana cost) can generate countless different topologies in the play, if they were all the gameplay attributes of a creature, Magic would be bland. Creatures would be mechanically identical and not vividly characterised. And when combat is just crunching a list of numbers, most audiences tend to feel it's just boring accountancy. So, Magic has cards that are not creatures but act on them: artifacts, enchantments, sorceries, and instants. But without expanding our conception of what attributes a card can have, all these spells can do is increase or decrease power, toughness, or mana cost, or remove the attacking or blocking ability. Else, they act directly on players, but players don't have many attributes beyond their health. There's no getting out of it: we need more stuff.

As Into the Breach revealed to us, strategy games are effectively series of puzzles strung together. They are daisy chains of logic problems in which we must work out the correct actions and the right order in which to take those actions so that we might hop a logical fence. For Magic to make more puzzles, it needs more pieces. I think a newbie designer would be inclined to fill out the game by adding additional stats to each unit. If a few numbers means some depth, it follows that several numbers would mean enormous depth. Long stat sheets are often the solution when we want a mechanically sizeable vehicle in a racing game or player character in an RPG. Yet, these walls of figures work in RPGs and racers because we control one car or often one person at a time in these genres, and we don't typically have to constantly reassess most of those numbers. Magic is different in a few ways:

• We can have platoons of soldiers on the field at once. If you control a single avatar in a game, it being a pack mule for abilities and stats isn't overwhelming. Even if you command four party members in an RPG, with the right concessions, it's manageable. If you control a lot of creatures and every one is a mechanics homunculus, that stops being true.
• Cards must show any figures on their face because, outside of a video game, you can't hide stats away in a menu. Even in a simulation racing game, you don't have every fine detail of your vehicle thrust in your face. That means you can race without the screen becoming a swamp of statistics, but as Magic is a card game, it has to put everything up in your grill. If there is a lot of text on each card, that could make you pop a nerve, and designers risk having more text than they do space to print it.
• We must constantly assess the figures on our cards as they relate to other cards. We'll cover this more in coming sections, but the stats and abilities of your cards have a different effect on the overall game state based on what other cards are on the field. This means that you always have to be conscious of the stats and abilities of each card, so you need to rescan the play space regularly, and if you can't do that quickly, you're undertaking these exhausting reading exercises multiple times per turn. Even opening a booster pack could turn into an afternoon of research, and a glut of information on each card would make the game inhospitable for newcomers.

It's a natural impulse to want to be maximalist in your design and cram in all the cool features you can think of. But effective design is often about pairing your creations back to only the parts they absolutely need. And "different" in game design is often better than "more". "More" similar abilities and restrictions to the ones you already have make your game harder for the player to learn and parse moment-to-moment. They also do not increase the play's variation or give the player more distinct options to choose from. When an element is individual, it is memorable and can provide a different choice from what's already available.

A note on stats before we go any further: We're going to be looking at stats and abilities, but as we do, it's important to understand stats as a component of abilities. That is, we could view being able to attack as an ability and a creature's power as being something separate, but I'm viewing the ability to cause 4 damage to a target as an ability: a singular concept. One reason vehicles and characters in games often end up so decorated with stats is that their stats and mechanics are reliant on the existence of other stats and mechanics internal to them. Or, seen in reverse, their stats and powers are designed for application through new abilities. Their core powers either do not make sense without these new abilities (they are one half of an idea), or they feel thin if they're not expanded on by other mechanics. I realise that explanation is a little heady, but the pattern is clear in games with talent trees.

For example, the Necromancer in Diablo IV can learn an ability called Blood Surge, which damages multiple enemies. If the player character knows Blood Surge, they can then learn Enhanced Blood Surge, which allows them to heal when they damage enemies with Blood Surge. On the talent tree, Enhanced Blood Surge can then branch to Paranormal Blood Surge. Paranormal Blood Surge allows Necromancers to charge up a bonus damage ability if they hurt creatures with Blood Surge while they have 80% or more health. So, there's a system here that is made to pile abilities onto a character like plates onto a busy waiter. You can't have Paranormal Blood Surge without having Enhanced Blood Surge. You can't have Enhanced Blood Surge without having the basic Blood Surge, and even knowing Blood Surge is reliant on serving the Necromancer class.

And if this specific path to Paranormal Blood Surge wasn't enforced by the game's rules, the player would still be encouraged to take something like it because it's maximising the utility of the powers they have. You can only activate Paranormal Blood Surge's bonus if you are at 80% or higher health, and you are more likely to be at 80% or higher health if you use a life-drain spell that can hit a plurality of enemies, a spell like Enhanced Blood Surge. However, it's also not a coincidence that this Blood Surge ganglia exists on a talent tree. Developers design upgrade paths with the idea that they help coax players towards acquiring abilities that work well together and prevent them from easily branching into diverse powers that might not stack well or might give their character too broad a range of strengths. You don't want one hero who is effectively a Barbarian, Rogue, and Necromancer.

If the Diablo example doesn't float your boat, imagine if your MTG creatures had all the base stats of a Dungeons & Dragons character: STR, INT, DEX, CON, WIS, and LUK. The designer would have to come up with powers or sub-stats that all of those stats could feed into. E.g. Having STR increase carrying capacity or INT determine the number of starting languages a creature knows. Or there are the many games that give the entities we control equipment or upgrade slots, like Shining Force or The Crew. Those slots call for lines of items or powers we can insert into each. So, simply trying to deepen our MTG orc by giving it six base stats or space for a new set of brake pads is likely to overcomplicate the play. The abilities of other games are often designed to exist within large mechanical webs, which, for the reasons mentioned in the earlier bullet points, are beyond the scope of one Magic creature.

You'll also notice that when we make the possession of an ability dependent on the ownership of a previous ability, we group the same abilities together, reducing the variation of the characters and objects we control. Again, Paranormal Blood Surge doesn't come without Enhanced Blood Surge, and abilities related to CHA are going to cluster together on high-CHA characters. In most games, that clumping is not a problem because there are so many abilities we could pick for one character to wield that diversity is possible anyway. But to reiterate, we can't jam a lot of abilities on one Magic card, meaning if abilities cluster together, you're going to end up with a lot of similar cards.

The upshot is that, for diverse and streamlined play, Magic needs abilities that could be applied to any number of creatures. I'm talking about abilities that are only dependent on the simple underlying stats of mana cost, power, toughness, and the fundamental mechanics of summoning, attacking, and blocking. To reorient this idea, if cards have few base attributes and mechanics, they are mostly blank slates for all sorts of combinations of abilities to be applied to them, assuming those abilities applied to them are not dependent on the existence of others we could apply to them.

As each turn in Magic is a puzzle, I'll also refer back to my brief introduction to puzzle design, in which I say these many possible interactions between parts create diversity, challenge, and mystery and ask for ingenuity from the player. If there are many different ways in which elements could be made to interface with each other, the player has a lot of options in finding the best or correct one, and must work hard to do so. There is a big haystack in which to find the needles. Widely applicable abilities also create flexibility. The fewer stats on any entity in a game, the less specific it is in its nature, so the less specific it can be in its function. If it's less specific in its function, then, by definition, it's highly adaptable to many different situations.

How Magic Develops Itself

Magic's creature card template achieves the dream of being open for many different abilities to be painted on. And the abilities it embeds on those templates reach that goal of being non-reliant on others. Together, these design elements allow for cards that are easy to parse, diverse, flexible, and can be combined in many different permutations. Let's look at a few common Magic card abilities to which these criteria apply:

• Deathtouch: This creature destroys any creature it blocks or that blocks it, regardless of the creatures' relative power and toughness values.
• Lifelink: When this creature deals damage, the player that controls it gains health points equal to the amount of damage it dealt.
• Flying: This creature can attack the opponent without being blocked.

Note that the use of a name for each of these effects allows the creators to compress the rules. If a card said something like, "Any damage this creature does to a target is returned to the player as life points. In addition, it can attack opposing creatures without being blocked", that's an eyeful for the player. If, however, the card says "Lifelink, Flying" on it, the player can efficiently process its role and move onto the next. MTG: Arena, a video game counterpart to the card game, has a very neat layout of this data. Cards are stamped with the named abilities they carry and any rules that apply exclusively to them. The player may also hover their cursor over a card to see a popup explaining those abilities in full. The newbie player can glean all the information they need about a card without that text getting in the knowledgeable player's way. They each know where to look. Note that sprites, models, or UI icons are also shortcuts games use to signal complex abilities and restrictions through simple symbols.

Magic favours blocking creatures, and players generally only increase their mana cap by 1 each turn, so without unique abilities and non-creature spells in play, stalemates would be the norm. Each competitor looks out on a wall of their opponent's creatures, blocking them from afflicting damage. Magic becomes mostly a game of working out how to avoid or break those deadlocks through these more colourful abilities. You can have angels fly over enemy units, Lifelink keep you healthy long enough to play devastating endgame monsters, or Deathtouch destroy a living fortress. Non-creature spells also help resolve these stalemates: Lightning Strike can damage an enemy beyond their minimum health, Stasis Field can bind their ability to attack, etc.

Our opponent then uses the abilities of their creatures and non-creatures to overcome these obstacles and create obstacles for us. Abilities are designed with this countering principle in mind. Opponents can intercept our flying creatures with beasts that have Reach, they can use Negate to cancel our Lightning Strike, they can destroy our Stasis Field with Citizen's Crowbar, etc. We may then head off or overcome those impasses, sending up more powerful flying creatures, Negating their Negate, or exiling that Crowbar. And matches consist of these bouncing counters as, with each back and forth, one player tries to amass more power than the other.

Whereas other card games often lock you into operating within a ruleset, in Magic, you can rewrite the rules in your favour. Think one of your creatures should have Flying that doesn't? Think your opponent should lose 1 life every time they draw a card? Think they shouldn't be able to target one of your creatures with a spell? All these rules can be written into the book. But don't get cocky because your opponent will be trying to cross out your rules and scribble in their own.

Often, matches resolve by one player being able to cast plenty of beneficial cards while preventing their opponent from doing the same, such that the winning player can reinvest their power to get more power. Think of it like a stock buyback but with merfolk or the colour red. Players might boost the power of their creatures, letting them easily mop up enemy fighters, which only increases the gap in brawn between one player and the other. They might stun opposing creatures, giving them time to draw more cards and increase their available options.

Note that a health points system with a relatively low number of starting points means that if either player does not properly defend themselves, the other can quickly eliminate them. A small store of HP can be a more expedient means of resolving a game than counting up to a distant target number. If you end up in an imbalanced deathmatch in a shooter, all you can do is keep dying until your opponent reaches X kills, which could take a while. If you're in a one-sided hockey game, you just have to keep playing for the full 60 minutes. In Magic, it's not always pleasant to be on the receiving end of accumulating power, but when you are, you lose quickly and can move on to the next game without any wasted time.

Synergies

Building and playing a deck effectively frequently involves exploiting synergies between the cards. That is, being conscious of how abilities, restrictions, and obstacles relate to each other and might be matched for the best results. Let's look at an example turn: I use my limited mana to summon Hallowed Priest, a weak creature that gets extra power and toughness when I gain life. I also unleash Electrostatic Infantry, a slightly stronger creature that gets more power and toughness when I cast a sorcery or instant spell. So, I have two pretty wimpy creatures down and haven't taken advantage of their unique effects. That's not exactly fearsome.

Now, imagine I play Impassionated Orator, a low-level creature that gives me 1 life whenever I play another creature, and Hallowed Priest. When I play Hallowed Priest, that will trigger Impassioned Orator's effect, which will give me 1 life, and when I get that 1 life, that will trigger Hallowed Priest's effect, which increases its stats. Or I could play Electrostatic Infantry and then Abrade. Abrade is an instant spell which does 3 damage to a creature. I could destroy an enemy and, at the same time, have Abrade trigger Electrostatic Infantry's effect, buffing it.

Where, in the first example, we got two creatures down in their feeblest forms. In the second example, we got one creature in the trenches in a so-so state, but managed to upgrade the other, and gained a point of life. In the third example, I managed to play and power up a creature on the same turn and destroy an enemy creature. That's the power of harmonics between abilities. It's the rough equivalent of having a character in The Sims use a chair and TV at the same time to increase their fun and comfort or using your jump and attack simultaneously in Duck Game for an aerial attack. Note that Magic's play is nuanced enough that it doesn't just matter what cards we throw down but in what order. If we don't have Electrostatic Infantry on the battlefield when we play Abrade, then we won't trigger its boost ability. If we play Hallowed Priest before Impassioned Orator, then we won't trigger either of their abilities.

We must also consider how our entities will interface with our opponent's. That consideration is by no means unique to Magic; it's how any strategy game works. Still, a great strategy game can create many different dynamics between abilities and obstacles, each with significant and varied implications, which is what Magic does. If your opponent has played Call in a Professional, which prevents you from gaining life this turn, you'll want to shy away from the Impassioned Orator/Hallowed Priest Strategy, if at all possible. If your opponent has summoned Electrostatic Infantry, that's an indicator they'll be looking to power it up in subsequent turns. You could hold back some mana and a Counterspell card to prevent them both being able to activate the effect of a card like Abrade and stop them boosting Electrostatic Infantry in one fell swoop.

If your opponent is using cards that insta-kill individual creatures like Annihilating Glare or Bone Splinters, you might want to refrain from casting a few high-power creatures and go for many low-power ones. They can't take them all out. If they are using many low-power creatures to block yours, maybe try one with Trample like Titan of Industry or Glacial Crasher. It will deal damage to any creature blocking it, and then any damage in excess of the total toughness of the blocking creatures to your opponent.

Dynamics don't just exist between cards but also within them because a lot of them have this IF/THEN construction to their abilities. We saw this with Electrostatic Infantry, where IF we cast an instant or sorcery spell, THEN it gets more power and toughness. I'd also point to cards like Mystic Skyfish, that says IF you draw your second card in a turn, THEN it temporarily gains Flying. Or there's Angel of Vitality, that says that IF you gain life, THEN it will give you 1 extra life on top of it. The "IF"s cause their abilities to only trigger within certain contexts, meaning that players must both consider whether an entity's abilities are appropriate to the current context and whether they can use other abilities to create a context in which those abilities would achieve success. Or, in the case of the opponent's cards, a context in which those abilities would fail. One reason that Magic can support so many expansions is down to the interchangeability of the IF rules and the THEN rules. You can pair different IFs with many different THENs and many different THENs with many different IFs.

