Sandbox Dunes

Touching the Bounds

2025-11-19T00:00:00Z

Imagine you’ve been playing a game for a few hours and, via machinations of the plot, you have been dumped into the center of a classically styled hedge maze. The game’s central antagonist taunts you from over loudspeakers, specifically noting how they were able to trap you in the maze, how devious the maze is, and how unlikely (though not impossible) it will be for you to escape the maze. As you explore, your player character comments on your current progress through the maze, including any moments where you arrive at dead ends or retrace your previous steps.

As you wander the maze, you feel Lost. Is it an enjoyable feeling? Compare this to another scenario:

You’ve been playing a game for about 30 minutes, not yet having fully internalized the flow of the game, and you arrive into a sort of hallway space with doors at either end, with various bits of machinery dotted along the walls. As you move to the opposite door, you realize it’s shut. You go back to the door you entered through, only to realize it’s also shut. You start looking around the room, trying to identify if any of the machinery is interactable. Everything you try produces no results, nor provides meaningful feedback of any kind.

As you wander the room, you feel Lost. Is it an enjoyable feeling?

Most important to me is this: Which scenario would provide a more enjoyable feeling of being lost, and why?

Let’s ignore that this hypothetical is ultimately poorly constructed, and that I don't have the resources available to make both games just to test my theory. Instead, lets just analyze what we can hope the answers to these questions will have been, and extract meaning from them.

In the “Maze” scenario, while a player may feel lost, that player is also constantly given feedback informing them that they are meant to feel lost, and that any given scenario they go down was anticipated by the developer (because otherwise there would not be accompanying voice lines). The player thus doesn’t feel any anxiety in that experience of “being lost”, as they can tell that feeling is in line with the feeling they were intended to have in this specific scenario.

This stands in opposition to the “Room” scenario, where due to a lack of clear signalling and feedback, the player cannot tell if they are meant to feel lost. This in turn creates an anxiety about that “lost” feeling, as the player is not sure whether they "should" be feeling lost or not. Not only can they not escape this room and feel lost via the process of trying to escape, but so too are they also trapped in this anxious feeling.

From this hypothetical (and it’s hypothetical answers) we can extract three core ideas:

A game, whether consciously implemented by its developers or not, cannot only intend for how a game is meant to be played, but how a player should feel while playing. We’ll call the combination of these two notions the “Intended Play Experience”.
While a player might not particularly care about the intended play experience during the majority or even all of their play, they might stil have a desire to understand or simply “check in” on the intended play experience. We’ll call this “Intention Checking”.
As a result, beyond just setting up the dynamics that result in the player inhabiting the intended play experience, developers may want to provide active signals to the player that communicate what the intended play experience is at any given time. We’ll call this “Intention Signalling”.

Here’s a concrete example of this all in action:

While playing Baby Steps with my partner, we saw a castle in the far distance, specifically off to the right in a new area we had just entered. However, the path leading us into the area banked to the left, with it leading towards a bright light in the distance that marked the next checkpoint. This contrasted heavily with the lack of path to the right, which was instead made up of dense trees and foliage that quickly obscured any sight of the castle.

In many ways, walking to the left seemed like the Intended Play Experience (i.e enter the zone through the expected means, branch off and explore later once the path opens up), and as such we became uncertain about whether we should even try walking to the right. We wern't just concerned that we would hit an impassable obstacle to the right, and then need to backtrack, but perhaps more importantly that even if we did find a route to the castle by going to the right, we might miss out on a more interesting, richly detailed and deliberately designed path that would have appeared later on had we gone down the left path.

At this moment, we found ourselves Intention Checking the game, trying to see if this rightward path was an intended route. We ultimately decided to walk out just past the foliage to the right to see if anything laid beyond, and we were surprised to find a flat, uncovered ridgeline, easy to walk along, with a new path visible in the distance that seemed to head towards the castle. By providing these affordances and details, the game was not just communicating that going in this direction was viable, but went further to imply that that path was one considered and intentionally crafted by the developers for us to take. It did this via the process of Intention Signalling (or, we could say, by providing intention signals).

The question this entire scenario most arouses in myself is: “Why get anxious about how a game designer desired you to play their game?”. Once we’ve been given a game, it is in many ways our role as player to follow our own desires, and as such only interfacing directly with the intentions of the developer when they clash against our own. If we are in touch with this conceptual ideal of our role as a player, doesn’t trying to check how the designers want us to play stand in direct opposition to our ideals?

While I hold this counter-argument to be important, the unfortunate reality is that this “conceptual ideal of play” is, by necessity, ignorant of the lived realities of play. Put simply, while we can play any game in any way we want, that doesn’t mean that all those modes or styles of play are equally good, regardless of how "good" is defined.

On PC, I’ve put 90+ hours into Fallout 76, most of them from the height of the pandemic, but with a couple dozen hours spent in the years after. I’ve spent many of those hours simply roaming its virtual landscape, exploring points of interest and completing the occasional quest. My fondest memories of the game stem from a full 10+ hours of play, stretched over a couple weeks, where my home base was perched on a cliff on the outskirts of Morgantown. I hiked up and down said cliff dozens of times, often moving at a snail's pace due to being weighed down by loot and hunger / thirst status afflictions, as I explored the post-apocalyptic university town and the various small environmental stories within. Yet, even as I had these genuinely enjoyable and fulfilling play experiences, I also found myself googling a question multiple times: “How do I play Fallout 76?”.

To be clear, I knew mechanically how to play Fallout 76. You shoot and you loot and you build up a base while exploring and completing quests, and there was no part of the basic control scheme or interaction space that didn't make sense to me. I also can not overstate that I very much enjoyed my style of playing Fallout 76; this was not the case of me being otherwise unsatisfied with my playtime and thus trying to find ways to squeeze more out of it.

