Culture Clash

(April 2007)

I'm Okay, You're… Kinda Mean

Crackdown is a great game. I love that it strongly adheres to the philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well. It's visceral, fast-paced, oddly cheery, and satisfyingly mindless – at least, that's how it presents itself.

Many gamers leave their imaginations at the door. For better or for worse, they allow the game experience to be fed to them and don't waste any additional thought on the matter, which is disappointing when you pause to consider the fact that games are flights of fantasy that really shine only when imagination, emotion, are directly involved. I'm not one of those gamers, something that's kind of a mixed blessing. On one hand, it's allowed me to genuinely enjoy snoozers like Ninety-Nine Nights – I just invented my own (totally awesome) story and dialogue as I went along. On the other, once my imagination is engaged, I'm mired in the story no matter how bad the game is, so I either have to finish or make up a conclusion on my own.

After my first hour of Crackdown, wheels began to turn. On the surface, it's splendidly elemental – bad guys bad, good guys good, apply explosions, repeat. And you can certainly enjoy the game that way. But humor me and take another look at the world of Crackdown. In Pacific City, crime is so thermonuclear that the Agency finally, desperately, grants its Peacekeepers unquestioned shoot-first clearance. There are no arrests. No trials. The penalty for any crime, from jaywalking to RICO violations, is summary, on-the-street execution, the showier the better. What's more, the Agency co-opts the research of one of Pacific City's most heinous crime lords, unleashing genetically altered, unkillable supercops with a mandate to butcher evildoers in their homes. If some granny gets in the way of your rocket as it dispenses a heaping helping of incendiary justice on a Volk hit squad… well, lady, omelettes and eggs.

Essentially, Crackdown asks you to fight crime by becoming a criminal, and a really nasty one at that.

You're the Good Guy in the vast majority of story-driven games. But think how tenuous the definition is: good characters range from the shimmering Avatar of Ultima IV to the complex but essentially psychotic Max Payne; a sample so broad that “good” in games just means what you are and “evil” just means what you're not, rather than any criteria of behavior or philosophy. This is almost necessary, since being the good guy in most video games still means you have to kill and kill – and in the case of games like Crackdown, you're really not obligated to spare innocents along the way. In fact, in Crackdown, the “bad guys” never victimize innocent passersby. They are after you, and it is your crossfire in which bystanders are caught.

One great opportunity as games grow increasingly complex is to simply set the player loose in a world and encourage them to do as they see fit – essentially, to let them define for themselves whether or not they'll be “good,” what that means, and how it makes them feel. It's something Warren Spector has long championed. The Deus Ex games approach the concept by challenging your relationship to story edifices: halfway through, the good guys turn out to be not so good (but not evil), the bad guys suddenly seem okay (but not great) and you're stuck making what can be a very difficult decision.

Unfortunately, many players don't bite when this hook is dangled before them, and many games claim to be freeform but aren't. Dei Ex are actually kind of unique in that you really can play however you like without penalty. Few other supposedly open games are truly like that. In other games, moral decision trees are generally so transparent that one path is obviously correct, or so structured that one path will obviously maximize rewards. Very rarely do players actually inhabit the shoes of their character in these games; they make calls based on what they think the consequences or rewards might be. You can't get away with this in good tabletop roleplaying, but since computers aren't yet able to recognize when a player is acting out of character there's no real penalty for it. So while morally open games are possible, designers and players alike have to evolve a bit before we truly realize some of the exciting concepts Warren is talking about.

Outside of comedy it's rare for Evil to acknowledge its evilness, or contrast itself with the opposition. The same is true for games – the ones in which the player is evil as a core design concept are usually goofy, like Dungeon Keeper or Overlord. Is this due to fear of reprisals for “teaching” kids to be evil? I doubt it. I think it's because making a game where the protagonist is flat, realistic evil is a staggering design challenge… especially when you consider that game-good usually involves multiple felony homicides. If that's good, what's evil? The alternative, therefore, is Snidely Whiplash evil, making the game into a comedy. Or, of course, there's evil through misguidance or circumstance, which is not really evil at all but stupidity, such as that of the protagonists in Shadow of the Colossus or GTA.

The future of narrative gaming is open, dynamically reactive worlds – games that respond genuinely to what you do and adjust the game environment and its contents accordingly and on the fly. Moral choices in such games would be up to the player's feelings, introducing a new level of challenge. Right now the AI technology is not quite able to pull it off believably. Some games make admirable attempts, but they just can't nail it quite yet. We're getting gratifyingly close, though. Once it happens, players themselves will have to grow, to let their imaginations in and really live in the game world – if, that is, they want to experience all it has to offer.