Strategies

A constituent of strategy games with these many synergies between abilities and obstacles is that within each strategic approach, you can find sub-strategies and sub-sub-strategies, branching downwards. A tall tactical tree gives the player plenty to learn and explore. In MTG, one macro-level strategy is to pool mana faster than your opponent to let you get more or stronger cards out sooner. But how are you going to get that mana? Creatures that let you tap them in exchange for mana? Spells that allow you to play more than one land card each turn? Cards that let you reuse the same land to produce more than one mana? Treasure tokens that you can sacrifice for one more mana for that turn? You'd likely prime your deck for a combination of these sub-strategies, but which do you use, and how much do you bend your tactics towards each one? That's a decision you'll have to make both when deck building and on a per-hand basis because, during a match, you won't have access to every card in the deck. You'll only have access to the contents of your hand.

If we go down the road of recruiting creatures that can supply mana, which creatures do we pick? How about Ilysian Caryatid, a 1/1 (that's 1 power, 1 toughness) plant that gives up 1 mana unless we have a creature with 4 or more power on the field, in which case it gives up 2? How about Citanul Stalwart, which produces mana if you disable one of your artifacts or creatures until the next turn, but comes in at half the cost? Or there's Llanowar Loamspeaker, a 1/3 druid who can add mana or temporarily turn one of your land cards into a 3/3 monster.

Each of these creatures, or more to the point, their abilities, offers advantages and disadvantages, meaning that you have different choices in the play here, and you're not just picking the same choice reskinned. You might be better off putting down the Caryatid if defence is not a priority, but high mana gain in the long term is. Citanul Stalwart is faster to get out than Caryatid, but is not as high yield as Caryatid in the mid and late game. Llanowar Loamspeaker is not as fast as Stalwart, nor can he even give up 2 mana like the Caryatid, but he offers a lot of offensive and defensive power for a creature you can play early. As a bonus, he allows you to switch from a mana-gathering strategy to a more aggressive posture quickly. Some Magic cards are valuable not just because of their precision at one task but because they allow you to multi-task.

Or maybe you don't want to go down the mana-maxxing route at all. You'd favour a deck that destroys creatures on the field regardless of their stats. If that's your style, you've got terrors like Bilious Skulldweller or Battlefly Swarm that are charmed with Deathtouch. You have instant spells like Infernal Grasp or Hero's Downfall that can take out an enemy at any time, as long as you have the mana. There are nightmares like Sheoldred or Gravelighter that demand the opponent sacrifices a card when they enter the field.

But again, none of these is the strictly correct choice because none of their abilities overcomes all obstacles and restrictions. Unlike the creatures we discussed, Infernal Grasp and Hero's Downfall let you pick which minion gets destroyed, and you can cast them even on an opponent's turn. Yet, contrary to the creatures, once instant spells are used, they're used, whereas creatures are persistent. Creatures also come with the advantage that they can damage and block the opposing player. But the creatures I've named are also non-fungible.

Skulldweller is so cheap you can play it on the first turn of a game. You can do the same with Battlefly Swarm, plus it can fly, but unlike with Skulldweller, you need to pay 1 mana on any turn you want to activate its Deathtouch. Gravelighter can also fly and is stronger than either of those animals, but not only is it a bit more expensive, if you activate its power to make an opponent sacrifice a creature, it forces you to cull one of yours too. Sheoldred is the strongest and most expensive of these creatures, and you can sacrifice her to unleash a flooring barrage of spells over the next few turns. But Skulldweller and Swarm kill creatures by blocking them, whereas Sheoldred and Gravelighter just ask an opponent to pick a fighter to mulch. Sheoldred and Gravelighter are the least precise in who they target.

And again, in deploying these strategies, we must consider the cards (the obstacles) the opponent is rolling with. If your opponent starts playing fast-acting high-power creatures, you might not want to play weak mana-yielding creatures and instead switch to soldiers with higher defence before your foe zeroes out your health. But if your opponent can't do any significant damage to you right now, low-cost, weak mana crops are highly practical.

If your opponent is playing a lot of modestly-powered tokens, creatures with Deathtouch aren't much use because they'll only kill one attacker among many, maybe dying in the process. You might want to fight quantity with quantity. If you have creatures you can't afford to expend in a skirmish, using instant spells to kill enemies is an excellent strategy, but won't work on monsters that have Hexproof. Gravelighter is at an advantage if none of the opposing creatures have Flying or Reach, but at less of an advantage if they do. That is, unless you can kill off those creatures. And Sheoldred's brilliant if your opponent lacks strong cards, but it's not impossible to overpower her.

Conclusion(s?)

To look back over the key points of this article, designers carve play through abilities, restrictions on those abilities, and obstacles, all of which they create relative to goals, and other abilities, obstacles, and restrictions. We can also take from Magic that it's not just necessary to have abilities, restrictions, and obstacles in a game, but that each ability of significant power must be met with restrictions or obstacles that specifically address it. And where entities have abilities, those specific entities must have the right restrictions applied to them and obstacles complimenting them. Magic provides a teachable example in that, in its play, not only do general principles of mana cost or blocking exist, but each creature that can be attacked must be blocked to prevent them from inflicting damage, and each creature that could be played is bounded by a cost. This is specificity in ability and restrictions. To abandon these rules for any one card would be to create an imbalanced entity.

If a game is intelligently designed, its restrictions, abilities, obstacles, and goals can relate to each other in many significantly different configurations. With enough different synergies between the entities in play, we must consider our actions based on context. Many different strategies become possible, creating variation and challenge, and allowing us to come up with inventive solutions to problems. Designers can create a galaxy of synergies between these elements by giving play entities just a few inherent characteristics and designing abilities that are not dependent on many others. For a game with a lot of controllable entities or where entities must feature all elements on their face, this is essential for making the game parseable.

But here's where I have to burst the bubble. In these examples, the Magic I've described is the game when it runs ideally, and in many matches, it's not that game. It becomes argumentative and dysfunctional, waging war on its own best features. At least half of the Magic: The Gathering games I play, I find irritating or demoralising, some to an extreme. In the future, I'll publish some blogs on the self-defeating aspects of Magic's design. But despite those objectionable matches and moments in which it squanders its potential, I keep playing Magic because when it goes right, Magic offers not just a tree of possibilities but a grove. Thanks for reading.

Notes

1. You could also consider restrictions to be built into abilities or restrictions and obstacles to be a singular category. I don't think there's one correct framework through which to view these components of games, but I believe the one I've laid out here is helpful for understanding them.

Pinball is a brilliant invention. It resonates presence, it's mechanically ingenious, it's got a captivating history, and yet, so many of its tables are incredibly similar. As video gamers, we are used to seeing mechanics recur frequently in our media. Identical weapons pop up in shooter after shooter, and countless grid-based RPGs assign characters the same stats, like STR, DEX, and CHA. But even taking into account how standardised the mechanics of popular game genres are, pinball tables of the last thirty to forty years still feel markedly predictable. It's not just that you see the same parts make it onto countless tables (bumpers, ramps, kickers, rebounds, scoops, etc.); it's that the tables tend to place these parts in the same layout.

Common Design Tropes

Picture a pinball table with these design features:

• A playfield angled towards the player.
• Two flippers in the bottom middle with a space slightly larger than the ball in between them.
• Two triangular "rebounds" above the flippers that the ball can bounce off of.
• Two lanes to the left of the left rebound and the right of the right rebound. If the ball falls into one of the "inlanes" closer to the rebounds, it's safe, but if it falls down the "outlanes" closer to the table's edge, it drops off the board. That is, unless you have a "kicker" activated at the bottom of the outlane, which springs the ball back onto the board.
• A table centre that is mostly empty space.
• A bevvy of targets to hit at the far end of the playfield.
• A chute on the far right side of the machine with a plunger at the base from which we initially deploy the ball.
• "Missions" which task us with hitting certain board components in a certain order, with a large score bonus on offer for their completion.

That's eleven different features, all with a specific implementation and most with a consistent placement on the board. You wouldn't see a level design this crystallised take over all computer games, or even one genre of them, but this is the environment of most modern pinball tables. The basket of tropes above is so ubiquitous that a lot of players just see it as "pinball".

There are also trends that aren't universal in the craft but are very common. For example, bumpers grouped into sets of three or more, or "orbits": long curved lanes that wrap around the back of the board. So, what gives? Are pinball designers spent on ideas and stuck in their ways? Well, maybe to an extent, but when mechanics or formats come to consume entire game archetypes, it's because they serve some function. That doesn't necessarily justify their widespread use. A design component and its implementation can target a need, and seeing them everywhere could still be tiresome. However, if a design pattern has a purpose, its pervasiveness isn't arbitrary.

Mechanics Accommodating Mechanics

Introduction

We looked at a set of design currents in pinball, and must now ask what purpose each of them serves. Many of the lynchpins of game design are there to let you experience the full range of interactions possible using the game's "core mechanics". Or, at least, the range of interesting interactions possible. The bread and butter of a shooter is gun combat, and most shooters include a shotgun, a sniper rifle, and mid-range pistols or rifles. Developers embed those guns because they let us explore firing over the complete spectrum of distances possible. Sniper rifles for long range, shotguns for short range, and the mid-range rifles for, you know. You'll also find weapons running the gamut of firing speeds from the slow, methodical rocket launcher through semi-automatics up to machine guns that madly belch bullets.

In a grid-based RPG, you must set the equipment and stats of a character to overcome problems. The most fundamental interactions between you and entities in their worlds involve you positioning your avatar relative to other characters or clicking on menus. Menus include dialogue menus and combat menus. So, plenty of RPGs let you solve problems in the dialogue system or combat system and give you stats to do both. Common solutions include using CHA for dialogue interactions and STR or DEX for combat interactions. Within the combat, you can place your character adjacent to enemies or at a distance from them, so the games give you stats that support attacking an enemy when next to them (STR) and when at range (DEX). To reiterate that succinctly, these tools (STR, DEX, CHA) keep appearing in this genre because they're the ones that let us scour the genre's systems (dialogue menus, grid-based positioning, grid-based attacks). You can pick almost any game that lets you interact with its entities using a wide variety of tools, pick one variable in those interactions, and observe how the tools cover the full spectrum of that variable.

Properties of the Ball

The spine of pinball play is using the flippers to hit the ball and having that ball hit targets. It's very satisfying to be able to take such a rich medium and describe it in a single sentence like that. Remember those guns from our FPS example that let you experience all the properties a firearm could have? The ball in pinball has two properties that a component on the table could directly alter: speed and direction. Starting with speed, an element on the table could increase the speed of the ball, reduce it, or drain it entirely. Let's look at components and how they alter that variable.

The ball's speed can be increased by flippers, the launcher at the side of the table, "active" bumpers that push the ball when they hit it, or, in rarer circumstances, by magnets that accelerate the ball. The ball may also speed up through the simple process of descending an incline, either the overall slant of the table towards the player or a ramp. Ramps have an incline in addition to the table's existing gradient, making for a faster descent. The steeper the designer sets a surface, the faster the ball will accelerate down it. A smooth ball and table material ensure the ball isn't slowed by friction.

The ball's speed can be decreased by the opposite: forcing its way up the table or ramp against the slope. Here, steepness reduces speed. When the ball hits objects that don't actively push back against it, like "passive bumpers" or the machine walls, it will also lose some of its momentum to them. Losing enough velocity causes the ball to stop, but the angle of the table means that it starts speeding up again soon after, maintaining the game's fast pace and ensuring that the ball is returned to the flippers so the player can keep playing. There are, similarly, parts of tables that can stop a ball dead in its tracks, like a magnet or scoop, but you'll see that they quickly release the ball or dispense another ball in its place.

The ball's direction changes when it bounces off of anything. Its new direction is determined by the angle at which it impacted the other surface, the angle of the surface it touched, the ball's speed, and, in the rare case that the other object is moving, that object's velocity. Active bumpers may nudge the ball further in one direction, ramps can shift the ball along the Y-axis, and ramps, rails, and lanes channel it along the X and Z-axis. Tables often include "orbits", lanes that wrap around their back, partly because they allow the spectacle of the ball travelling down a curved lane and because they allow for a longer journey than would be possible with a straight lane. The ball's direction isn't just affected because it follows the paths of ramps, rails, and lanes but also because the shapes of those channels mean it will be moving in a certain direction when it exits them. And finally, there's that angle of the table again, hungry to return the ball to a downward velocity.

There are a couple more relevant properties of the ball: position and rotation. However, outside of software, there's no such thing as a teleporter, so no component can change the ball's position arbitrarily. That is, you can't suddenly write new X, Y, and Z coordinates for the ball to exist at and have it immediately appear at them. You can achieve the same effect by having a ball disappear from one spot on the table and dispensing another ball at another location, but mostly, the position of the ball is altered by changing its velocity, as velocity is how much something changes position over time and in what direction. This is why we have ramps or lanes that output the ball in a certain direction or bumpers and targets that deflect it along a specific vector. They allow the designer to influence the ball's position. As for rotation, because the ball is spherical, it is identical on all sides, so rotation does not change its appearance or how it behaves as a gameplay element.

Properties of Table Components

In these interactions between the ball and table elements, we've discussed how the ball might be affected. We've not yet discussed how the designer might explore the possible characteristics of components, either in themselves or in how they react to a hit from the ball. Like the ball, parts built into the table may also move position, either rotationally or by sliding along an axis. So, you have drop targets that fall downwards when hit. Conceivably, a target could move in any direction when punched, but it moving in many of those directions would block parts of the table or be difficult to implement technically, so they tend to drop down. Targets may also shift position without being hit, responding to changes in the table's mode or other gameplay events. Once in a blue moon, you will face a continuously moving target, but they can take up copious space and are a fair bit of work to implement. As for table components changing their rotation, that's what spinners and hanging targets do.

There are even rollovers, parts on the table that the ball interacts with without undergoing any change in velocity. You will recognise them as those lights that turn on when the ball glides over them. Unlike the ball, environmental components may also be mechanically equipped to emit certain sounds or light up and may have different shapes. It is empowering for the player to see elements react to being hit. The spinner spins, and the drop target drops for the same reasons that enemies in shoot 'em ups might explode upon dying, or the ball in a golf video game might leave a trail behind it. It lets the participant know that their actions are affecting the environment, and it underscores the speed and force of the object they control.

Making Level Elements Accessible

Introduction

In pinball, as in video games, it's not just the entities themselves but the relative positioning and orientation of entities that determines the player's experience with them. A ? block on the ground demands a different mode of interaction than one in the air. A trampoline in front of a pit facilitates a different experience than one sitting below a line of enemies. Designing a pinball table is designing a level, and two key concepts in level design are enabling applications of player powers and enabling interaction with target items.