I just got the sense I was playing the game “wrong”: I completed quests only occasionally, ignoring the main quests entirely while also largely not engaging with the NPC filled towns. I mostly ignored all live events and co-op missions; I did try them a few times, but the gear and resources required immediately outmatched what I usually had, and the missions themselves didn't seem compelling enough to dedicate preparation time for. I also just leveled up very slowly: My 10 hours in Morgantown raised me only approximately 10 levels from 20 - 30, yet I was constantly surrounded by players who were level 300 or 500 who clearly weren't needing to put in that kind of hour count to keep their number ticking up (though nor were they generally participating in the kind of slow, methodical exploration I was engaging in). All of this together implied I was doing something wrong: that the game loop I partook in, while perfectly enjoyable, wasn’t the actual gameloop I was meant to be engaging with.

To be honest, I get this feeling all the time, often from live service games like Fallout 76, Destiny or No Man's Sky, ones that appear to have a specific loop of engagement that game systems are built around. Yet I also get it from Turn Based Combat games like Baldur’s Gate 3 or Final Fantasy X, where my best efforts to engage with those systems still often lead to difficult, slow or awkward encounters. Both styles of games, and many other examples, are ones I can have fun with, yet have an undeniable friction that I must push through. And that friction stems from a feeling.

The feeling is that, for whatever fun I am having or progress I am making, my play is still fundamentally misaligned with at least some part of the intended play experience. Exterior to my play, I'll find myself talking to friends, reading walkthroughs, scouring forums, watching let's plays and otherwise frantically googling, and all this in an attempt to find the signals that will allow me to understand how the game wants to be played. And in lieu of that understanding, I am left with this nagging anxiety that my play experience is exterior to the designer’s intentions, feeling lost in that experience of play. And I do not enjoy that feeling.

Am I saying that, if these games were better at intention signalling, I would have a much better time with them? Well, yes! It doesn't necessarily mean I would find the ways they want me to play them fun, nor does it mean I would simply inhabit their intended play experience. In fact, when confronted with these games intended play experiences, I might end up pulling back from the games, deciding that ultimately the entire game is aimed in a way I care not for.

But, I would no longer have that anxiety that I was simply missing some core aspect or notion of play. Maybe I'd actually really love these games intended play experiences and onboard them fully. More likely but still great, I could modulate my own mode of play with occasional dips into the intended play experience, thus experiencing the fullness of the game while holding onto my own play identity. However I respond to the intended play experience, there are countless examples in my play, and likely yours, where it would be comforting to reach out and grab it, to know how our own experience contrast againt what the designers intended. And thus, as a designer, I think it's worth considering how we design games to allow for that communication to be had.

It's worth saying that this theory ties into or alligns with many, many others areas of study / scholarship, most notably to me the Lusory Attitude, the Magic Circle, Death of the Author and just the general field of Semiotics, but probably many, many others that I am blanking on right now or am otherwise unaware of. It's also very possible that this lens through which to think about games has already been written about extensively under different verbiage, in which case, please let me know as I'd love to read it!

Regardless, this is a theory I'm increasingly applying to my own work, as a means through which to anticipate, direct and respond to player expectations and concerns. There is certainly more to say on how we signal our intentions to players, why players develop this anxiety in the first place, and how we ensure our intended play experience alligns with the player to hopefully elimate that need for intention checking entirely. But tbh this has been sitting in my drafts for over a month and was way too wordy already, so I'm going to happily leave it here for now.

Good Game / Bad Game

2025-08-08T00:00:00Z

The first thing you’ll notice about Apex Legends: The Board Game is that it’s big.

The box alone is ginormous, a 30cm+ by 30cm+ cube, one whose top needs to be shaken off given the sheer amount of friction and pressure generated by its insides. Inside that box lie a multitude of sub-containers, holding hundreds of little tokens, miniatures, cards, and diorama pieces, alongside 2 rule books and a 4 large map pieces comprising a base game board that's 60cm by 60cm in size. On top of that game board will go walls, ziplines, supply boxes, canyons, trees and rocks alongside full ~10cm high buildings, and ~10cm high buildings that go on top of those buildings, with miniatures going on top of them too, stretching the game board’s reach vertically until you have a full on miniature battle field laying out in front of you.

Yet the game’s spatial needs are hardly limited to the game map itself. To the sides of the game board lie the basic fundamental pieces required to play: the round counter (with space for cards underneath), your aim board (with space for cards underneath) + corresponding deck of aim cards, your zone indicator + corresponding deck of zone cards, your weapon cards, your supply box cards, and your 3 bags of available loot of different rarities. And then there are the character specific items, like their character sheet + miniature, tactical and ultimate abilities + miniatures + counters, a deck of available special abilities + your hand of special abilities + a discard pile for used special abilities, alongside a backpack and equipped weapon cards. With the game needing at least 4 characters per play session, times the previous requirements (and the amount of space they occupy) by 4.

The space you need to fully play the game? By my estimation, at least a meter and a half squared, if you’re ok leaving the box and various other game pieces on the floor. The time you need to set the game up, including just basic unpacking, building the battlefield and drawing characters + loot? Likely an hour+, and make sure to give yourself another 45 minutes once the game ends purely for packing it all back up again.

