Remember when I posted part one of two of an essay on Mirror's Edge? That's okay, I'm pretty sure no one else does either.

The inclusion of a story at all in Mirror's Edge feels a bit unnecessary and problematic; especially in its execution, flabby and perfunctory, it makes the game feel like any other unimpressive video game, plot and cutscenes tacked on because they're expected but not with any real effort put into them.

Yet the idea itself, of an underground struggle against a corporate police state, fits well thematically for a game whose central inspiration is free running. It seems an appropriate marriage of plot and mechanic, of story and mechanic, in the traditional sense of those terms, both using the theme of freedom and oppression.



It's a tall order, though, to make a game about freedom. Plenty of games have had a "fight for freedom" as their plot--any World War II game, usually; Freedom Fighters, of course; and so many others--but most of the time the plot is, again, perfunctory, an afterthought, and therefore no one expects any actual connection between that plot theme and the gameplay. In Mirror's Edge, though, the connection is much more explicit. A promise is, in some way, being made: as much as this is a game about flow, it is a game about freedom. And, as much as it fails to actually flow, and for much of the same reasons, the game fails to actually be free.

On the large-scale structural level, the game's linear and fixed series of levels, coupled with linear and fixed plot advancement, clearly doesn't even have a pretense of player freedom. On that level the game is a movie, just like so many other games: there are characters, they talk to each other in shitty movie dialogue, they fight or run or die, and players get to watch, without any choice or influence.

But this could be forgiven despite the game's promise of freedom if the game offered freedom on a smaller scale, the scale of the gamespace of the levels and the mechanics themselves--that's the more important part of the game, obviously, and what has much more impact on the thematic effect of a game. But of course there isn't any more freedom on this level, either: most sequences have one or at most two or three paths through them, with one branch or another offering little to no impact on future gameplay, and in the constant adrenaline rush pace of the game you don't have the opportunity to think much about your options anyway.


The obvious contrary here is to open world games like Grand Theft Auto or, well, pretty much any game from the past two years, as open world is currently quite in vogue. Mirror's Edge would actually make sense as an open world game, though, giving players something closer to the actual experience of free running, which is as much about breaking social norms, experimentation, and finding new ways to move as it is about looking cool. Mirror's Edge allows the player to do none of these, in fact enforces the opposite of this: you must follow the rigid, strict path set by the developers, or you fail. Experimentation is punished, not rewarded. You are not free.

But even if Mirror's Edge had been an open world game, wandering around the rooftops of the city Crashdown-style and taking conflicting missions from various characters, there would still be the mechanics themselves, conventional--nowadays perhaps even better referred to as old-school--platformer mechanics that are brutally strict, with very little valence between "successful jump" and "death". Higher jumps, true, have a further dimension of whether you successfully roll with the landing, thereby avoiding damage and keeping your momentum, or simply hit the ground hard, leaving yourself limping; but this is still just another aspect of "right" or "wrong", "succeed" or "fail", binaries of morality/efficiency that are antithetical to any discourse of freedom.

If Mirror's Edge, or any game, wants to truly be about freedom, its base mechanics need to reflect that, and that means more results than simply variances on a scale of positive to negative. That means that even the solutions of its platforming near-contemporaries--time reversal, quickload, etc.--would be just as ineffective: they might be more forgiving of mistakes, but they still enforce a strict difference between mistakes and the "right way" to play the game.


What's needed, really, are mechanics in which the different results of player choices are not merely "better" or "worse" ways of playing, not mechanics that can be optimized to achieve the most efficient completion. I'm not talking the "morality scale" endemic to (Western) RPGs, either, as that's just another binary system that confines players to developer expectations. Rather I'm talking about something like Sim City, something that's more toy than game, where rather than a structured game with set goals and win conditions the player is presented with a model of a world and a set of ways to interact with that model and then set loose to do what they will.

You can still have "better" and "worse" choices within particular subsystems--that is, you can still have ways that make your city poor or rich, or jumps that lead to your death--but the point is that navigating those subsystems is not the core of the game. They are important, sure, but only in that you have to understand how to navigate those systems in order to achieve your own goals, decided by yourself, and that those goals determine what systems you need to understand, and how you need to use them.