A Sniper Rifle in an FPS is no use if the level doesn't include long sight lines. In an RPG, there's no point in an AoE spell that our INT might boost if enemies don't cluster together. So, pinball tables are designed in such a way as to make many of those interactions with ramps, spinners, bumpers, etc., that I described above possible when firing the ball from the flippers. The pinball community often describes tables and assesses their quality by looking at the "shots" possible on them. A shot is effectively made up of the path the ball travels from the flipper to a table component and potentially any routing a component like a ramp or a scoop. Note that the ball is usually shiny enough to catch your eye and looks the same whatever way it is rotated so you can immediately identify where it is in relation to table parts and act accordingly.

The Flippers

The need for ready access to components is why the flippers sit at the bottom of the table. Flippers propel the ball up the table instead of down it, so placing every target above the flippers is the only way the player can use the flippers to hit the targets. Try to imagine what would happen if you placed targets on the table below the flippers. You also get flippers positioned right above the out zone so that the player has the chance to save the ball before it tumbles out of play. Older pinball tables in the bagatelle style lacked this geography, and it makes it always feel unfair when the ball falls into the pit.

Flippers at the foot of the table usually come in multiples of two because each is angled down and to the left or down and to the right. These different angles not only mean the ball rolls into the out zone if it lands on the flipper and you don't hit it fast enough, but they also allow the flippers different trajectories at which they can shoot the ball. The conventional "left" flipper has more access to the right side of the table, while the conventional "right" flipper has more access to the left side. Put both the left and right flippers in a machine, and the player gets access to the full table and all the components and interactions possible across it. Note that the player only receives this reach as long as the flippers at the nadir of the table have their hinge closer to the outside of the table and slope towards the pit. If you vertically inverted the flippers so that the hinge was closer to the inside edge, they would mostly shoot the ball into the wall.

The designer can insert more left flippers than right or more right than left further up the table, and this may be appropriate. However, at the root of the table, doing this creates a heavy bias of access to one side of the table over the other. So, designers usually keep an equal number of left and right flippers at the table's base. If designers are after an equal number of left and right flippers, you might ask, why not go wild and include four or six? Some tables go that route, such as Red and Ted's Roadshow by Williams or Jungle Queen from Gottlieb. By making the player keep track of the ball in relation to more than two flippers, you extend one axis of difficulty. Large additional flippers will also provide the player with slightly wider access to the table, but there are drawbacks too.

The additional complication of more flippers may make the table too chaotic, or the increased access and safety net they provide could shear away at the machine's difficulty. You also have to consider that when designing the table, space is a precious commodity, and every component you add takes up more of it. As we'll discover, there are a lot of parts that are worth having in the bottom third of the table to enhance the experience, and more flippers drive them out of those spots they'd otherwise occupy. The flippers often steal those components' seats to add experiences to the table that are only slightly different from those the player can already tap into. You could reasonably argue that there's a subtlety between the trajectory of one left flipper and another right next to it. However, there are also a lot of players who are going to see that identical part in a very similar place doing a very similar job as redundant. The player knows there could be a different part doing a very different job in that spot.

To fit extra flippers into the bottom third of the table, the designer may have to make them smaller, which not only makes the window in which a ball will connect with a flipper frustratingly slim, it can also clip the utility of the flippers. The further a ball can travel up or down a flipper, the more distinct points along it the player can fire the ball from. The more distinct points along the flipper the player can fire the ball from, the more angles they can fire it away from the flippers at. The more angles they can fire it away from the flipper at, the more agency they have and the better their access to different targets on the table.

If the designer wants to add more flippers, they can install them further up the board and maybe even at eccentric angles. If they do that, the new flippers can facilitate interactions more distinct than extra flippers at the bottom of the table would allow. It's a means to increase the diversity of experiences on that table. This is especially true if the flippers are at different angles or are different sizes than those at the base of the machine, which is why you often see designers install them in that configuration. As flippers allow access to parts, new flippers call for new targets to aim for, enabling target layouts that would otherwise be questionable.

The Middle Third

The void between the bottom and top of the board means the ball is not blocked from hitting the components in the top third. You can see the importance of this negative space in Pinball for the NES. Pinball jams up the main thoroughfare of the table with bumpers and pegs, and as a result, you often feel like your ball barely has the chance to take flight before it comes crashing down again, that all the shots you take are truncated. The middle section becomes a bouncer to the party of targets in the upper third.

Returning the Ball to the Flippers

Another key idea in keeping the player in control and giving them entry to the full board is routing the ball back to the flippers regularly. The player's interactions with the table happen via the ball, and the player's interactions with the ball happen via the flippers. So, transitively, it's the flippers through which the player plays the game. Therefore, if the ball is not at the flipper at any one time, the player has little power over the game outcome, means to declare intentions, means to test their skill, or means to earn rewards or punishments. Going too long without letting the player shoot the ball in pinball is like having the player go too long without changing course in a flight sim, too long without directing a unit in an RTS, or too long without throwing the controller across the room in a bullet hell. It is a basic form of interaction, even if the ideal timings between course changes in a flight sim or commands in an RTS could differ from the optimal gaps between pinball flips.

How quickly the ball should return to the player is a matter of taste that starkly divides pinball fans. They often categorise tables into "flow" and "stop and go" variants. On flow tables, the path of the ball is continuous and unbroken. It gracefully completes the arcs you hurl it into and quickly returns to your hands, meaning that the pace of the game is relentless. This pattern is at work in Williams's The Getaway: High Speed II and Demolition Man. A stop and go table varies the pacing, halting or slowing the ball's movement with parts like magnets, scoops, and bushels of bumpers, giving a little more bite when the ball collides with something. Naturally, it takes longer for the ball to return to the flippers, leaving the player out of control more of the time, but giving them breathing room and creating peaks and valleys in intensity. Examples include Williams's Indiana Jones: The Pinball Adventure and Bally's Who Dunnit.

The simplest means by which the ball can return to the flippers is to follow the slant of the table, but many lanes or ramps also angle their exits so that when the ball flies out of them, it will do so on a path back to the flippers. It's further the job of the inlanes to neatly deliver the ball back to our tiny mechanical digits. For our purposes, we're taking the inlanes to consist of those little lanes above the flippers and the angled pieces of hard material under them that have the ball roll back towards the flippers.

The existence of the inlanes means that a ball landing at the bottom of the table has more chance of reaching the flippers. Note also that if the ball rolls towards the flipper from the inlane, it will travel the full length of the flipper if left alone. As the inlane couriers the ball to the flipper, the player gets the chance to shoot the ball away from it at any angle they want, giving them access to a wide set of targets on the board. And if the ball rolls towards the flipper from the inlane, an experienced player will know they can "catch" it, raising the flipper to slow the ball. When the ball is slower, it is easier to control. Thanks inlane.

Managing Tension

The Importance of Texture

I don't want to create the impression that the goal of the pinball designer is to make every component on the table as accessible as possible. There are "fan" tables, like Williams's Terminator 2: Judgment Day or Bally's Attack from Mars. They're so named because the potential elements are all accessed via shots that fan out from the flippers, but there is an argument that pinball should give substantial resistance to players trying to hit certain targets. Like any game, pinball can leave room for interactions that are easier to initiate and yield mild rewards and interactions that are harder to initiate and pay generously.

Desirable and Undesirable Positions

In pinball, as in any spatial game, there are positions for entities to exist at that are beneficial for us and positions that are detrimental for us. In a platformer, having your position intersect with an enemy's position results in failure, but having your position match the goal's position results in success. Positions take on relative desirabilities based on the goal. So, having your avatar near an enemy is bad, but getting it closer to the goal is good. This is actually true of all variables in gameplay: a higher fuel variable will be desirable in a vehicular simulator, more spell slots may be desirable in an RPG, etc. Because proximities to certain elements in spatial games can be positive or negative, the speed and direction of entities, which will alter the positions of entities on future frames, can also be positive or negative. If your jump arc in an action-adventure will propel you over a pit, that's good. Into the pit, that's bad.

Developers design levels with the knowledge that their stage design can lead players into or out of these desirable or undesirable positions. However, the game becomes dull if the player can always stay a long way from an undesirable position or any undesirable play state. If the player doesn't regularly run the risk of losing something or failing, the game lacks tension. So, the design needs to place the player in undesirable positions.

The problem is that the player will see themselves being forced into undesirable positions as unfair. This was the flaw of the pit design we mentioned that would deliver the ball off the table without giving the player a chance to intercept it. The designer can avoid forcing the player into undesirable states by having the player land in that position through failure to complete a reasonable task like catching an incoming ball in time or skiing through a gate. Designers can also achieve this effect by incentivising players to place themselves in harm's way. Perhaps they need to move into an enemy's attacking range to attack them back or have the opportunity to drive close to a wall to take the inside curve and outspeed other drivers. Positions that are undesirable in one sense thereby become desirable in another, and players will try to enter into them if they think the desirability of that position outweighs the undesirability.

Desirability and the Flippers

In pinball, we see this combination of the desirable and undesirable in the flippers existing just above the "out zone". To gain control over the ball and shoot it where we want it, we must also place it very close to the point of failure. We can't take a chunk of bait unless we swim right up to the hook. That sense of precarity is increased by uncertainty about which flipper we might need to use and when we might need to use it when the ball is in the top or middle third of the table.

Although, sometimes, the ball bounces so many times in a second or two, with such gusto, it doesn't feel reasonable for the table to expect me to predict where it will land. Aiding this chaos are the rebounds: the triangular bumpers that often feature on tables above the flippers. A rebound could ricochet the ball up into a target or away from the out zone, and the possibility of getting that bonus is exciting. It could deflect the ball downwards into the danger zone. It could also move the ball that hits it laterally, quickly changing what flipper you're expected to react with, keeping you on your toes. While we often talk about tests of skill and random outcomes in games as mutually exclusive, games frequently test our skill by giving us a random event to react to. In action games, this often happens at a moment's notice. This dynamic ensures tension and surprise without our success or failure being out of our control. In pinball, which flipper the ball lands on can be challenging to predict, but either way, we have the tools to deal with it.

Outlanes

We've covered most of the components that appear on the bottom third of the average pinball table: the energetic flippers, the helpful inlanes, and the wild cards: the rebounds. Now we have to check in on the crotchety old man that is the outlanes. Existing closer to the wall than the inlanes, these slots potentially deliver your ball straight into oblivion without any chance to hit it with the flippers. To me, that almost always feels like the table cheating. I get that same feeling when the ball falls directly down the gap between the flippers without touching either one.

You might wonder why the outlanes always exist closer to the wall than the inlanes, and the answer is just that the opposite would require that the inlanes somehow cut across the outlanes to return the ball to the flippers.

From a commercial perspective, outlanes can ensure that even a player who has mastered the use of the flippers might still lose the ball and need to cough up more change to keep playing. If I'm being polite, the outlanes encourage the player to seek a wider range of methods to keep the ball in play beyond hitting it with the flippers. The player may be able to nudge the ball away from the mouth of the outlane and can sometimes complete tasks on the table to temporarily activate a save at the bottom of an outlane, returning any stray balls. The same applies for the gap between the flippers.

The Launch Chute

This is a good time to mention that the chance to launch the ball via the chute can also encourage the player to face tension again after the sting of defeat. Even spawning in the ball is something the player takes an active part in rather than passively observing, and if the table has a mechanical plunger, they get to feel the spring snap of the launch pad and see the ball rocketing a path towards glory. Of course, if the player just lost their last ball, the chance to send another one up the chute is also a reason to insert another quarter.

Uncertainty and the Bottom Third

Because the ball has a good chance of hitting a number of different components at the bottom of the board, the degree of uncertainty is again high. The ball could land in an outlane, in an inlane, on a rebound, on a flipper, or in the gap between the flippers. Variety and tension persist here because of the differing implications for the play that each part creates:

• The flipper gap or an outlane spend our ball if we don't have the requisitive savers on.
• A guarded outlane or flipper gap save our ball but may spend their guard doing so.
• A rebound semi-randomises the trajectory of the ball.
• The ball hitting the flipper demands we react quickly, and if it hits somewhere we can't "catch" the ball from, we must strike with less chance to decide where on the flipper we take the shot from.
• If the ball lands in the inlane, we get more power over the speed and trajectory of the ball and more time to consider our shot.

If all the parts at the bottom of the board had the same or similar functions in the play, there would be no tension in where the ball is going to land or reason for the player to care about where it lands. If the player doesn't care about where the ball lands, they also don't have any reason to modify its path. In pinball, as in all games, uncertainty is also a motivation to play again after the session is over. Skill at a game may improve imperceptibly slowly, but if the game is unpredictable, there's always the chance that the player will be more fortunate on the next play.

Table Structure

The Three-Section Model

This standard bottom third of the pinball table in which we have two flippers, two inlanes, and two outlanes is called, scandalously, "An Italian Bottom". That name goes back to a request for the European release of Bally's 1979 table Paragon to include this layout. It's also standard for the lower third to have two triangular rebounds above the flippers. In this article, we've cut pinball tables into three regions. The bottom third of the table is responsible for dropping the ball out of play, but we can also use it to shoot the ball up the table. The middle third of the table is mostly empty and is the open air our shots travel through. The top third is a canopy of juicy targets for us to swat at.

Alternative Layouts

Not all tables conform to this trifurcation, just like not all tables have an Italian Bottom. Older, bagatelle-style pinball machines tend to have targets all over the board as they're more about the ball falling down through the play space than being pushed upwards. This idea of the three-nation table is also complicated by "upper playfields". Some tables, like Bally's The Shadow or Flash Gordon, include a sort of mini pinball table, complete with its own walls and flippers in their top section. The separate playfield can't live in the bottom third because there are already flippers and other components there. It can't usually live in the middle third either because the designer often can't block the middle area of the table for reasons we've discussed.

Upper playfields are divisive in both senses of the word. Some players feel that they break the cohesion and consistency of the table. When their ball is locked in the pocket dimension of the upper playfield, the player also can't experience the full range of interactions that you get on a good table because they can't reach most of the parts. But it's not all bad news.

There's an increased variation and depth you get to your table by adding this second table inside it, and that second table has unique dynamics. Because the upper playfield is smaller than the environment overall, when the ball's inside it, it takes less time to reach its target and return to the flippers, quickening the tempo and demanding faster reaction times from the player. Arbitrarily increasing the requisite reaction time might seem unfair, but the game balances that increased difficulty against reduced punishment for failure. If you lose the ball in the upper playfield, you don't lose a life; you just leave that particular play area.

Regulating Rewards

Fixed and Increasing Rewards

Clusters of bumpers also allow for successes or failures through actions localised to one area of the table. If you have a lone bumper, the ball bounces off and flies somewhere else on the table. That's sometimes what the designer wants. It's an energetic and potentially stochastic interaction. However, if you have a copse of bumpers, you effectively get a new part because the ball can bounce between them continuously, racking up points or other rewards. Again, tension results from uncertainty because, with each bounce, there's a chance the ball will hit a bumper again, increasing the point count, or fly out, ending that score chain.