To me, all of the above makes Apex Legends: The Board Game, almost inherently a bad board game. This is apparent in its most base, material attribute, that of accessibility. Not Accessibility in terms of allowing players of all different backgrounds to be able to play it (though it certainly struggles in that sense too), but rather just the sense that it is simply extremely difficult to find the space and time required to play the game. And while I am a proud defender of “unplayable games” (The Tragedy of GJ237b stans rise up), I can’t defend Apex Legends: The Board Game on these grounds because it clearly intends to be played. Yet, this is a game I cannot play in my own flat because I lack a surface large enough to play it on, same with my local board game cafe. In fact, the only surface I could think of that I have access too that would support the playing of the game was my parent’s dining table, which eventually lead me to shove the entire game in an ikea bag (which it still managed to poke out of), head over to my parent's on the tube and play with my brother. Even there, I found that the contents of the game not just spilled across the entire table, but further onto surfaces surrounding the playspace.

As such, if we acknowledge that the material circumstances required to play Apex Legends: The Board Game are so high that the game is functionally unplayable for broad swaths of even the board game enthusiast population, we must ask of it "why? Does the game truly require all this stuff, at this scale?" The answer is of-course no, for board games, even those about combat, exist on far smaller scales than this and are both functional and fun. So then as a follow-up we ask "Does the stuff, at this scale, make the game considerably more enjoyable than those other games?”. That’s a more complex, individualized question, but I’d also err on the side of no: The sheer amount of stuff, both material and systemic, makes even basic actions slow and complex to execute, with the results being interesting or useful around as often as they are unnecessary and obnoxious. Yet, if we ask a third question, one that really just stares us in the face when we look at the title: “Apex Legends: The Board Game”, “Does the game require all this stuff, at this scale, to fulfil the fantasy of playing a board game version of Apex Legends?” Well, then the answer to that question is yes. And that is difficult to contend with.

I am not intimately familiar with board game adaptations of video games, and so forgive me as I at least partially retread the steps of a major, pre-existing discourse on board game design. That said, I am at least aware that at least part of the appeal of these games is related to the aforementioned stuff and scale. I backed Apex Legends: The Board Game's crowdfunding campaign, knowing it'd be years before the game actually got into my hands, in major part because it was a board game adaptation of one of my favourite games, Apex Legends, and because the prospect of seeing recognizable locations and characters recreated in card and plastic was inherently appealing. The developers leaned into this aspect, not just investing heavily into producing a mass of high quality art assets, but even allowing players to purchase special diorama sets for the legend miniatures to stand on, completely useless in the actual play of the game, but great if your primary reasoning for purchasing the game was for miniature painting and display. In some sense, this returns to that notion of the “Unplayable game”, though not of the type I like to consider and enjoy.

For a certain type of consumer, the game is not made unplayable by material circumstances but rather by choice: While they may want to know the game is playable, they do not mind if the game is never actually played. For this kind of consumer, it may simply be enough to display the game proudly on a shelf, perhaps even with a few of its game pieces dotted around their home or office. The game is, on some level, designed to serve as an object of discussion and adoration, rather than, or at least alongside, functioning as an object of play.

I am also aware that while I would argue that the stuff and scale of Apex Legends: The Board Game does not make the game inherently more fun, this also wades deep into one's opinions re: Eurogames vs Ameritrash. This dichotomy (needlessly nationalized, especially as the urr Eurogame is Go, a game of Chinese origins, and also needlessly hierarchized, as Ameritrash implies they are inherently inferior to Eurogames, which is not true) represents two different pathways for board game design: The Eurogame is minimalist, elegant, self-justifying, using as few game pieces, rules and aesthetic touches to focus players entirely on the game's play. Amerishtrash, meanwhile, is maximalist, highly aesthetically and materially oriented, focused on having a bunch of different bits to move around or tick up or roll or pull or play, and of figurines and display pieces and high artistic and narrative investment. In other words, while Eurogames focuses on the emergent qualities of play, Ameritrash is game design that seeks to surround, even engulf play, in the fun of stuff. In this sense, more stuff, and greater scale, does directly correlate to greater value and enjoyment.

If we were to quantify Apex Legends: The Board Game on this spectrum, it clearly lands far closer to Ameritrash than Eurogame. This is due in part to its sheer physical presence on the table, but also its multiple overlapping and interconnected systems, and because of its high commitment to artistry and aesthetic flourishes. These all come together to contribute to and build up the game’s central fantasy, which is on record as an incredibly specific fantasy, which is that that playing Apex Legends: The Board Game should feel like the final minutes of a late 2022 - early 2023 era match of the battle royale mode of Apex Legends: The Video Game, featuring two squads do their final looting, shooting and ability using as the ring closes around them. And if we judge the game by this metric, on how successfully it executes on its fantasy, we find it to not just be incredibly successful, but also be very fun.

The play session that me and my brother played began with our two squads taking sniper shots at each other from either side of a dam, with us separated by a near impassible canyon, save a few ziplines that went over it. We dove for small bits of cover wherever we could as the ring slowly closed, with my brother gaining the upper hand in these opening bouts. But soon the ring engulfed the building he was occupying, forcing him to move from his position and zipline over to my side of the dam. This second phase resulted in intense close quarters combat, with special abilities firing off every round as we desperately fended each other off. The final bout had my brother send his Bloodhound back across the canyon, outside the ring, so they could snipe me from a distance while his Gibraltar clung to life up close. While I had a couple good shots towards the end, my Wraith died first and Bloodhound died soon after. The game ended with my brother having won handily. But if I’m honest, he largely won the bout right at the start.

In the opening round, a sniper shot from Bloodhound took half my Wraith’s health out, and I didn't have the right gear to heal her back to full immediately. Thus, my ability to maneuver and fire back was delayed as I tried to get her back on her feet, which in turn meant my brother was able to move to better positioning, loot better gear and fire off more shots. For everything I tried, and for every other event or bit of bad or good luck the game threw up, nothing was able to swing the momentum of the encounter back in my favour.