I realize that this sounds very, very far from the conception of Mirror's Edge. And in some ways it is--but not in the important ways, I think. This could still be a game based on free running--and now it would be a game that is actually about free running, about freedom and experimentation and defying expectations and making your own discoveries, rather than just another linear platformer with an unfulfilled promise of something better.

There's a conventional wisdom among some game developers and enthusiasts that in order for the player to have fun, the fun way has to be the easiest way. That is, players don't care about how they're "supposed" to play the game if they can find an easier way of doing it, even if that easier way is boring, dull, repetitive, etc.--and they'll then get bored with the game quickly and blame the developer for having failed at making a fun game.

And there are certainly many players for whom this wisdom holds true. Those who played Left 4 Dead by simply hiding in a corner and meleeing their way through a horde of zombies (and thus prompted the melee fatigue patch), to name a recent example.

And there is nothing wrong with such players, at least in their playing style. (Blaming the developer when they don't enjoy the game seems a bit much, though.) For many such players, they wouldn't blame the developer because they aren't looking for a game to be "fun"; or rather, fun has a different meaning to them than other players. For them, it simply means accomplishment, overcoming the challenge presented by the game by any means possible. These are the compulsive gamers, who strive for every achievement, the highest level, the fastest solution, etc. (And those that don't complain are publishers' wet dreams: they consume games with very little regard for their quality.)

But I'm more interested in the games that could be said to actively defy this play style. That is, all such players will generally end up doing things in a game unintended by the developer (which is absolutely right and good, all players should) and more importantly things that make the game arguably less interesting, but there are some games where such players will miss the entire point of the game. Which brings me to the Hitman series.

Hitman's protagonist is a genetically-engineered super-assassin known as Forty-Seven. While fragile compared to some FPS protagonists, he's far stronger than any human or any enemy in the games: he can take a shotgun blast to the chest and keep on going. (Two, however, starts to push it, and there's no way of regaining health during a mission.) On most missions, Forty-Seven could easily get to his target by simply cutting down everyone with a gun. Enemies in Hitman are fragile: a bullet to the head is instant death, it only takes a few more shots to the chest with a pistol, and a heavy weapon buts down anyone with a single burst anywhere.

But the game's design is based around stealth. It's a game about sneaking in, knocking out a lone guard, taking his uniform, hiding his body, infiltrating a compound without rousing suspicion, silently assassinating the target, and then getting out before anyone is the wiser. It's a game in which an FPS-style massacre means you've screwed up. Yet there is little in-game penalty for such action, and it's certainly easier than the stealth approach. Unlike some stealth games--like the Thief series, where stealth is a requirement because almost any enemy will easily dispatch you in one-on-one combat, or the Splinter Cell series, where stealth is a requirement because you fail most missions if anyone "raises an alarm"--Hitman is perfectly content to allow you to complete a mission through mass murder.



from The Amateur
There are a few drawbacks--the later games rate your performance on each mission based on your stealthiness, with the highest rating offering some unlockable bonuses, and the first and fourth game, which allow you to purchase your own equipment, penalize you monetarily ("clean-up" expenses deducted from your payment). But by and large, you can ignore nearly every major mechanic of the game and simply shoot your way through if you want. The game will play like an extremely easy and short third-person shooter.

So why is Hitman one of the more well-regarded franchises on the PC, especially the fourth game, which garnered nearly universal praise? Because most players understand what's fun about the game. Because most players understand that survival is not the challenge in Hitman. Completing the mission is not the challenge in Hitman. Just because the game allows you to advance on those conditions alone, they are not victory.

Well, that's not exactly true, of course. As soon as you try to define "victory" or the "challenge" of a game as anything other than reaching the end screen, you're in subjective territory. (Not than anything is truly objective, but you get the idea, I hope.) But what we're talking about is just that--players defining their own victory conditions. Players deciding that merely advancing in the game is not good enough for them.

(As a side note, an interesting thought just occured to me that in essence, Hitman is a game that allows you to fail. Because the game is so easy in terms of simply finishing the missions, you don't see a game over screen or are otherwise forced to reload a saved game very often. Most of the time when you restart a mission or load a save, it's by your own choice--you failed your own conditions, not the game's, and you could have continued if you had wanted to. And that's a very interesting and powerful thing, to me, the option to fail and go on, though I won't be exploring it in this post.)