As the player can become numb to getting the same reward regularly, some tables, like Bally's aptly named Bumper, have the score increase with each successive bumper hit. The player stays engaged because the next hit is less likely than the last but also more valuable. The diminishing emotional reward of receiving the same points payouts repeatedly is also why many tables, like Stern's AC/DC and Williams's Fishtales, let the player increase their score multiplier or the bonus they get after losing a ball or completing missions.

Varying Rewards

In general, pinball tables, like any other game, keep the player engaged by varying the amount of reward across time. In an MMO, some loot sources will give more valuable items than others. In roulette, some spins will yield greater rewards than other spins. Pinball varies the amount of reward over time, not just through having different targets output different point amounts, but also through missions that require the player to hit certain targets in a prescribed order. A player will receive small points caches by hitting targets, then one large point drop at the end of the mission.

Missions

Accommodating Different Interest Levels

While pinball is a physical game, missions are an intangible design component that ties all the physical parts together. You can find the same dynamics in video games with the rules, visuals, and audio accompanying the circuitry and controllers. By allowing the player to pursue or ignore missions, modern pinball tables offer something for both the casual and experienced player.

Someone unwashed in the chaotic waters of pinball and looking for some quick fun can play the table in its default sandbox state, trying to generally hit targets and see how many points they can accrue doing so. But keep doing this, and the game can feel aimless. The player also gets better at hitting specific targets over time and will likely want to see that accuracy rewarded. That's where the missions come in. By asking the player to hit specific targets at specific times, designers ensure player shots are premeditated and a result of skill instead of flukes. That more focused mode can engross the experienced player.

Varying Types of Goal

The inclusion of missions also allows the designer to placate both players who like open-ended goals and closed-ended goals. The participant who wants an open-ended goal can see how high a score they can accumulate, and the one oriented towards closed-ended goals can focus on beating all the missions or the final mission of the table where applicable.

Game Feel

As Steve Swink notes in the invaluable textbook Game Feel, a designer can use goals and level design to give physical interactions in the game meaning.^[1] Goals are also a protocol by which to direct players to the manoeuvres that have the best feel. On a pinball table, for example, we might decide that hitting a ball diagonally across the table into a springy pop bumper is satisfying. Therefore, the flipper and pop bumper may be placed to facilitate that shot, and one or more missions may ask the player to take it. Those interactions and that feel are a result of the base mechanics of the game, the level (or table) design, and the mission objectives.

Timed Missions

Most missions on pinball tables are timed. They are comparable to the timed missions in video games in that they ratchet up the tension as they progress. As your proximity to the goal is steadily increasing, your time with which to reach the goal steadily decreases. Having the clock hit that ultimate 0 in pinball is not as infuriating as it is in many video games, however, because it doesn't cause you to lose; it just ends the mission.

Theming

One of my favourite parts about video games is seeing how designers use physical components, rules, and play scenarios together to create metaphors for ideas external to the game. It's one of my favourite features of pinball as well. Zaccaria's Combat has long rails over the table to simulate the flight paths of planes. The same company's Circus exists in a constant multiball, giving you the experience of juggling the balls. Spooky's Total Nuclear Annihilation has an upper playfield in which your ball does an impression of a particle pinging around in a nuclear reactor. Pinball FX3's Sorcerer's Lair features a mission in which we must escape ghosts by running through the back passages of a haunted house. It has us roleplay that by shooting the ball through covered lanes where it temporarily disappears.

Conclusion

It never stops amazing me how complex and instructive deconstructing even a relatively simple game can be. In pinball, we find lessons that can teach us about the interactivity, player agency, accessibility, and sense of purpose in any video game, while pinball machines themselves are keen applications of all those concepts. I'll never launch a ball the same way again. Thanks for reading.

Notes

1. Swink, S. (2009). Game Feel: A Game Designer's Guide to Virtual Sensation. Elsevier, Inc. (p. 18-20).

We, the audience for computer games, frequently don't think of them as belonging to the same medium as sports, tabletop games, or party games. But all of those types of art and entertainment are sub-categories of a single form. Under many definitions, all games have mechanics, goals, and other similar features. So, by learning about non-video game games, we also learn about video game games. Each subtype of game has unique lessons to teach us, but pinball has a very special connection to entertainment software as it was both a precursor to arcade computer games and a competitor with them.

Prehistory

An abridged version of pinball's history should probably start with sports like bocce or bowls, which involve rolling or hitting balls along the ground.^[1] You'd project them through hoops, into holes, at falling targets, or towards other balls. A version of bowling was played as early as 3200 BC in Ancient Egypt. But closer to home, ball-based lawn games were practised in late medieval Europe, with bowls existing as far back as the 13th century and the family of sports known as ground billiards dating to at least the 14th.^[2] Henry VIII was an avid gamer in his day and enjoyed lawn bowls, among other recreations.^[3] During the middles ages, indoor versions of the aforementioned sports arose, resulting in games that could be played on the floor of pubs, like bowling and shuffleboard.^[4][5]

Over time, classic ball sports were shrunk down to fit on a single table. A tabletop version of ground billiards existed in 15th-century France.^[6] And there's a lot of bowling in bagatelle, an amusement in which players use a cue to hit a ball up a table avoiding wooden pegs and aiming for holes.^[7] Bagatelle became fashionable in the French nobility and military after it took pride of place at a party attended by Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in 1777.^[8][9] Some of the French soldiers backing up the colonists in the American Revolutionary War took whole bagatelle tables with them, helping popularise the game in the states.^[9] It's how we got this drawing of Abraham Lincoln playing a proto-pinball table:

Bagatelle diverged into variants like Germany's adorably-named stosspudel and Japanese Billiards, which, as you can tell from the title, was also European.^[10][11] Bagatelle designers started replacing those bulky, splinterable wooden pegs on the board with strong, slim metal pins.^[7] These rebellious piercings would become the pins for which pinball was named. A turning point came in 1871 when British inventor Montague Redgrave (great 19th-century guy name) filed the US patent "Improvement in Bagatelle".^[12][13] Many sources erroneously claim that the reason Montague's patent was groundbreaking was because it introduced the idea of launching the ball with a spring mechanism instead of a cue.^{[1][9][14][15][16][17]} This is not true. The German Historical Museum has a Japanese Billiards table from 1750 that houses a spring launcher.^[11][18] However, Montague's patent did secure that launcher for American business interests and also provided copy protection for a sloping table (instead of a flat one) and a bell dome that rings when hit: the modern bumper in the making.^[13]

It's a hop, skip, and a jump from here to what we know as pinball, but I want to stop for a second to pay attention to how un-American the origins of the hobby are. Pinball gets labelled as quintessentially U.S., bound up in the history of 70s and 80s youth, quarters jangling in their pockets as they searched for something to do after a long day of high school. In a Motherboard documentary, pinball restorationist Mike Hooker describes the machines as "uniquely American, it's like a hamburger".^[19]

This is not to take anything away from people who find comfort in American culture, but rich countries get rich by placing themselves at the epicentre of importing and immigration. That's trade. Therefore, I'm not sure there's an all-American anything or an all-British or all-French or all-Austrian anything. The national identities of Western nations are often, maybe always, lathed in retrospect. And the customs and fashions that comprise their identities have been indelibly affected by foreign hands. Coca-Cola's flavouring was extracted from a tropical African nut, the Statue of Liberty is French, hamburgers are named after a German city, and pinball was stosspudel.

The Making of Modern Pinball

Through the 20th century, the pinball we know doesn't so much pop into existence as it does fade in. The machines took root in the 1930s U.S during the Great Depression.^[20] A coin-operated bar game provided an inexpensive thrill for people, especially those who might be out of work and have a lot of leisure time to fill. Keep in mind that was before our homes were whole entertainment complexes. The companies that would become synonymous with pinball were settling into the scene during this era and had names like Gottlieb and Bally.^[21] Lights and electronic sound devices began to appear on tables alongside the old chimes of bells.^[13][22][23] The first electrified pinball table was Pacific Amusements's Contact, from 1933, which introduced the electronic bell and electromagnets, which telekinetically propelled the ball.^[23][24]

The inclusion of lights and sound was as much a marketing strategy as it was art. Traditionally, amusements had needed customers to engage them first or had carnival barkers drawing attention to them. But flashing and chirping away in the corner of a bar, the pinball machine could be its own barker. Video games would learn plenty from pinball and slot machines, including the benefits of making units pulse with attract modes and audacious sound effects, all of it yelling, "Pick me, pick me". Those flashes and shouts would coalesce to create the delightfully cacophonous atmosphere of the arcade.

Making speakers and bulbs surge with energy also meant introducing circuitry to games. Shocked Frankenstein-like to life, pinball machines were pioneering the use of electronics in entertainment appliances, specifically in cabinets that would be placed in bars and arcades, laying the groundwork for the first arcade video games.^[24] But for an arcade video game, you need solid-state electronics: the electronics of semiconductors. Semiconductors, metals that neither entirely conduct nor resist a charge, are the basis of modern computers. They are what diodes and transistors are made from. Without those parts, you can't store data or perform logical operations in bulk unless you want your computer to fill a whole room because vacuum tubes were as big as lightbulbs, sometimes bigger.

But on our pinball timeline, it's the 1930s, and the transistor won't be invented until 1947. Even then, it will take years to enter regular production. And microprocessors, the computer chips that act as the brains for our modern devices, won't arrive on the scene until the 1970s. That's why it takes until the 1970s for us to get video games as a movement and not just a few isolated experiments or arcade novelties. For the same reason, solid-state pinball tables (remember, that's the tables with semiconductors) won't arrive until the 70s.^[24][25][26]

Between the invention of pinball and the eve of the transistor, the hobby knew a life that commercial video games never have: they were electronic without employing integrated circuits. In this "electro-mechanical" era, pinball machines are more technologically comparable to an old rotary phone than to a games console. They erupted with the analogue charm of filaments, wires, and solenoids. For a long time, a more modest component was also slowly gaining ground in the space: the flipper. There's no shortage of sources incorrectly reporting that Gottlieb's 1947 production, Humpty Dumpty, was the first table with flippers.^[14] Even Gottlieb's official website repeats this myth and then goes on to say that it's the flippers that make pinball pinball, implying that they invented the hobby.^[27] Not that they've let the success go to their heads or anything.

Humpty Dumpty did debut the first electro-mechanical flippers, but you can find purely mechanistic flippers at least as far back as 1932 with Hercules Novelty's Double Shuffle.^[23][28] George H. Miner's Base Ball let the player press a button to have a mechanical bat hit a ball. Arguably, that's a pinball machine with a flipper, and he designed that in 1928.^[29] Still, Humpty Dumpty became influential because it was a compelling argument for the power of electricity in pinball. It also helped popularise the flipper, even if its competitors didn't all see the genius of it immediately.^[30]

Besides adjusting the strength with which you launch the ball or tilting the table (a technique that wasn't part of the intended original design of the game), early pinball in the Bagatelle style offered the player no way to control the path of the ball. It's only with flippers that you can catch the sphere before it drops into the loss zone and redirect it back onto the table. And the flippers are your sole option for hitting targets from below. So, without those little levers behind the glass, pinball was a game of chance.

When flippers arrived, the sport could, for the first time, rigorously test timing, reflexes, intuition for physics, and comprehension of rules. All skills that video games will later measure. The flippers also returned pinball back to the skill-based roots of those lawn and pub games it drew from. Because you can keep pushing the ball back up the table with the flippers, you can also have longer, more substantial play sessions, which will be another key feature of video games. I'm not even convinced that we should classify the random pinball and the skill-based pinball as the same game. They are poles apart.

Although, if you mention flippers to someone, they're going to imagine two large paddles at the base of the board near the centre with their hinges on the edge closest to the walls of the table. That's not how machines in the late 40s wore their flippers; tables had flippers further from the drain, distant from each other, and facing outward. As we can see from the official video game of pinball manufacturer Zaccaria, even into the 80s, there were tables that had small flippers not centrally located or not grouped into twos.

The premise behind a lot of tables with flippers was not that you would dribble and shoot the ball until you dropped it but that the game was still basically about either getting lucky or unlucky. The ball would bounce off of a number of objects that would score you points and then would either fall out or land on one of the flippers. There, a fast-fingered pinball bandit could bounce it up for more points. If the ball landed near a flipper, it was something like a free spin rather than the start of true play. Again, the tests of talent were introduced with time.

It's obvious why a business owner might want a game of chance in their bar, pharmacy, or arcade, but there's revenue to be made with the skill-testing pinball too. It is potentially profitable partly for the reason that many carnival games are: the physics are unintuitive. Watching the sport being played, you'd think that you would be able to control the ball much better than you can. But the direction it moves when you hit it is not just dependent on where along the flipper the ball was when you flicked it but also the angle it approached the flipper from. Tiny changes in positioning of the ball at one point in the game can drastically alter the events that follow. Unlike many carnival games, however, there's no hidden catch to the mechanics of pinball. You're not seeing a misleading setup, you're seeing the physics as they are, and as it turns out, physics are complicated.

Because you have a small ball and a top-down view on the board, pinball tables also provide a lot of physical interactions to explore within a small real-world space. Carnival attractions wander into town, get played once or twice by most people, then leave. But a pinball game sits in the same place where the same people are going to play it repeatedly. It needs to be able to keep producing new experiences across all those play sessions. It must be easy to learn but hard to master. They're characteristics you'll later see in video games.

Pinball as Politics

This point that pinball is a game of skill was actually politically freighted, at least in the mid-20th century U.S where the medium came of age. Pinball machines are coin-operated, and some earlier tables and arcades gave cash payouts for successful play.^[31][32] But if you're putting your money into a machine with a random chance of winning a currency reward, that's gambling.^[33] There are a lot of reasons lawmakers don't like gambling: negative social stigmas, religious prohibitions, concerns about gambling's associations with racial minorities, and the possibility of addiction.

Politicians have long waged war on addiction, again, because of stigma, as an excuse for increasing police budgets, or out of a genuine sense of care for a community, but also because addiction reduces the supply and quality of labour, lowers the number of active consumers in a market, and can be expensive to treat. I can't tell you how much each of these factors motivated any legislature during any one period, but we can agree that when politicians redlight gambling, it's due to some combination of these complications. In the case of pinball, you also had a game popular with minors, so if it was a form of gambling, that would make the machine owners and manufacturers responsible for child gambling. Not a great look.