What's notable is that, as a game designer, the fact that the game can be fully swung against me so immediately is incredibly problematic. While I don't doubt there was likely some set of moves I could have done to swing the match back in my direction, I still ended up spending essentially the entirety of a 2+ hour play session assuming I had lost from the word go and was ultimately proven right. In most scenarios, that's just not a desirable feeling for a player to have.

And yet, as an Apex Legends: The Video game player, I found the scenario incredibly gratifying, because that is indeed how some encounters in Apex Legends can go! While I would say that Apex can be surprisingly forgiving in letting you recover and reset an encounter, more so than many other Battle Royales, this was a situation where a team managed to land a big early hit early in an encounter and keep up pressure on their opponent throughout the rest of the encounter. If the team they were opposing had no easy cover to hide behind, nor the items required to fully reset their situation, nor any ability to try and escape the encounter entirely, well, then of course they lost. That's just how Apex Legends works. Why would I expect, or want, anything else?

From this perspective, of approaching the game as a sort of simulacrum of Apex Legends: The Video Game, I undeniably enjoyed it. The cadence of the match, the strategies we employed, the ways in which the scenario played out, flexible and fated, all matched up to my experience of Apex Legends: The Video Game. And as someone who enjoys that game, and in particular the particular era of the game they are attempting to emulate, and found that emulation to be essentially successful, then I am unable to deny that I had a ton of fun playing Apex Legends: The Board Game, even as I reckon with the myriad ways I didn't enjoy playing Apex Legends: The Board Game.

It’s important to credit the artistic strengths of Apex Legends: The Board Game. It truly cannot be understated how important it was that our match looked the part, not just that the major elements like buildings and characters to small details like fences or ziplines are show dedicated study to the original assets and incredibly work in recreated in material form, but also that elements like buildings, cover and character abilities dome physically occupy the space in a meaningful and appropriate way. The result is a real sense that one is looking into the world of Apex Legends, the graphical "simplifications" required by the material nature of the Board Game also giving it the aesthetic of a tactical map or low-fidelity hologram. The rulebook dedicated 4 whole pages to how to deduce whether a given character can see another, or what elements of cover might sit in-between the two, but I tell you that 90% of the time we were able to resolve this on our own by simply crouching down and looking at the world through the shooter’s eyes.

Yet… those 4 pages of Line of Sights rules, themselves inside of an 8 page explanation of the shoot action, which adds up to be a full 10 step, multi-phase process. Beyond just line of sight, the shoot action requires the player to do significant amounts of math to determine a gun’s “To-Hit Difficulty” (a confusing name) which depends on the gun’s ideal range, attachments, and different varieties of cover and abilities that might be either on or between the two characters. And again, while this is not inherently bad game design, players are doing the shoot action constantly, given it's a game about shooting, and going through these steps is cumbersome every time, not least of which because you are required to reshuffle a full deck of cards every time. I can’t deny that shooting in Apex Legends is a complicated problem, and that even if in the experience of play it can feel as simple as pulling the trigger on a controller, it is also one that incorporates every bit of complexity that is outlined above. And yet, for all these justifications I can make in terms of whether Apex Legends: The Board Game meaningfully fulfills or accounts for it's central fantasy of emulating a video game, I still struggle with that simple, base reality: I am playing a board game, and in that context, why is any of this like any of this?

While I hope to have captured some of the complexity of Apex Legends: The Board Game, I find it impossible to fully explain just how truly overwhelming this game is. To give just a small amount of further insight on this topic: Each legend has two central abilities, displayed on cards, that recharge a certain number of turns after use. But they also have an entirely separate stack of abilities, which are also displayed on cards, that are used once and then discarded, which are pulled into a hand slowly over the course of the game. When you pick up loot, sometimes it directly Loot sometimes slots into specific slots on your character, or onto guns, and other times goes into your backpack to be used or attached separately, and there are very specific, but confusing rules on how that all works, even as I was unable to find the rules that specified how you exchanged items between allied legends. There are ofcourse dozens of gun cards, not just detailing the specifics of what gun they are and what base stats they have, but variants, with different starting ammo, attachments, passives and special abilities. And there are also ofcourse multiple grenade types, which utilize their own, bespoke throwing mechanics to determine how "accurate" your throw was. And trust me when I tell you there is more. More gamemodes, more maps, more modifiers that add adtional complexity to the game. I cannot tell you if this game is strategically deep for the sheer fact that I cannot see it's bottom. It's a 30cmx30cmx30cm box hiding within it a bottomless pit.

This utter, almost depraved complexity that the game offers requires an almost equally dedicated depravity from it's players, to not just understand and execute on the full ruleset but to appreciate and engage with the full range of tactical options a player may have at any given time. And during play, while my brother and I did our best to play this behemoth of a board game, I came to an uncomfortable realization: My brother and I were only able to play Apex Legends: The Board Game, let alone enjoy it, because we have a deep familiarity with Apex Legends: The Video Game. Our understandings of the possibility space offered of the board game, of the nuances mobility and positioning, of shooting and grenade throwing, of item and ability usage, stemmed entirely from our ability to think through the scenario via the lens of the video game. Without this prior context, and our ability to insert our knowledge of that game's play into this game's play, we would have absolutely lost. And not just lost on what we should do in any given scenario, nor even simply what we could do, but far importantly, on the why of doing any of it at all? Why should I cross the canyon vs staying? Why would I use any one of these legends over any other? Why is shooting a gun so complex? Why is this game so big? Why did they make it so complex, so overflowing with stuff,and at such scale?