There are a couple things that are very interesting to me about this. The first is the meta aspect: because Forty-Seven can easily dispatch everyone in a given mission, the fact that he (canonically) doesn't and instead pursues stealthy execution means that he is, in some way, playing a game with his targets. Forty-Seven, unlike most shooter protagonists, isn't in this for survival. That's easy. He's in it for invisibility. He's in it about satisfying his own chosen conditions. He's playing a game, just like the players.

There's often a disconnect between the abilities of a player and the supposed abilities of a game's protagonist. Half-Life, for example, is often mocked for its MIT graduate lab assistant who manages to slaughter Marines and stop an alien invasion, while on the other side, many games with military protagonists are forced to treat players like ignorant civilians (like they are) rather than well-trained soldiers. Hitman, to me, is one of the few games that evades this problem. There are a few moments in cutscenes when the player may know more than Forty-Seven (he is ignorant of a lot of human culture due to his upbringing), but for the most part the story's treatment of the character matches up with players' abilities.


The second interesting thing to me is that by making the game's conditions of advancement easy to satisfy, it encourages players to make their own rules. I started this post talking about players who don't do what game developers intend them to--and I pointed out that, in general, this is a great thing and something all players should do and all developers should encourage. And this is what I meant.

The difference between the players I described at the start of this post and Hitman players isn't some slavish adherence to how the game is "supposed" to be played. That's a bullshit idea. Hitman doesn't have a "right" way to play it any more than any other game. The difference with Hitman players is that they aren't to make the game as easy as possible. They're out to make the game as challenging as possible. Players impose their own restrictions on themselves, set their own goals, and consider themselves defeated when they fail those goals, not when the game tells them they've been defeated.

One of the most important bits of game theory I've ever heard was from Will Wright, creator of Sim City. In a talk on stories in games, Wright commented than whenever he talked to someone who'd played Grand Theft Auto, for example, and asked about the game, he never heard anything about the game's linear narrative. Instead he heard stories about getting six stars, using rocket launchers to destroy tanks, crashing cars and creating massive pile-ups, and so on. And these, he explained, are all stories, too--and stories that are more important and more meaningful to players than the ones authored by game developers, because even if they aren't as detailed or as complex or as artistic or whatever, the players created them, not the developer, and that makes them more meaningful to them than anything someone who's never met them could create.


Wright is also famous for describing his own creations--Sim City, The Sims, etc.--as toys rather than games because they don't have set victory conditions.

I think there's an obvious correlation here. In Sim City, so long as the player doesn't go bankrupt, the game never ends. There is no "winning" Sim City. Thus players have to decide for themselves what they're aiming to accomplish, what kind of city they want to build. They define their own victory conditions. In Hitman, "winning" is easy, in the sense of actually reaching the end of the game. But it's that ease that allows players to play with the game. When advancement is trivial and the game's space is nonetheless diverse, players are allowed and encouraged to decide for themselves what they're aiming to accomplish, what kind of hitman they want to be. They define their own victory conditions. And they can change their minds, try out different techniques and goals, vent steam when they're frustrated by actually just slaughtering everyone, and so on.

What we're talking about is the difference between a game of chess and a Lego set. Chess is a very strictly defined game--all of your options are set from the beginning. There is a limited number of variables with limited possible values and a strict victory condition. Thus winning is simply a matter of calculation--that's why computers are the best chess players. There is such thing as the perfect chess algorithm, the perfect chess game, even if it hasn't been created yet.


A Lego set is just a child's toy rather than the province of grandmasters. Nobody sets computers on building the best Lego set. And you know why? Because they can't. Legos are building blocks for our own imagination. They're tools to aid us in developing our own creativity. They can teach problem solving just as much as chess can--we can define our own goals, our own victory conditions, and figure out the best way to solve them, or set a computer to do it for us. But those victory conditions must always be decided first by the player.

And, of course, chess was the same way once. Someone decided the victory conditions of chess, the rules of chess. And those rules changed over time, when people didn't just play the game but played with the game, toyed with it, experimented. It's just that at some point people decided not to anymore. That toying was wrong, that chess was only worthwhile if the rules were always the same, that accomplishment only had value when it could be compared numerically against someone else's accomplishment and one could be declared objectively (hah!) superior. When people decided that there had to be a best way to play chess.

In other words, what we're talking about is the difference between a game player and a game creator. The person who follows the rules and the person who makes the rules. The computer and the programmer.


Who do you want to be?