There were other bones that politicians had to pick with pinball manufacturers. The pinball factory capital in the mid-20th century was Chicago, a city in the pocket of the mob.^{[20][33][34][35]} New York City mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, also argued that the manufacture of the machines consumed metals that could otherwise be turned into weapons and ammunition for World War II.^[33] Bally would actually make aircraft parts for the allies. And there were a lot of adults in a flap over pinball turning kids into layabouts wasting all their pocket change in seedy dives. Yet another thing pinball did in arcades before video games: create a moral panic.^[33][35]

Mayor La Guardia described pinball tables as "evil contraptions" and, in 1942, banned them from the city. Police raided candy shops, arcades, and other venues, effectively dragging out pinball machines in cuffs. The NYPD held a photo op with La Guardia where they smashed the machines with sledgehammers.^[35] Other cities like Portland, Salt Lake City, Milwaukee, Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, and Los Angeles followed suit.^[33][35] Heroin was contraband, cocaine was contraband, and so was Double Shuffle. In many metropolises, you could walk into a bar with a handgun, but not a bar with Flipper Cowboy in it.

NYC enacted the ban nine years after prohibition ended, so cities were used to using a heavy hand to decide where you spent your disposable income. Speaking historically, new games have long fomented fears of moral decay and banning games because of their association with gambling or rowdiness is not that unusual. There is a whole history of restricting gaming and gambling that you can go off and read about. Henry VIII didn't just play bowling; he made it illegal for the commoners to do it.^[3] I also really like this quote from a 14th-century London mayor:

"There is great noise in the city caused by hustling over foot balls from which many evils may arise".

Talk about gatekeeping gaming. Of course, in outlawing pinball, major American cities also gave themselves the problem that they'd made pinball cool. The hobby was now counterculture; The Who would go on to write a song about it. Still, it's harder to participate in counterculture when its materials are illegal. Operators responded to the stink eye on their products in part by changing the cash payouts for extra balls within the session. If tables couldn't give rewards external to the game, they could award prizes that were internal. The evolution of pinball from peg-on-board games to hand-eye coordination tests also had a key role to play in their legalisation. The flipper was political.^[30]

In 1974, the California Supreme Court declared pinball a game of skill rather than chance, relieving it of its status as gambling. This ruling overturned its ban in sunny Los Angeles, but other cities remained stuck in their ways.^[36] The saviour of the sport would be Roger Sharpe, a G.Q. editor who had been obsessed with pinball since seeing a friend balancing a burger, fries, soft drink, and a cigarette at the same time as playing a table.^[37] An absolute circus act. After rising through the ranks to become one of America's dabbest hands at the game, he caught the interest of the AMOA.^[35]

The Amusement & Music Operators Association (AMOA) was founded in 1948 to argue that jukebox makers shouldn't have to pay music royalties and came to act as a sort of ESA for the "out of home entertainment industry". In 1976, the AMOA sent Sharpe to New York City Hall.^[33][37] In front of a watchful council, he not only told representatives that pinball was a game of skill; he showed them it was. He announced the path he would force the ball to travel when pulling back the plunger on Gottlieb's Bank Shot, and it took it.^[36]

If you can command the path of a ball, that's the opposite of it moving randomly. And if it's not random, it's not a game of chance. In the only documented instance of someone playing pinball so well that it changed the law, the New York City Council voted unanimously to overturn the ban. Sharpe would go on to testify in front of more legislatures, and after New York, the other cities fell like dominoes.^[32][34] Although, it is also relevant that by the mid-1970s, you do see a socially liberalising U.S. and a more free-market approach to business, so that may have played a role too. But the sense of relief was shortlived. It took the better part of four decades for pinball to move back home into many major population centres, and as soon as it did, a more popular man moved in next door: video games.

The End of an Era

The video game renaissance wasn't all bad news for pinball. The competition from entertainment software pushed pinball to up its standard. Tables got more modes, flashier graphics, and more statement theming to hold their own against their animated and technologically-complex sparring partners. Many of the pinball machines now considered the best ever designed, like The Addams Family, Black Knight, and The Twilight Zone, hit arcades in the 80s and 90s.

Video game developers and pinball manufacturers also weren't mutually exclusive. Many of video games' chubby hogs, such as Sega, Capcom, and Data East, would also manufacture pinball rigs like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Kingpin, and Time Machine. Pinball moguls like Williams, Gottlieb, Stern, and Midway would develop and publish video games. They were all part of the shared amusement space. Most of us know Midway's Mortal Kombat, Cruis'n, and NFL Blitz, but more foundational work was done by Gottlieb, which developed Q*Bert in 1982. And don't forget Williams, which broke the mould with Defender (1981), Joust (1982), and Robotron: 2084 (1982). All seminal action games. Midway games was also a subsidiary of Bally, before Bally was bought up by Williams. So, some of these companies merge into each other.

But for all the shared success of pinball and video games, nothing could ameliorate the fact that video games were eating pinball's lunch.^[2][35] Pinball didn't have the animated characters or functional worlds of video games. Their action couldn't extend beyond the frame, and they were limited by what was possible with the electro-mechanical. Video games could wholly transform what was inside their view window and react more vibrantly to player input. Pinball machines also have unique advantages over video games that we'll get to, but as it turned out, the public at large saw pinball as playing second fiddle to computer entertainment.

So, pinball companies began going under or getting bought up. Remembering that the New York legalisation was only in 1976, Chicago Coin went bankrupt in 1977. It was bought by Gary Stern, starting Stern Electronics Inc., but it stopped manufacturing tables in 1985. In 1986, Sega buys out Data East Pinball, and was in turn bought out by Gary Stern in 1999 to form Stern Pinball, a company distinct from the long since deceased Stern, Inc. Gottlieb was bought by Columbia Pictures in 1977, which was then bought out by Coca-Cola of all people in 1983. Their factories fell dormant the following year. Premier Technology bought Gottlieb's assets in 1984 and began making Gottlieb tables anew, but by 1996, the money had run out, and Gottlieb was again dead.^[27] In the same year, Capcom Coin-Op bit the dust, having existed for just 18 months.

Bally got bought up by Williams in 1988, but you already know that part. You want to know what happened to Williams. In August 1999, the New York Times said that Williams figured that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, and was releasing experimental pinball-video game hybrids. By October, the NYT was reporting Williams had shut down its pinball division. Three of the four big pinball manufacturers (Williams, Bally, and Gottlieb) had given up the ghost, ending the golden age of the hobby. An equivalent event in video games would have seen a 90s where companies like Nintendo, Sony, and EA went under. Ideally, you will have read these two paragraphs listening to the outro from Derek & the Dominos's Layla.

New machines do still come out all the time; the medium is currently considered to be going through a revival.^[35] Maybe that's because we're floating just the right distance from pinball's heyday for it to have been forgotten and rediscovered. It could also be because more people are looking for tangible pastimes in an increasingly digitised world. It's definitely in no small part because pinball is fucking cool. But the medium is also enduring a preservation crisis.^[19]

Pinball tables were only so accessible, to begin with. A proper machine will run you several thousand dollars, meaning that, for most players, owning one, let alone a whole collection, is out of the question. Therefore, enthusiasts are reliant on local businesses to host them. But pinball machine components are constantly taking a beating, and anyone who's owned a printer can tell you that devices with moving parts are high maintenance. So, a lot of businesses will be reluctant to stock these high-cost machines with niche appeal that might need specialist repair, especially when there are more popular alternatives. Alternatives being what pushed pinball to the fringes in the first place.

If a venue operator is considering a pinball table, they're also more likely to purchase a recent release than one of the classics. Not many people are going out in the evening looking for a cold beer and a 1940s amusement device. And when the industry underwent its dramatic shrinkage, it meant that replacement parts for older tables were no longer being manufactured. There are not many people qualified to fix classic pinball tables, which is worrying when according to repair tech, Mike Hooker, many retro pinball tables are especially prone to breakage because they were designed for short lifespans. Hooker says the idea was that people would see a new machine in a bar or drugstore, play it for a short spell, and then tire of it, so the owner would switch the machine out for another. Therefore, they weren't built to last.^[19]

There is a parallel between classic pinball tables being abandoned to rot and the destruction and degradation of early film. The Library of Congress reports that 75% of silent films were lost. In the cases of both pinball and film, you had creative works that were considered novelties in the early days, and so, were treated carelessly, with people realising too late that they'd discarded items of cultural value. The name of bagatelle, that precursor to pinball, has an etymological root in the Italian noun "bagatella", meaning something frivolous or "a trifle". That's how pinball has been thought of for most of its history, even by some of the companies writing that history.

Yet, where video games once stole pinball's oxygen, they now carry some hope of immortalising the rare and ailing tables. Remember, if you can represent it on a screen and in code, and have a computer-based interface for it, you can simulate it in a video game. But we shouldn't get too carried away with the idea of video games as a mind upload system for pinball. A lot of pinball video games aren't trying to recreate existing tables, and even when they attempt to emulate physical products, their tributes may fall short of the real thing, physics being a common area of discrepancy. The creation of professional simulations of pinball tables also requires customers to be willing to pay for those tables. However, the hobby is in this mess because of the limited consumer interest in them, especially in the older tables that most need preserving. So, even on the computer, many table replicas aren't going to be viable commercial products.

That leaves much of the archiving work up to unpaid developers, but with no money, it's hard to make a 1:1 realistic recreation of anything. And we know that in video games, copyright is often the enemy of licensing, so even trying to preserve tables in paid video games is a shaky strategy. The problem is double-layered. Developers have to license all tables from manufacturers, but then, over time, pinball has become increasingly based on properties the manufacturers are licensing out from other firms. With the hobby's nicheness, it's not like there are Scrooge McDuck vaults of money to pay for all this IP, and even rich studios like Rockstar and Activision have had copyrights in games lapse.

So, many newer tables don't get added to pinball sims, and even retro tables can be lost, as they were in Pinball Arcade. Pinball Arcade was the only video game officially archiving a bunch of the Bally/Midway machines, but it jettisoned its 61 Bally/Midway tables in 2018 after the IP-holder declined to relicense them. Video game pinball was never the same. There's also a physical presence that you get with a table in front of you that a conventional video game recreation can't deliver. VR can help with that, but VR is currently an expensive technology with a relatively small install base, and touching your game controllers won't feel like touching the machine.

Video game preservation is not in a great place. It's a family quilt of legally grey ROMs, flash and mobile titles that were never plaster cast, and live service content that it's unclear whether we can ever save. But at least video game clients can be copied. They're built into technologies that were made for the replication of data, and that isn't everything you need to preserve a medium, but it's a big help. With pinball, not only do software replicas suffer from all the shortcomings all video game preservation does, but you really do need the hardware and not just software for the full experience. Because of pinball's status as a forerunner to arcade games, if we don't preserve pinball history, we don't preserve video game history. But pinball is also worth rescuing for its own sake.

The medium has a traditional appeal, and there's a 3Dness to pinball that you don't get in video games outside of virtual reality. If video games typically appear on the screen, pinball tables appear carved into it, hollowed space falling away, and objects rising to meet you from behind the glass. Pinball also wears its mechanisms on its sleeve in a way that video games rarely do, and it's a kick seeing what elaborate contraptions make their way into tables.

Williams's Medieval Madness has a castle setpiece at the far end, which you break into with the ball. By striking the entrance to the fortress, you can cause its drawbridge to lower and portcullis to rise. Dutch's Big Lebowski has a window in the middle through which you can see a bowling lane. In one of the table's minigames, you can use your pinball to knock down the pins. Stern's Godzilla has a model skyscraper on the table, and if you shoot the balls into the right spot, it springs them up onto the roof of this building. As you complete goals, an action figure Godzilla attacks the skyscraper, causing it to fall, floor by floor, towards the ground. Once it is entirely destroyed, the balls fall down onto the table, activating multiball. Cool.

---

Pinball has come a long way since Henry VIII used it to revolt against the British in 3200 BC. But the centuries-old history of pinball-like games is proof that whatever slings you might try to fire at it, there's something enduring about the appeal of knocking a ball across a table into targets. Pinball preservation is not in great shape, and as a community that has benefitted from the discoveries of that medium, I'd recommend we put some attention on that problem and lend pinball a helping flipper where we can. Nonetheless, pinball lived through being blamed for the corruption of the youth, it survived being outlawed, and it survived having all but one of its major manufacturers go out of business. You might be able to kill individual pinball tables, but pinball as a medium is forever. Thanks for reading.

Notes

1. Farr, D. (2009). Encyclopedia of Play in Today's Society, Vol 2. SAGE Publications (p. 480).
2. Azzarito, A. (2020). The Elements of a Home: Curious Histories Behind Everyday Household Objects, from Pillows to Forks. Chronicle Books (p. 13).
3. When Bowling Was a Sport Reserved for Royalty by Lauren Young (March 2, 2017), Atlas Obscura.
4. Miller, M. (2012). Bowling. Shire Publications (p. 15).
5. Menke, F.G. (1969). The Encylopedia of Sports, Fourth Revised Edition. A.S. Barnes & Co. (p. 824).
6. Diehl, D., Donnelly, M.P. (2011). Medieval Celebrations: Your Guide to Planning and Hosting Spectacular Feasts, Parties, Weddings, and Renaissance Fairs, Second Edition. Stackpole Books (p. 105).
7. The Long and Unpredictable History of Pinball by Tim Stevens (January 14, 2023), DesignNews.
8. Eliassen M. (2009). Encyclopedia of Play in Today's Society, Vol 1. SAGE Publications (p. xxxv).
9. Bagatelle Wizard Instead of the Pinball Wizard by National Museum of American History Staff (October 31, 2012), National Museum of American History.
10. Schmeller, J.A. (1872). Bavarian Dictionary: Collection of Words and Expressions That Appear in the Living Dialects as Well as in the Older and Oldest Provincial Literature of the Kingdom of Bavaria, Especially Its Older Countries, and either Not at All or Not in Today’s General German Written Language Are Common in the Same Meanings. Oldenbourg (p. 382).
11. Untitled by Deutsches Historisches Museum Staff (September 16, 2021), Facebook.
12. Bueschel, R.M. (1996). Encyclopedia Of Pinball: Whiffle to Rocket 1930-1933, Vol. 1. Silverball Amusements (p. 8).
13. Montague, R. (1871). Improvement in Bagatelle. United States Patent Office.
14. The History of Pinball by Maris Bellis (September 21, 2019), Thought Co.
15. Untitled by Pacific Pinball Museum (February 14, 2019), Facebook.
16. Pinball in America by The Strong National Museum of Play (Date Unknown), Google Arts & Culture.
17. The History of Pinball by Video Amusement Staff (Date Unknown), Video Amusement.
18. Game Table With Three Ball Games by Wuselig (September 8, 2007), Wikimedia Commons.
19. The Pinball Doctors: The Last Arcade Technicians in NYC by Motherboard (January 11, 2018), YouTube.
20. Encyclopedia of Pinball, Vol. 1. (p. 2).
21. Encyclopedia of Pinball, Vol. 1. (p. 145, 147-149, 151, 156, 157, 161, 163).
22. Encyclopedia of Pinball, Vol. 1. (p. 141, 164, 171).
23. Editor in Chief: Dave Harfield (Full Credits on p. 97). How It Works, Issue 8 (2009). Imagine Publishing (p. 65).
24. Frauenfelder, M. (2013). The Computer: An Illustrated History From Its Origins to the Present Day. Carlton Books Ltd. (p. 160).
25. Encyclopedia of Pinball, Vol. 1 (p. 227).
26. Boasberg, L., Haber, B., Pierson, D., Magazine Staff (Listed on p. 3) (1978). Play Meter, Vol. 4, No. 11. Skybird Publishing (p. 5, 7, 29, 45).
27. Gottlieb History by Robert A. Fesjian (October 11, 2015), Gottlieb Development LLC.
28. Encyclopedia of Pinball, Vol. 1 (p. 58).
29. Encyclopedia of Pinball, Vol. 1 (p. 12).
30. Encyclopedia of Pinball, Vol, 1 (p. 183).
31. Encyclopedia of Pinball, Vol. 1 (p. 57).
32. The Unexpectedly Seedy Past of the Pinball Machine by 99% Invisible (October 8, 2014), Slate.
33. How the Mob Made Pinball Public Enemy #1 in the 1940s by Allison McNearney (November 14, 2021), The Daily Beast.
34. Pinball: From Illegal Gambling Game to a Classic Pastime | American Obsessions by Vice (March 24, 2015), YouTube.
35. That Time America Outlawed Pinball by Christopher Klein (August 23, 2018), History.
36. PINBALL EXPO 2006 by Anonymous (2006), Pinball News.
37. Pinball Used to Be Illegal and a Chicago Man Changed That in One Shot by WGN News (June 3, 2019), YouTube.