While playing Apex Legends: The Board Game, I was reminded of a particular class I took while I was in high-school and doing a summer game design program at the University of Southern California. We had been instructed on the benefits of paper-prototyping, about how it was not just faster than digital prototyping, but offered specific affordances, such as using real-world gravity to move objects, or utilizing the materiality of physical game pieces to adjust them mid-play. We were all then instructed to make a board game that, ideally, leaned into these physical affordances. But Overwatch had just come out, and every student in the class had been playing a bunch of Overwatch therefore almost every board game made by every group was just some take on “What if a hero shooter was also a board game”. I remember finding the board games I played that day fun, even if I remember nothing about them, but what I’ll never forget is overhearing what one TA said to another at the back of the room where they thought no one else could hear: “None of them have used the physicality of board games at all. They’ve all just made Overwatch: The Board Game”.

Apex Legends: The Board Game, to be clear, does not feel like a student project, assembled hastily from scraps over the course of an hour. Apex Legends: The Board Game feels like a highly polished, highly considered product, with incredible artistry and intelligent mechanics all resulting in a board game that I find genuinely quite fun to play, and one intend to try and play more of. But it is also cumbersome, in it’s storage, in it's set-up and in it’s play. At every turn, it seems to not so much take advantage of it’s medium as a board game, but rather find novel, sometimes intelligent, sometimes frustrating, ways to overcome the limitations of a board game: Physical buildings assembled from complex papercraft, bulging as they barely manage to maintain their shape; A plethora of incredibly complex rules requiring complex mathematics that players must remember and then execute on lest the game fly wildly off track; the simple decision to make the game almost unbearably large, almost inherently unplayable, just so it’s various pieces can exist at a scale that allows for the artistry and fidelity to appropriately awe.

Apex Legends: The Board Game succeeds in the material world in terms of that artistry, and succeeds in the ludic world in terms of executing on it’s inherent fantasy of translating a fast-paced first person shooter to a turn-based squad shooter. And that’s all fine, in many ways impressive, and in most ways was the point of the whole project. But at the end of the day what I think I want from a board game is the ability to just play with it: To bring it over to a friend’s place, or some convient middle space, to show it off to someone who I think might like it; to set it up quickly wherever is least disruptive for others, to move through the explanation of the game’s rules with speed and then to briefly re-explain them wherever there is friction, to experience fun and tension throughout the process of play, and to pack it all back up again with ease when our play is done. Apex Legends: The Board Game is not interested in providing any element of that fantasy, that fantasy of being a good board game. And that it is a difficult thing for a board game to lack.

Devlog 3 - Projection

2025-07-16T00:00:00Z

A more focused devlog today, a fun, weird technical one, where artistic overhauls require large technical overhauls too, and we contemplate the roles of game engines (and external tools generally) in our workflows.

On Screen, At the Screen

As I teased in the last blog post, I’ve undertaken a pretty major visual / interactional overhaul for Inoculate, putting the entire previous game view on a set of in-game “Computer Screens”. This was something I’ve wanted to do for a while, and for a few reasons: For one, there are significantly more options for the kinds of content I can display, while still ensuring the entire experience feels coherent. It also gives the game a more wholistic visual identity than a purely abstract view could provide. Finally, it gives some of that sense of “contextualization” that I talked alot about in the last blog post, grounding the game’s abstract mechanics in an at least partially real world.

It’s weird to start a Devlog with the final result of my labour, only to then work backwards through how I achieved it. Yet, it's also accurate to the experience of making this all work: I knew exactly what I wanted, underwent a process to achieve it, and then achieved essentially exactly what I wanted. But that process of getting there was itself interesting and notable, and so still worth analyzing imo!

To start with, I built the current visual set-up, which obviously is still just the barest of greyboxes. Getting the game to actually render to these screens was relatively simple. Splitting what I’m terming the “Map View” (i.e the one with all the Nodes) and the “Axes View” (the one with specific Node info), I essentially just pointed cameras at them, rendered those cameras to a render texture, slapped the render texture on a material, slapped that material on a plane, slapped that plane on the front of the computer and that was it! Easy!

For what it’s worth, there are probably some of you wondering why I didn’t just slot at least the Axes UI elements directly on to the screen, instead of doing this Camera pointed at UI approach. I have my reasons (though we’ll be talking about some of the problems it caused later), but my answer is two-fold. For one, this approach helps unite the interaction system across screens, and has the added benefit of making it incredibly easy to swap out what a screen is displaying at any given time, just by adjusting what's being rendered to the render texture. That said, it'll all also definetly be getting tweaked over time: Stuff like swapping the UI buttons for “physical” buttons or having certain pieces of information be displayed via analogue means, all to make this machine the player now uses a more… machine-y feel. As I said earlier, having a variety of options to display different kinds of content is really what this whole aesthetic is for, and while that will definetly be refined (and made more performant!), these two visual / mechanical options for UI / UX is going to be a really fun thing to play with.

As a fun extra, here's some of the game elements from the scene view. You can see the room is specifically angled / position to not be looking at HUD / Map view. A very goofy solution to a problem that's VERY easily solvable in a number of other ways.

Interfacing

Of course, the easy part is getting a camera to render a pre-existing thing; The harder thing is to get interactions with that previous thing to work again. Essentially, the way interactions worked before was simple: The player hovers over / clicks something with their mouse, if it’s a Unity UI button we just trigger than interaction, and if not we shoot a raycast out based on the mouse’s position, see if it hits an intractable, and then trigger whatever interaction that’s designed to trigger. The problem is now that, in order to get some of those same functions working but with content "inside" a screen, we now have to do multiple checks and translations:

What game screen is the player trying to interact with
Where on the screen itself are they hovering over / clicking
What position does that correspond to "inside" of said screen
Determine if that internal position corresponds to any intractable
If so, trigger the interaction

To begin with, because I knew we’d have multiple screens which needed essentially identical functions, I created a generic class that would help with all of the above steps. This sits on any on the planes we made previously that display all of the content, and are fed a reference to the camera whose content’s they are displaying. With that, I made it so there is always a raycast shooting out of the mouse’s location, and if said raycast hits a screen, we know the player is attempting to interact with the contents of it. This solves step 1.