All other sources linked at relevant points in article.

Note: The following article contains minor spoilers for Silicon Dreams.

UK-born Jamie Patton and US expat Danny Adams are Austrian studio, Clockwork Bird. The developer's 2019 cyberpunk management sim, Spinnortality, challenges you to secure wealth and power on a global scale through unscrupulous strategies like propagandising and clandestine corporate dealing. In the same year, the studio released The Embers of the Stars, a nihilistic text adventure set at the universe's curtain call. Their most recent title is the 2021 narrative puzzler, Silicon Dreams, which blurs the line between oppressor and oppressed. In it, you carry out Blade Runner-like interrogations of humans and androids, all the while subject to the second-class status that comes with being an android yourself. Jamie and Danny put aside some time to talk to me about their creations.

Gamer_152: Your three games so far have been cut from very different cloth. Are there any essential concepts that make a Clockwork Bird game?

Jamie Patton: Curiosity about what a game can be. A desire to do something different, maybe something we haven't seen before. A commitment to the idea that games are art and that we should explore that space and see how it can affect players.

Danny Adams: In a very basic sense, it is our design philosophy to make games that haven't existed before, to explore this medium and to create settings, characters, stories and systems that are experimental and that stretch people's understanding of what a video game can be. Video games open such an enormous space for the types of stories that can be told and the methods by which those stories are communicated.

During my studies years ago, I was captured by the statement that "everything is political", even the choice to make a game that is non-political is a political choice. I want to make games that lean into that reality rather than away from it. We see a lot of problems in society that tend to be ignored or just accepted; "This is just the way things are". The intended effect of our games is to shine a light on these systems and assumptions without being preachy or communicating that there is one right way to think, and Silicon Dreams is a great example of this. On the surface, a relatively simple "visual novel" experience, I think we were really successful in making a game that allows (sometimes forces) players to make choices about their ethical and moral expression that range from difficult to impossible and being confronted with the outcome.

G_152: I understand James developed Spinnortality solo, and then the two of you began working together for Silicon Dreams. How did you meet and decide to team up?

JP: We met at a games conference in Vienna, where I live, and bonded over story games. We stayed in touch for the next few years, but just as friends. Yes, I developed Spinnortality in my spare time as a hobbyist, then ran a Kickstarter and applied for a grant to get the project over the finish line. It sold well enough that I was able to think about asking someone else to come join the team, and Danny was the one person I really wanted to work with. I think his ideas about storytelling in game design are brilliant.

DA: We met at a game conference in Vienna, where I was hosting a table of micro-TTRPGs. Our first interaction was when we were mighty witches drawing spells on our arms in marker. This game experience prompted a long discussion on the nature of games, digital and physical, and our views on the possibilities for what these games could do, and there was a lot of shared opinion. These discussions turned to more regular contact and conversation, which turned into developing a small side-project in Twine which resulted in the choice to team up and officially start making games together.

G_152: Spinnortality and Silicon Dreams are consciously political, and you've been open about many of the fictional influences on you, including Blade Runner and West World. Is there any political, sociological, or philosophical writing that shaped the worldview of these games?

JP: Both Spinnortality and Silicon Dreams are cyberpunk games, and we thought long and hard about what that means. In Spinnortality's case, I wanted to make a game that looked at a near-future world similar to ours and called it "cyberpunk", to talk about modern issues such as corporate overreach, gerrymandering, and the conflict of interest in political funding. This was influenced by cyberpunk works such as Neuromancer, Islands in the Net, Altered Carbon, and the Mirrorshades anthology, as well as Capitalism: A Ghost Story by Roy, which looks at modern capitalism under a critical lens.

For Silicon Dreams, we wanted to zoom in. Where Spinnortality dealt with large-scale, wide-ranging issues, we wanted to see what life under cyberpunk capitalism looked like on a personal level. So everything in that game is focused on your relationship with the interviewee: the game is just a conversation with them. You see their body through the TV screen and their emotional responses on the readout. For this game, we were influenced quite a lot by Last Week Tonight, which dives into what it is like to live under current American capitalism day-to-day, and was a good inspiration. I also watched quite a lot of The Good Place, a philosophical show about being a good person, so I was quite interested in moral relativism (which could be translated as "do the best you can under the circumstances you have", which is very relevant for the moral choices of your put-upon protagonist).

DA: I can't reference any specific writings that influenced the worldview of these games. As Jamie mentioned, a lot of the inspiration from my side came from just reading the news and existing in this world watching runaway corporate power and greed propped up by politicians who are more concerned with protecting their donors' profits rather than their constituents. Particularly present in my mind during development was the prevalence of "us vs. them" tribalism and hope in a world that valued cooperation and raising everyone up together.

G_152: Kronos Robotics, the tech giant in Silicon Dreams, starts off fabricating prosthetics and collaborating with relief organisations but grows to become a slave factory and a massive driver of poverty. Were there real-world inspirations for Kronos's amoral transformation?

JP: The company we drew from the most was Apple, due to their success across multiple eras, their ability to corner several markets, and their modern ubiquity. It was also heavily inspired by questions we've been asking (and seeing asked on social media and TV) about the looming threat of automation. Kronos start out making something people need, or come to see as useful: prosthetics. This was inspired by Deus Ex: Human Revolution's attitude toward augmented humans: people wouldn't just start grafting stuff onto their bodies for no reason; there'd need to be a purpose for these augments to get started. But once they have a decent foundation as the market leader for prosthetics, they start buying up university projects to push their AI tech further and overcome the uncanny valley.

Soon they have good AI and decent prosthetic systems to let that AI do labour, and at that point, there's no reason they should employ human workers when they can easily automate everything with in-house tech. At this point, their trajectory begins to mirror Apple's: they notice an opportunity (an android/computer is released from a competitor and sells well), and they release their own version to corner that market. Soon they push the idea that these devices (androids or computers) are so useful there should be [...] in every home. Eventually, after attaining market dominance, they release model after model to corner the market with superior, expensive products and serve diehard fans (later generation androids/the iPhone). Some level of planned obsolescence is integrated into these products.

So, while Apple was a good skeleton to drape our "evil company" material over, I honestly think Kronos was mostly a patchwork of different companies. They're what happens when automation, ruthless market exploitation, and endless amounts of capital meet in one place. They weren't a nice company that saved people and then lost their way; they were always ruthless about making money. It's just that doing good in the world allowed them to turn a profit. It was never their main objective.

DA: Jamie mentioned Apple, which was a huge inspiration, but the largest inspiration for me was Amazon. The issues of market dominance and planned obsolescence are bad enough when one discusses a product, but I wanted to pay particular attention to the issues that arise when your product is a person or when your workers are not seen as people. While the lines may be more blurred in Silicon Dreams than in reality (Is an android a "person"?), it seems undeniable to me that under global capitalism, human beings are treated as nothing more than a commodity. A person's value is derived from the profit potential they can offer their employer to the point that it becomes acceptable to expect employees to urinate in a bottle so that they don't fall behind on their quotas. Much of my understanding of Kronos and fictional framing while imagining how they would deal with their workers was inspired by the stories of Amazon's treatment of their warehouse labour.

G_152: Silicon Dreams shows us androids from a lot of different walks of life and lets us explore each extensively. Did any of these characters undergo significant changes during development, and if so, how did that shake out?

JP: I'm not sure any went through huge changes: we had an idea of who they were, then fleshed it out. I think Atter, the doctor, became a bit more sympathetic during one rewrite: we wanted him to be a dick, but we wanted him to have reasons to be the way he was and human problems that were still relatable. We didn't want to excuse his actions, but we also wanted to acknowledge that everyone is a rich, complex world, even people we don't like. Two of the characters were written by an outside writer: the Hunter and, I think, the Vrogger? [Virtual reality blogger] Those went through some pretty big changes: we were happy to have the material he gave us, but it needed a fair bit of work to fit in with the other characters. So both were a little thin on the ground. You could have played through most of their scenes, but they were kind of sketches of characters rather than the full versions you see in the game.

JH-422, the nurse caretaker, also went through some rewrites. We wanted to create a character who was irredeemable, to show that not every android is a good person just because they are on the receiving end of violence. But that was quite hard to write, and kind of unpleasant to play, because you spend 30 minutes just talking to this horrible human being. So I think we softened him a bit.

DA: It would be fair to say that all of the characters went through significant changes over the course of development. We began development with a few very basic outlines of the types of characters we would like to include, but actual development and writing of each character was a hugely iterative process, and they all went through several rounds of tweaks, changes, or overhauls to their story, framing, and personality.

It may have taken more time to develop the characters in this way than it would have had we started development with a cast of fully fleshed-out and predetermined characters, but I think the game is better for the choice we made. For those who haven't played, Silicon Dreams can't be described as having branching dialogue; even this description implies too much linearity. This is a game in which the dialogue is written and designed in such a way that the possible paths a player can take are much broader than most games. Because of this, I think it was an essential part of the design to build them up iteratively to allow the dialogue to reflect their personality and to respond to the multiple ways a player may approach any discrete piece of information.

G_152: What's your professional relationship like? What did you learn about working together over the course of developing Silicon Dreams?

JP: When we got together in late 2019, we were both a bit wet behind the ears, I think. I'd launched one game and got lucky, and Danny had just come out of a game design course. We learned how to do production, track hours, figure out scope (we're still working on that, but it's a lot better), and this was also Danny's first game launch. We also learned the importance of visuals and presentation: for most of its life, the game looked terrible, and we literally changed the overall look about three months out from release when we won a prize, but the judges said, "Yeah, please use this money to hire an artist". We also learned that each of us has good ideas by themselves, but that something magical happens when we bounce ideas off each other. Silicon Dreams wouldn't be the game it is without that alchemy.

DA: Jamie said it all for this one. I can't add anything that he didn't already cover.

____

Thanks to Clockwork Bird and thank you for reading.

As someone who plays between 24 and 25 hours of Halo Infinite a day, I know a thing or two about getting your ass kicked in the multiplayer. I've also had time to observe how players like to approach problems and which approaches do and do not work. One of the most common mistakes I see is people charging in to melee an opponent like they're Conan the Barbarian and getting knocked on their backside. Sprinting into punching range has always been a questionable habit, but in Halo Infinite especially, the players and environment are in rapid flux, meaning that you can't select one strategy and then go onto autopilot. You must decide whether or not it's appropriate to melee on a battle-by-battle and even second-by-second basis. But explaining why that's the case is difficult.

If you will permit me, I'd like to go gentlemen classy mode for a minute. Imagine a round of poker. In this round, one player has 10 chips in front of them, and another has 30 chips. A standard bet at this table is 10 chips. Which player is in a better position? The one with 10 chips or the one with 30? You might be tempted to say it's the player with 30 chips because they have more. However, we must remember that if you spend the last of your chips in a round of poker, going "all in", you get to see the hand through to the end, and if you have the best cards, you win the pot. The pokerer with only a handful of chips can buy their way to potentially winning the hand with only 10 currency, while their rival would probably have to spend three times that amount for the same reward. And we can apply that principle to Infinite's combat encounters.

In Halo, you're not trying to protect a stack of plastic discs while draining your opponents', but you are trying to conserve health while wearing down other spartans'. In many scenarios, the big-brain way to get there is to approach adversaries while firing and then enter melee range to finish them off. It's an easy technique to execute that makes it harder for the target to retreat and will give you a reliable hit rate with weapons that fire wide, like the Assault Rifle. It will also get you a shot at punching your foe, which deals a lot of damage in a very short time. Note that when I say "melee" in this article, unless I state otherwise, I'm referring to a melee hit on the front or side of an enemy without using a weapon that makes melees a one-hit kill. So, back smacks or impaling them with the Energy Sword would not count.

Despite the advantages of the melee rush strategy, it should give you pause that if you are at a distance where you can melee your opponent, they can melee you too. That might not sound like something to worry about because the damage you and your opponent can do with a melee hit is fixed, so it doesn't seem to put you at a disadvantage. A lot of sources online will tell you the damage of manual hits varies, saying that, in Infinite, whoever has more shield in a melee clash lives, and whoever has less dies. At least, providing both players have fallen below a certain shield waterline. This was originally how 343 calculated melee damage, but that system proved to be confusing and frustrating to players. Hence, the studio reverted to the standard melee attacks doing a set amount of damage in May 2022. But that still doesn't put two close-range opponents on equal footing. For one thing, different weapons strike at different speeds.

Meleeing happens on a delay of about 1-1.25 seconds, depending on the size of the implement you're holding. Smaller weapons melee faster than larger weapons. The one item that falls outside that time range is the Oddball, which is tiny but strikes like lightning at a speed of roughly 0.55 seconds. At the pace Infinite moves, half a second is a significant gap. Knowing these stats might change what weapon you approach with and who you step to. However, if you're a casual player, you might decide that Oddball aside, these differences in speed are fractional enough that this is nerd shit. That's fine. But even if you and your opponent have the same weapon when you melee, thinking that puts you on level ground is also repeating the misconception from the poker example. We can't just consider what each player has to gain by entering melee range but also what they're gambling.

In the space of about a second, a melee attack can do a lot more damage than most munitions. If a player is at or below about 40% shield, a standard melee hit will kill them. If a player is meleeing with a Banished weapon (the Skewer, the Mangler, the Ravager, or the Shock Rifle), they can do about 10% more damage, killing an opponent at about 50% shield or lower. Weirdly enough, the same is true if you hit the default melee button while wielding the Gravity Hammer. The explosive power cores strewn about the maps are also an exception to the regular damage rules, needing your opponent to be well below 40% shield for you to beat them to death with one, but no one in the history of the universe has ever meleed with a power core, so we won't fret about that.

The point is there are situations where you and your opponent's shield values are such that they are almost certainly about to die from gunfire, but your health is at a value where you'll probably survive unless they get a melee hit on you. In these encounters, if you just stayed shooting your opponent from a distance, you could kill them and live, but if you move into their personal bubble and get walloped by them, you'll die. Sure, you can melee your opponent back if you're quick enough, and they'll die too, but below a certain amount of shield on your opponent, that high-damage attack doesn't give you any advantage over shooting; your foes can't be extra-dead. You're just getting the kill you would have gotten anyway while putting yourself in danger. Running in to sock your opponent in the visor is engineering a situation where your opponent has 10 chips, you have 30, but you're both subject to the same costs and reward potentials. Why gamble your own life when you don't have to?

If the target you're about to melee is crafty enough, they may also be able to jump or dodge out of the way as you approach, leaving the cone in which you can see and hit them. Losing sight of them is particularly confounding in ranked play where you have no minimap with which to track other players. While reducing the distance to your opponent makes aiming easier if they're still, once you're close enough, small movements on their part can mean large relocations across your screen, making them harder to hit. If my advice sounds incomprehensible, look at the following table, which shows what happens when your opponent is very low on health, but you have enough that it would be hard to shoot you to death but easy to melee you to death:

You want to be on that top row if at all possible, and that means not making a beeline for your opponent whenever the opportunity presents itself. Now, this is not me saying that melee attacks are never the answer; they're often the answer because of all the advantages I mentioned earlier, but it's contextual. If your opponent is low on health and you have it in spades, go in, fuck 'em up, crack their egg. If it looks like they're staring through a sniper scope, that's another opportune moment to go hand-to-hand, assuming you approach from an angle. If you're on your last dregs of health and you don't have an ace up your sleeve like a Plasma Grenade or the Plasma Pistol/BR combo, you might as well try a melee; you may be able to trade a life for a life. But if you have okay health and your opponent is at death's door, you're throwing away a win by moving into their personal space. So, why settle for 1 kill and 1 death when you could get 1 kill and 0 deaths? The big stick that is melee also means that if you're a little ahead of an opponent in a fight and they start coming for you, you'll want to back up.

To act on the advice in this article, you need to know how much shield your opponent is charged with. To reiterate, most melee attacks kill a spartan with about 40% or less shield. If you're not practised in estimating your opponent's shield value, that is the largest learning curve you'll scale in working out when to melee. If your opponent is sparking away, having lost their shield, it's plain to see they're susceptible to a melee attack, but otherwise, there's no indicator. If you're wielding an Assault Rifle, 8 body shots on your opponent is enough to reduce them to meleeing health, while 4 body shots with the Sidekick will do the same, these being the default weapons in social play. However, the enemy's shield value always depends on the weapon you've been hitting them with, how many shots you've landed, and where they landed.

So, there's no simple maths to tell you whether they're ready to be bludgeoned to death. The best way to work out when to melee is to just keep playing and get a feel for it. Infinite moves at a more rapid rate than earlier Halo instalments, and melee attacks hit slightly softer now than when the game first launched. So, if you haven't played Infinite in a long time or are used to the Master Chief Collection Halos, your existing instincts on when to move into proximity with your opponent may be misleading.

There are other reasons not to get within visor-fogging distance that don't have anything to do with a spartan's shield or weapons. Meleeing is unsuitable if your opponent has nearby players supporting them when you don't, if you have a painfully slow internet connection, or if there's a grenade or other hazard in front of you. At least, it's unsuitable if you're not going for a last-ditch suicide attack. You must further be aware that if a player has a glowing blue light on one wrist, they have a Repulsor and can execute a move that pushes you back and stuns you, knocking you out of melee range. It's better not to approach repulsive players from the front without strong backup, and even then, you shouldn't do it if you have your back to a ledge. The opponent can propel you off the map right into a kill volume. If you collect the Repulsor, however, you can protect yourself from deadly melee attacks by doing the same to them. Melee should not be used by anyone who is pregnant or suffers from high blood pressure.

Often, when an opponent has an advantage in close quarters, it's better to attack from a distance, from a direction where they won't see you coming, or only go in with backup. It sounds obvious to avoid these traps when you write it out, but in the heat of battle, walking right up to a raging soldier can be so automatic that we forget to consider the room when we do it. The need for a player to avoid being meleed sometimes involves that player dancing around the opponent, trying to maintain close enough proximity to get a good shot on the opponent but enough distance that their opponent can't lunge at them. The opponent's steps are then to try and move into the player's space regardless.

Now, there's one exception to what I've stated about distance and melee. Since Halo 2, it's been possible for players to jump over the head of an attacker, spin 180 degrees, and melee them in the back for an instant kill: the "ninja". If the opponent ninjas you, they can defeat you at close range, even if they don't have a short-range weapon and you have shield advantage against them. It's another reason not to always rush towards the enemy with reckless abandon, but its existence might make it sound like ever trying to melee is cooking your own goose. The good news is that it's very hard for an opponent to pull this move off, even if they have the literal higher ground. Infinite awards a gold or "mythic" medal, the highest class of medal, for this feat due to its difficulty. If you're quick, you can also back away from an opponent trying this and ruin their day. But if there is an annoying flea on the other team that keeps wiping you out with this move, maybe keep them at arm's length.

A quick recap of our two main points:

1. If you and your opponent have the wrong shield values, moving to melee them can needlessly gamble your life.
2. When considering whether to melee, you need to take into account the speed and melee damage values of you and your opponent's weapons, the equipment you're both carrying, whether there are hazards in the way, whether they've been ninjaing you, and whether either of you has backup.

It's fascinating how deep a single mechanic in a game can reveal itself to be when we take the time to really listen to it. On the surface, Halo Infinite's melee is when you press the right stick in and do some damage to your opponent. Yet, when you repeatedly execute the move, you find a sprawling web of complex mechanical relationships. There are countless more networks of complexities we can find in games if we put our minds to it. Thanks for reading.

When we left Halo Infinite in the cold twilight of January, the game was in cryo sleep. As a boxed product, it had yet to be fully assembled, its slow load times and ugly glitches giving it the feeling of a beta rather than a final build. As a live service game, it left UNSC recruits pounding at a low progression ceiling and parched of new cosmetics and play experiences. When Infinite launched without core features, 343 Industries needed to make up a lot of ground in very little time, but instead, left a ten-month gap between major content updates and axed the Online Campaign Co-op feature. Between then and now, we've seen Infinite reawaken with not one but two new seasons of items and mechanics. Yet, just as the FPS seemed to be leaving its sleep pod, bittersweet news emerged that both gives us some confirmation of what's gone wrong at its developer and calls into question its capacity to get back on its feet. Here is Halo Infinite, nineteen months in.

What I most love about 343's philosophy towards seasons is that they recognise that if the play is largely rooted in the weapons and equipment, a substantial expansion of the play must add and update guns and combat accessories. It's a conclusion few other live service shooters have reached. With Season 3, 343's armoury churned out the Bandit, a semi-automatic medium-damage rifle. Upon its reveal, players immediately associated it with the DMR, the trusty single-fire long-range armament from Halo: Reach. But I think the Bandit would baulk at the comparison; the lack of a scope on this bad boy means that it's not built for precision over long distances like the DMR or Battle Rifle. Instead, it challenges the player to keep a steady aim in the mid-range while encroaching slightly on the other couple of ranges around it. Like the Sidekick, its accuracy varies wildly based on the support of the user's hand, but it trades the Sidekick's lightness for weightiness and its rapid speed for a measured rate of fire.

The most transformative makeover of an existing weapon has been to the Disruptor. The community's reevaluation of this shock pistol has been fascinating to watch. We thought it was a wet squib for a long time after launch. When you only have two weapon slots and need to act fast in a firefight, why carry a sidearm with a lower damage per second than a conventional pistol? It didn't help that sometimes the Disruptor's damage-over-time function would glitch out and fail to trigger.

But 343 expanded its magazine, and the playerbase began to understand the nuanced advantages of its secondary effects. It could slowly damage combatants even when we didn't have line of sight, it would delay their shield recharge, it could disable vehicles, and it could chain its effects to multiple enemies. It took some time to feel out all those features, but they were there. Then 343 decided that a gun doing five things at once was suffering from mission creep and stripped it of its poison-like damage-over-time power.^[1] They readjusted some of its other metrics to compensate, but the loss of the extended damage function brings an end to one of the coolest ideas in the Infinite weapon set.

In grenade news, the Spike Grenade has mutated so that it has a smaller spread but does more damage to players directly in front of it, while the Dynamo Grenade's electric bolts have been made more ferocious but arc within a smaller circle.^[1] When designing grenades for a game, there's always the risk that you just make the Frag over and over, and create cheap get-outs for players who want high damage for poor aim. These updates to Infinite's explosives demand increased accuracy from the player and push you to better consider directionality and enemy attack formations when picking your grenade. I especially like the Spike Grenade talking a similar role to the trip wires in Bioshock.

To the equipment shed, Season 3 brought the Shroud Screen, which pitches an opaque bubble wherever you drop it. Even your radar can't see in or out of the mysterious Shroud Screen. Like the original Infinite equipment, it finds applicability to a wide range of scenarios, and its helpfulness is proportional to the inventiveness with which you use it. You can lure an opponent into the bubble and then pull out a melee weapon to one-hit them, you can expand it at a junction to make a pursuer wonder which way you went, or you can block a sniper's view. On the attacking side, it's fun to fight stealth and cunning with brute force and fire a rocket into the shroud or run a Warthog through it, invalidating its advantages. If you fancy something craftier, try throwing a Threat Sensor in there.

In Season 4, we didn't get a new weapon, but we did get two more gadgets for our tool belt: the Quantum Translocator and the Threat Seeker. I think naming the Threat Seeker so similarly to the Threat Sensor is bound to confuse casual players, but mechanically, it rules. Like the Threat Sensor, the Seeker highlights enemies for your entire team to see, which is particularly useful in ranked play, where you must leave your radar at the door. Unlike the Threat Sensor, it doesn't mark everyone who wanders into a static sphere; it ricochets around the walls of a room before exploding with a cherry bomb pop, lightning up anyone unfortunate enough to get stuck in its path. Where the Threat Sensor was persistent and could give players a difficult choice between going the long way around or getting a target on their back, the Threat Seeker burns bright and short but can potentially mark more players without them having a say in it.

The Quantum Translocator is likeable enough, but I'm not as wild about it as the other two new items. This wristband drops a portal in the location you first use it. Then, when you next activate it, the portal moves to your current location, and you blip back to your previous portal. However, the Translocator expires over time; it's use it or lose it. If that's hard to follow, just think of it as a teleporter where you have to place the exit node manually. As with many of the most exciting implements in Infinite, you can see 343 thinking about what they can change in their designs beyond the payload of the tool: for the first time, you're not just affecting your vicinity with tech, you can set it up to affect anywhere on the map. On paper, that allows thought-provoking creativity: you can zap back to a refuge when your shield drops, phase behind an enemy to get stealth kill them, or return to base in a flash in case someone steals your flag.

The problem is it takes time to find a favourable point for your exit teleporter and then seek out an enemy. Placing down a portal near a probable combat zone is often not helpful because you'll transport only meters from where you started and because someone could get the drop on you during the portal's lengthy setup animation. After you've set your coordinates, it's also not a good idea to rush around looking for an opponent because that kind of recklessness gets you killed. Yet, if you don't find a use for the Translocator fast, it melts in your hands. You could use it as a ripcord for a losing battle, but wisely, the designers made it take just long enough to activate that you can't make it a panic button for whenever you have no shield and are being fired on. So, when I do get to teleport with the Translocator, I feel like a wizard, but I usually collect it and end up on a frantic hunt for a use for it, only to have it anti-climactically fizzle out.

If you are phasing in behind flag carriers and back-smacking them, you'll want to look good doing it. While Halo seasons have always had ostensible themes, it's been hard to chart those aesthetic lines through the armour, maps, and modes they've delivered. Season 3 (Echoes Within)'s cosmetics are as much a booster pack for your existing power suits as anything uniquely flavoured. It's for the best: the last two seasons haven't shipped enough generic items for players to customise their rigs to their liking. But Season 4 (Infection) bears a recognisable style in its equipables: a first for a Halo Battle Pass. You've got this hazmat Mjolnir that, as a sucker for industrial vibes, I love, and it complements the returning Infection gametype.

Season 3 also reintroduced a gametype from previous Halos: Escalation Slayer. The premise of Escalation is that each team starts with basic weapons and earns new loadouts as they accumulate kills. The old Escalation was memorable but had its pants on backwards, the mounting firepower of one team leading to the kind of power feedback loops I've talked about on this blog before. In Infinite, however, you climb down a weapon curve, and that curve is based on ease of use rather than raw potential for damage. Level 1 lets you spray and pray with an Assault Rifle, but the final round sees you trying to club opponents to death with the unwieldy Oddball. It prevents runaway wins and leads to closer matches without disregarding player performance.

Like Escalation, Season 4's Infection is also a revamp and not just a rehash. While I loved the novelty of Infection when I first laid eyes on it, I think it falls down in letting one freak death kick you over to the zombie team. The mode has also required less open maps with fewer options, so Spartans don't get swarmed from all sides by Energy Swords. Matches always came down to a bunch of stragglers with their backs against a wall, hammering away on the trigger instead of any more dynamic use of space. Infinite doesn't entirely prevent that, but its mechanics do let you slip into the skin of the survivors and undead more convincingly. The infected carry equipment that lets them evade and stalk pursuers. They better realise the stealth aesthetics that 343 was going for in the shallow Covert One Flag or the forgotten Tactical Ops. But the infected are also as fragile as rotting flesh. It's not smooth sailing for the Spartans either, who are hamstrung by limited ammunition. With undead swarming and rounds in short supply, the living need to make every shot count. More ammo spawns around the map coax Spartans out into the open, so they're not always shutting themselves in one room for the whole match.