From there, step 2 is relatively easy: Unity has an internal concept called “Bounds”, which return the dimensions of a given object. With that, we can use the origin point of the screen object to convert the point on the screen that our initial raycast is hitting to a purely relative position (0,0 being the center, 1,1 being the top right corner, etc).

Positioning

We’re now onto step 3, converting that relative screen position to an actual world space position, relative to the internal camera, and this is where I run into a rather embarrassing problem related to Vector math. Essentially, the Map View camera is at a slight downwards angle, which means any sort of relative "vertical" position that we try to input needs to be "tilted" to match the angle of the map view camera (i.e also moving forward in world space). The thing is that the math required to pull this off, while not particularly complicated, was just beyond my ability to implement at the time. Embarrassing! Even as I think about it now, I think about how not complicated it is, yet the act of trying to do it by hand just swallowed a massive amount of time.

At a certain point, I just got tired of trying to figure out a proper solution to the problem. Instead, I opted for some classic Unity bullshit. I already wanted a cursor to appear when the mouse moved over a screen, if just for the purposes of testing this output position. And, well, that cursor needed to be tilted to match the angle of the camera to appear correctly… which was easiest to achieve by having it be a child of the camera… and that meant that it’s local position was, essentially, angled (i.e moving it "up" in local space would move it a bit "forward" in world space, at the desired rate). This meant I could use this cursor to kill two birds with one stone: I’d move the cursor’s local position by the relative input Vector2, which would automatically move it at the desired angle and put it at the correct position. With that, I just used the cursor’s position to fire a raycast from to check for interactibles. This means that even in the current build, where I have turned the cursor invisible, the object itself is still there, still being moved around, as a way to shortcut me past some math I was struggling with.

This solved step 3, and step 4 / 5 should have been relatively easy from that point, right? Use the same systems I had previously for checking / triggering interactibles, just now utilizing the postion / raycast I was shooting from the Map / Axes view cameras. Well, only kinda. For the interactables that had already been working via raycasts hitting colliders, this basically worked without issue. But. There were also the interactibles that worked via the Unity UI system. I assumed getting these to trigger via a raycast would be pretty easy, given I had utilized this functionality when using Unity’s VR package in the past. But, for this project, which is not a VR game, and one where I didn’t want to install said package and fake it being a VR game just for this simple interaction… well the classic Unity bullshit swung backwards in my direction.

There were some semi-complicated ways to try and essentially force this functionality, but to be honest? I didn’t care for it. Doing a bunch of work just to pipe back into some in-built Unity functions, some of which I have other problems with, just didn’t seem worth it. So I decided to build my own button class. I tied it to a Serializable event, which is triggered if the player attempts to interact with it. This can also be further customized to reference functions on game objects from other scenes if required (Manager classes being the main example). I even store the mouse’s prior raycast information so that I can check if the current raycast has just started or stopped hovering over a button, allowing for hover based features. All this to say, it’s annoying to have to recreate features you’ve already implemented, but it's also hard to deny the tangible benefits of implementing your own solution.

One Man’s Tools

I want to stop and consider the previous section, as I find it represents one of the weirdest parts of working within a commercial game engine, or really any external toolset.

In the first instance, trying to translate an on-screen position to a camera-based position, I found myself "saved" by an external toolset. I was struggling with some relatively basic math, and then I realized that that it was math Unity does all the time without issue. And thus, via a slightly jank object parenting operation, I was able to hand off the need to figure out that math, and moved on with my day.

In the second instance, I had a relatively simple procedure I wanted done, interacting with UI via a raycast, but due to internal, arcane reasoning, Unity just refused to allow this to happen. I could have utilized one of many awkward, cumbersome work-arounds to try and get this all working again. Or, I could do what I ended up doing: Code it all myself, saving myself the trouble of managing an inherently flawed system and giving myself the benefit of full and complete control of how it works.

This is the thing about external tools: we often don’t really know how it does the things that we ask it to do, and moreover, that is often the point. I very much enjoy that there’s alot of stuff Unity can do without requiring much thought from me, from the complexities of physics interactions to the basics of rendering the game at all. But by this same process, I also deny myself the ability to learn how to program these things myself. I could, ofcourse, simply program an entire game-engine by myself. Am I advocating for this? Not really? The reality is that not jsut is that really outside of my desired skillset, but it would also just massively slow me down in a way that my goals simply don’t necessitate nor allow for.

But this is all also important to reckon with because of the amount of time I spent trying to get this external toolset to do things for me, hours I lost specifically because I wholeheartedly believed that the toolset should manage those things for me. The time I spent trying to make Unity solve my problems for me was, perhaps unsurprisingly, far longer than the amount of time it took to simply write my own versions of the scripts that functionned exactly how I wanted them to.

This is really the epic highs and lows of external toolsets: The highs of it simply doing stuff for you, or learning how to utilize and manipulate the tools to get it to do even funkier stuff for you; The lows of the stuff you don't learn how to do, and the struggles that stem from fighting the toolset to do those things for you. Another way to frame this is, in essence, tools mastery and tools reliance, the former about your ability to know how and when to use the tools, and the latter being about your inability to not use the tools and/or to prioritize their use above all else. And I think it is hard to fully separate one from the other.