The Season 4 map, Forest, doesn't have the most inspired name but is well-outfitted for Infection. Spartans tend to mass on the ramparts along one side of the arena while twisting jungle paths and loose stones offer cover for the approaching infected. The exotic ruins of Forest are something you might expect to find on Delta Halo or even in Tomb Raider. Other highlights from Seasons 3 and 4 include the surprisingly vivid desert of Oasis, a cheeky platforming section in Chasm that leads up to a power item overhanging the whole colosseum, and the imposing, lava-lit facilities of Scarr. However, I'm no fan of the idea Chasm employs, where you have to climb long staircases to reach platforms just feet above you. Visually, my favourite of the new maps may be Solitude, a remake of Halo 5's criminally underrated Plaza. With its cold stone urbanity, it's the most beautifully bleak stage Halo multiplayer's ever gotten.

You might recall that the Season 2 maps were created in Forge, much to the consternation of the game's community. Look, I love Forge, and it's now in a state where maps load in properly, and we can make incredibly ambitious modifications with it, like adding water volumes. It's also easier than ever to find professional-grade community creations in matchmaking. Say what you want about the golden days of Halo; Bungie wasn't as sharp at showcasing fan work as this. But I have to admit, not building maps in Forge for Seasons 3 and 4 has made them look a damn sight better, especially when it comes to the outdoor battlegrounds. An unfortunate exception to this rule is Cliffhanger which succeeds in painting a picture of a remote and dignified secret compound but undercuts that immersion with flapping birds glued to the ground. And even if this is a cross-platform game, I know graphics on the Xbox One can get a lot more realistic than this.

It's these areas where the wires are poking out that make Infinite feel conspicuously unfinished, no matter how many modes and maps it might boast now. Even during Season 3, when a lot of Infinite's old cracks were getting filled in, the game's technical stability was not improving. In fact, in some areas, it degraded. Parts of the UI frequently wouldn't load. Music cues would fail to trigger, leaving the game with inappropriate tracks playing or in awkward silence. Nearly every match, dead bodies would get stuck in the geometry or rotate comically in the air. Playlist wait times were always incorrect.

For the entire season, the first thing you saw every time you booted up the game was unadulterated jank. It would play the two opening cutscenes for the season, even if you'd watched them before, and then ask if you wanted to buy the Battle Pass whether or not you'd already purchased it. The game was replaying these scenes on each boot because it was dumping most of your settings every session, so it couldn't remember that you'd viewed those cinematics. After you mashed through the opening screens, there'd be a lengthy delay to connect to the multiplayer servers, and minutes could drag by as you searched for a game. That's if you were ever going to find one.

Season 4 did away with the cutscene glitch, but partly because the studio has given up trying to produce these cinematics, reducing the already threadbare consistency of the story in the multiplayer. So far, Season 4 has exhibited the spring bugs slightly less often, but they're all still there. Mistakes other services can patch within days, 343 can't get around to after nineteen months. Lord knows, it's not moving any faster, which is down to some combination of the wheels falling off the software and most of the player base having left for greener pastures a while ago. Modern audiences are sensitive as cilia to you wasting their time, but Infinite has always been an unnecessary timesink. It's not doing itself any favours by making the start of seasons, when the interest in the game is the highest, its least stable periods of operation. For those glitches that have been patched, I have no confidence they'll stay that way because, in the past, old bugs have been fumigated only to be reintroduced further down the line.

I still don't feel optimistic about Halo Infinite's future. When it comes to introducing new rewards and toys, 343 has hit a real stride. Those long-running complaints about sparse wardrobes and the absence of Forge are a thing of the past. We also have a persistent rank system now to keep progression rolling even for players who've completed the Battle Passes. Content-wise, Halo is back, baby! But for the average player, it's too little too late. Player figures are not significantly rising; they've almost certainly fallen since January. I keep saying it, but because there are only a dedicated few left playing, the difficulty of the multiplayer is not appropriate for a general audience, balancing between teams can be absurdly lopsided, and all squads seem to come with a rookie who falls miles behind everyone else, which isn't enjoyable for anyone. In January, 343 understood that a waning player base was better concentrated into a few playlists. Now they're splitting up that tribe with all sorts of new hoppers, and I don't know why.

Live service games are developed on a long enough time scale that they often don't reflect the current state of their developer until months in the future. 343 may have just successfully shipped Season 4, but less than a fortnight after I published my last Halo field report, crucial personnel started leaving the studio. In January, Microsoft laid off almost 100 employees at 343 Industries, including top directors and contractors.^[2]

Around the same time as these layoffs, Head of Creative, Joseph Staten, and Lead Designer, Christopher Blohm, departed from the company. Their exits come on the back of other crucial personnel quitting the developer in late 2022: Studio Head, Bonnie Ross; Creative Multiplayer Director, Tom French; Head of Engineering, David Berger. One of these employees resigning would be a blow. All of them quitting within a four-month period makes me worry that no one is flying the plane. And this exodus does not suggest that skilled developers think they can get quality work done at 343.

The ever-reliable Jason Schreier reports that having struggled to introduce seasonal updates to Halo Infinite, 343 is now going to try to keep up their current pace while also porting the whole experience to the Unreal Engine. Schreier describes the work on the game as "all but starting from scratch", and the developer thinks they're going to do it without many of their veteran staff.^[2] I know you can't jump to conclusions when we're missing a lot of information about internal events. Still, take stories like these, couple them with the current state of Infinite, and it doesn't exactly inspire hope.

The only comfort I have comes in the hint of an explanation for what started so many fires at the company. Former Senior Multiplayer Designer on the game, Patrick Wren, and another ex-343 developer, Tyler Owens, describe their coworkers as brilliant but Infinite being compromised by Microsoft's management and business practices, including their reliance on contractors.^[3] Schreier previously reported something similar, saying that the publisher's contracting policies throttled development of the game.^[4]

Contract work is a known quantity in software engineering. Across many industries, big companies like contractors because they get what is effectively an employee, but one that they don't have to furnish with benefits. Because the end of the contract means many contractors are effectively months away from termination at any time, the employer also has more leverage over them and can shake workers' confidence. It's easier to push back on employees' attempts to secure workers' rights or fairer pay. As satellite parties, contractors also don't get promoted up the chain, taking management positions and higher salaries, and Owens claims that there are tax incentives for businesses that use contract labour.^[3]

You might ask, if contractors are so exploitable, why don't companies just keep re-upping the same contracts indefinitely to get a kind of downgraded employee? Well, for one thing, if the workforce keeps turning over, people aren't getting enough time to form camaraderie with their coworkers and establish power within the company. So, they're in less of a social position to defend each other in the workplace, unionise, or form long-lasting industry connections.

For another thing, Microsoft did try making their temp workers effective long-term employees without the same benefits. This earned them a class action lawsuit in 1992, resulting in the corporation having to pay out $97 million. It was a landmark event in convincing companies that maybe "permatemp" workers weren't such a good idea. Now, Microsoft only contracts employees for 18 months at a time before letting them go. It may rehire previous contractors, but only after a six-month gap.^[4] It's pretty shitty to leave people in a position of economic precarity, estranged from their colleagues and the games they love working on. But it also tends to obstruct software development for a few reasons:

1. It means that in the middle of making a game, you're potentially switching out all these people who know the project for a bunch of different workers who have to familiarise themselves with it anew.
2. You're frequently severing working relationships between developers who then have to adapt to partnerships with new coworkers. Working together effectively is the lifeblood of any collective project.
3. You're not giving developers time to acquire expertise and then apply it to your product. You're letting them build up those skills and then sending them right out the door. It's the brain drain that has long hampered the games industry but accelerated.

You can see how for a game like Halo Infinite, which is in a perpetual state of development and has been since 2015, a reliance on workers you lay off every 18 months might completely fuck things up. You don't have to spend long trawling social media to find disaffected players demanding Microsoft revoke 343's stewardship over the series. Although, you won't find it at the official Halo site anymore as they've now shut down forums and purged all threads. A big win for community preservation. Maybe there is some problem with the culture or workflow at the company, but the community is likely barking up the wrong tree. The contracts are clearly a big factor, if not the factor in the ruination of Halo Infinite, so making a different studio work on it under the same policies isn't going to remedy the issue. The Halo Infinite calamity looks like the familiar story of a parent company screwing over the people who could actually make them money, laying a bunch of them off, and then letting them bear the brunt of customer backlash while they laugh their way to the bank.

I value diversity in the articles I write, I get bored saying the same things, and I noticed that a lot of what I published on this blog was describing the failures of capitalism, particularly the dysfunctional stage of that system we find ourselves currently living through. I've made a concerted effort to spice up these articles up by trying to return to a wider range of subjects. And sometimes you just want a little escapism, to get away from the economic and political pressures of the world and stab some hydras or shoot some Spartans. But capitalism infects everything; anywhere there is profit to be made, there's someone hollowing out something genuinely cool to make a few pennies more. The greed is inescapable, and I keep seeing my favourite media going down the tubes because some parent company decided to strip mine its assets or some executives had a bright idea about contract policy. And so, inevitably, we keep returning to the topic of the disease of big business, whether we want to or not. I guess enjoy Halo while you can, and if you can't, at least the explanation of why it's such a hotbed of disappointments provides some conclusion. Thanks for reading.

Notes

1. HALO INFINITE UPDATE – MAY 10, 2023 by 343 Industries (May 11, 2023), Halo Support.
2. Microsoft Studio Behind Halo Faces a Reboot on Years of Turmoil by Jason Schreier (January 31, 2023), Bloomberg.
3. Ex-Halo Infinite developers criticise "incompetent leadership" at Microsoft by Ed Nightingale (January 19, 2023), Eurogamer.
4. A tweet by Jason Schreier (August 27, 2020), Twitter.

All other sources linked at relevant points in article.

A classically-trained cellist, Greg Heffernan graduated from New York University in 2005 with a degree in music composition. Adopting the moniker Cosmo D, he became a passionate contributor to the Brooklyn music scene, playing in bands such as Bing & Ruth and Archie Pelago. Nine years after graduation, Cosmo would reenroll at his alma mater, but this time, to study game design. With his 2014 release Saturn V, he began a line of surreal exploration titles, which now includes Off-Peak, The Norwood Suite, and Betrayal at Club Low. Rearranging his surroundings and experiences into hallucinogenic sandboxes, his games celebrate the artistic communities in his vicinity and dramatise the changes that have reshaped them over time. I picked Cosmo's brain to find out more about how he puts a game together.

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Gamer_152: The environments in your games do a lot at once. They act as art galleries and practical spaces; they're hub areas and mission zones. How do you go about designing these levels?

Cosmo D: I start broad and hone in. I usually start [with] some grey-boxing in Blender, then go in layer after layer adding lights, textures, details, props over time. It's not unlike moving into a new place in real life. It starts a bit barren, but with time, it becomes more "lived in." I work on my games for a while, so I start to see where I want to add details with repeated visits inside the environment. It's an organic process, like everything else I try to do.

G_152: I know that Robert Yang (of NYU Game Center fame) helped you create more openings in The Norwood Suite levels, light them better, and make them denser. Can you give us some examples of specific changes you made based on his advice?

CD: At first, the foyer of the hotel was a wide open space with mezzanines, like a theatre stage or office atrium. Robert encouraged me to add walls under the stair landings, so the space would be more "broken up." I hadn't thought critically about moving from open to closed spaces and the power of that shift. If everything is open all the time, nothing in particular makes an impact. I think Off-Peak got away with this because it was intentionally maximalist and thematically appropriate for being so. The open/closed passageway stuff came together almost by accident. Yet, even there, I noticed players tended to would drift more to the left side of the station than the right just because there were more bright flashing lights weighted on that side.

In hindsight, I now realise how powerful spatial contrast can be. It's also more practical for rendering and performance, to go from big to small, closed to open, and back. If everything is always visible, it taxes the computer rendering it. Even outdoor environments benefit from markers, lights, etc. if they actively aim to guide the player. You could apply this rule to other artforms, certainly music, and the results would be fruitful. Robert's impact can be felt most strongly in Norwood - he encouraged me to make the space darker, use lights in passageways to guide players, and trust the impact of a small, dense room.

G_152: Your games are known for their diegetic sound. What's the motivation behind your in-level sound sources?

CD: I came to the medium as a music and sound person, so I really just wanted to lean into that as hard as I could. Especially as it pertains to atmosphere and expressing emotions outside of anything communicated directly. I love the classic Looking Glass games that use sound to heighten the experience. It's very much at the foundation of my practice.

G_152: Your games seem to take influence both from the New York jazz and electronic music scenes. How was it moving between one and the other? Are there patterns shared between the genres?

CD: At first, I enjoyed riffing visually in games the way I did sonically in music. But as the process of games became more involved, and I got more skilful with it, I think that process took on a life of its own. Still, I'm a big proponent of finishing things, knowing my goals, and keeping a productive pace, if possible. I applied this approach in music and now do so in games, though at a different pace and scale.

G_152: You perform the soundtracks for your games as part of the music trio Archie Pelago. What does the process for recording those songs look like? How do you convey to the band what you're doing?

CD: The tracks on the original Off-Peak soundtrack were Archie tracks that didn't have a home anywhere else. Every track had its own origin story and there was no set method. Improv, premade drum tracks, synth sketches on the iPhone, live recordings of ice breaking apart. Everything was and is possible - a true free-for-all. After that game was released, we went our separate ways as a band. But since then, I've brought in other instrumentalists.

Myk Freedman read charts for Norwood and Jerome Ellis for Off-Peak City. Novelty Daughter did live wordless singing for Norwood as well. I didn't give them much direction. I just gave them some sketches and encouraged them to be themselves on the microphone. For me, it's always been about letting collaborators be as comfortable and honest as they can be for the project.

G_152: You've mentioned that you were behind the music for some game-related adverts. Can you tell us any adverts specifically you scored for and whether that work differs from other musicianing?

CD: I left that world almost a decade ago, so the ads are probably lost to time, or the music is sitting in a vault somewhere. Still, that work is about deadlines, "hitting the brief," and coming up with convincing tracks that are going to sell both a product and a feeling. It's a bit like solving a puzzle or making a piece of sonic furniture, all under a tight deadline. It helped give me techniques and practices for finishing creative endeavours: pace yourself, scope smart, be ready to pivot, accept that it will often require more work. Inside the sweat-box of the composer's studio, I was in this mindset on a daily basis for years. My games probably wouldn't exist in the state that they do had I not cut my teeth in this environment.

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Thanks to Cosmo D, and thank you for reading.