I contemplate this as I think about how my primary game-making engine is Unity, and why, despite my experience in Unreal, Godot, Gamemaker, etc, I don’t use those tools instead. I have my reasons of course (the game jam build was in Unity, Unreal would be too heavy, Gamemaker too light, Godot probably could work but maybe for a project with slightly lower stakes). But I think the reality is this: I am most familiar with Unity, having the most mastery over it and, in turn, some reliance on the things I know it can do for me. Were I to move over to those other tools, I wouldn't have that mastery, and in the process of learning them, I would encounter just as many issues and just as many hacks to overcome their problems as I do with my problems with Unity. At the enbd of the day, I would be forming another symetrical, mutually beneficial if slightly toxic relationship with any other game engine as I have with Unity. And for now, what really keeps me in Unity's grip is simple: Better the devil you know…

And that’s it! In summary at least. I skipped over basically restructuring everything about my InputManager because while huge it was also a bit dull. Each screen’s content also had its quirks to re-implement, like how clicking and dragging on the map view needs to move the in-game camera, or scrolling the mouse wheel needing to zooming in and out, which took some finagling.

This also doesn’t cover some little aesthetic touches I’ve done, like making a little greybox room around the computer screens, doing a custom post-process pass on that camera view, and even implementing a “Sun” that moves in sync with the current game speed. These touches, while small and basic at the moment, are the kinds of things Inoculate needed: Context, a sense of space, the sense that the world is far larger and more real than the abstract map you play the game on. It is still early days, but it’s exciting to have spent a few months with this vision of the game in mind and now, in the course of a couple weeks, have it so totally in.

And for a final tease in prep for the next devlog, is that, as I said previously, what’s displayed on the screens is totally arbitrary, and can be swapped in and out at any time. This allows for a very fun way to implement a framing device for the whole game…

Devlog 2 - Systemics

2025-06-30T00:00:00Z

Devlog 1 was… in April? Nearly 3 months ago? Oh no!

Much has changed since the last devlog: I’ve moved, had some brief but nonetheless unfun medical occurrences, went to Berlin, got alot of playtesting feedback, and instituted some rather major changes as a result. What hasn’t changed is my employment status (I would loooove to do some design work on your thing, I promise I'm actually quite good at it!) , but that also meant getting to make major progress on Inoculate, which has been hugely rewarding.

However, I did manage to talk myself into the idea that said progress was not... aesthetically appealing. But I am taking the advice of my friend / fellow (much more consistent) blogger V Buckenham who told me that I can, quote “afford to put like 1/10th of the ass into my posts”. This is good advice, indeed a less pressured writing process was one of the main goals of this blog in the first place, and so I’m writing this now!

To save myself and you from something way too long (even by my standards), I am just going to breakdown the big pieces of progress I’ve made on Inoculate re: the basic gameplay loop, framing device and some of underpinning systems, and not even attempt to cover the more visuals / narrative oriented work I’ve been doing recently. See this as a sort of lost late May / early June devlog.

As a final programming note: There will be a playable demo of the game up on Itch by early August! If the Game Jam version was a proof of concept, consider this demo a light vertical slice, featuring new levels, new mechanics, and an entire narrative / visual overhaul.

I’m still figuring out exactly what the future of this project looks like, methods of funding and distribution included. But that also means confirming that the base fundamentals of Inoculate are enjoyable, both for me as a dev and for others as players, and this demo will help lock a lot of that in place. Expect to hear a bit more about the demo soon, and if you don’t, please harass me about it.

Blowback

The main brunt of why this has taken so long to write (beyond, again, life events) starts in Berlin, specifically Amaze, where I handed around a build of the game to anyone who wanted to play it. The results were really useful, with the overall gameplay and conceit being well received, but with some important issues to address. One was onboarding, which was very expected: The tutorial is out of date, the game doesn’t allow for pausing, etc, etc.

This onboarding difficult relates back to probably my favourite piece of advice from Frank Lantz: Even if you know something is bad, get it playtested, because the emotional turmoil of seeing someone else crash into a known problem is what forces you to resolve it. I knew that the game did not onboard well, but oh boy do I hate seeing people struggle with it. I’m tackling this from multiple vantages at the moment, mainly via dramatically increasing the amount of player feedback and visual signalling, and I have a relatively major overhaul to how time works in the pipeline that will also help massively. And I've now fully excised the old tutorial from the game, though a replacement tutorial remains on hold for now.

Yet there was another concern that came up that was less anticipated, even as I warned of it coming in the last blog post: I would deliver my opening spiel about the game, that it was a node-based RTS about spreading political ideology, and then people would play the game and see the nodes… but not much political ideology.

Essentially, my goal of making the game more abstract had succeeded, but with the contemporary build lacking clear, contextual information, people mostly had to just trust me that the game was about politics. Some of the ideas that came up were ones I had already anticipated: Increased contextual information at the beginning or end of a level, a live twitter-style feed, etc. Yet also a struggle came from just scope: Were all 4 factions always in play? The map implies this even if the game does not! And equally, who is the player anyways? Even if you buy into the idea of ideological warfare, who is waging the war?

All ***** is politiical

I want to give specific credit here to Alan Hazelden, who listened to me as I discussed these issues and had such a great answer re: how to address the above issues that it has genuinely revolutionized the lens through which I look at the game.

He suggested that that player, functionally, played the role of a sort of for-hire influencer, one could be brought on to theorhetically any side in any situation, to influence a given network in their clients favour. What this means is that Inoculate’s politiical focus is, put simply, no longer limited to politics. We can have a level about boosting the notoriety of a celebrity, or shutting down negative perceptions of a specific brand, or pushing the conspiratorially minded towards certain theories, or really anything where multiple world-views come into conflict, while also keeping all of the previous ideas around supporting previous political parties. With this, ideas for a campaign structure, narrative exposition and framing, and level pacing all quickly slotted into place, not all of which I’ll get into here. But needless to say, I am hugely excited by this direction for Inoculate, with it not so much being an expansion of scope so much as an expansion of reach.

That said, implementing this notion systemically was still a little complex. Essentially, I had to take systems that had been built to account for 4 factions with set ideologies and identities, rip all of those up to make the systems be able to account for any number of factions, with completely bespoke identities, on a per level basis, and then also re-build those aforementioned factions for the levels that required them within the new system. This was not necessarily glamourous, I truly have nothing to show for it other than just like… rewritten code, but it was actually very well-timed, as it allowed me to massively refactor the code-base for better performance and legibility. Things may mostly look the same at this stage (there are new colours now?), but they do now run better, and the future of the game is very bright indeed.

Local Politics

Another huge mechanical change that this new framing device unlocked, and one that will actually go to help some of the issues players had in learning the game, are custom political axes (a better term will be found later). Previously, all levels featured the entirety of the political axes displayed on screen, even when massive swaths of it would essentially be untouched by both player and AI opponents. This heavily amplified the aforementioned difficulties with onboarding, as players didn’t know at a glance which parts of the spectrum they needed to care about, and more generally, it just meant that each level would feel same-y, even in case where they were played differently.

Now, I can assign certain parts of the axes to be blocked off. This, combined with the previous change to generalize factions, means the actual structure and movement around levels can be completely customized on a per level basis. You can see a few examples below, with the opening level now having only a small, horizontal line of movement allowed to focus the player’s actions, while a latter level feature a more diagonal layout, and finally an “anti-centrist” layout that I’d love to use in a fringe or conspiracy theory oriented level. I would like levels or factions to have some custom art in the future, so it’s not just me covering up the base political axes, but this will get the job done for now.

Multi-Level Politicking Scheme

In other systemic oriented news, I finally implemented an idea I’ve had for a while : Layers. Levels can now have 2 layers for actions and node connections, Online and Offline, with offline connections generally being rarer and offline actions generally being slower but more powerful. This combines with another new change, where actions are cancelled if an acting nodes faction changes mid-action (i.e, a node acting on behalf of a right wing party won’t continue to perform a right wing action if they stop being right-wing).

I’ve yet to fully grasp the impact this has on player strategy, in large part because I have yet to fully design levels that meaningfully utilize the split structure, but it’s at the very least another interesting tool for me AND the player to have at our disposal, and early work with it has been really fun, further building out interesting interpersonal relationships between nodes and thus, interesting strategies.

Campaign Strategy

Finally, I did some work on the AI, though I imagine I will be continuing to write statements to that effect well into the future. Beyond just getting the AI to properly factor in everything above, it is also now undeniably smarter in the moves it makes. And while my work on it is far from done, but I thought I’d at least illuminate how I’ve been going about this thus far.

The biggest change is the way the AI system evaluates possible actions. Upon hitting a pre-determined time interval per faction (which can be adjusted based on desired difficulty), the game scores every theoretical action that all nodes that belong to that faction can take. Some actions are discarded immediately after a series of checks if we consider them to be non-viable (for example, if a node cannot be moved up, we do not check if moving it up would technically still be a good action).

We then assign each viable action a score based on a variety of measurable aspects, such as: how many nodes the receiving node is connected to, or how close the receiving node is to being allied with the acting nodes faction, or if acting on the receiving node would pull it out of an existing faction. We also check to see if a given move would put the receiving node in an enemy faction, which is obviously quite bad, but was also an extremely common occurrence prior to this being implemented. After scoring each action, the AI manager performs whatever action has the highest score and the timer is reset.

There are some current blindspots I’ll need to address in future. It’s not great at pathfinding around blockers in the political axes, which is fine for now, but will be more of a problem depending on the style of board. It doesn’t fully track how spread out the beliefs of the actors within itself are, so it can sometimes be a very broad tent coalition, not to it’s benefit. It’d also be nice to give the AI a bit more of a memory so that it could, for example, determine if it’s continually trying the same action over and over again and if so, force it to try a different strategy (just for the sake of variety and preventing any game from getting stuck). Yet, even with all of that said, the AI is undeniably smarter than it’s ever been, and the system for handling it’s decision making is much more robust and easy to add to than it’s ever been. In fact, it being smart has even started having notable impact on the design of the game.

A fun anecdote to end on: A specific level featuring two factions, one with an influencer node connected to some of the player’s starting nodes, had the AI constantly trying to capture a specific node right near the start of the level, one I also wanted to capture. The AI completely ignored every other node on the board, and only fought me over this single node the entire match. While I would occasionally gain access to the node and be able to advance, the enemy would constantly re-capture this essential node, blocking off any further faction connections up the map and really slowing down my progress. After about 10 minutes of frustration with just why the AI was being so intense about this one specific node, I realized that well, of course it was: It has accurately recongized a chokepoint (i.e that I could not advance in the game without capturing that specific node), and thus it has deemed that claiming it is the most worthwhile action it could do, moreso than even trying to attack my main node directly, which might leave it vulnerable. The AI wasn’t being dumb, it was my encounter design that was flawed.

I was able to resolve this issue by essentially shifting the choke point away from the player’s side of the map and towards the enemies end. The enemy AI still recognized it as important and would claim it early, but the result was that the player and enemy would have a larger encounter across the board, and the fight for the choke point felt more meaningfully and better tilted in the player’s favour to prevent frustration. So while there is still work to be done, having an AI that is now smart enough that it can meaningfully inform how I do level design is really going to make going forward and continuing to design levels just that much more viable, and more fun.

And with that… I think this post is done for now! There’s actually a fair amount I didn’t cover above that meaningfully aligns with this kind of systemic work that’s just a little too low-key to mention here (alot of colour-coding and UI / UX updates to make the board much more legible especially). There are also plenty of other, quite large things that will be mentioned in the future.

But the goal is that you will hear about all these things smaller, hopefully in smaller, more frequent chunks.I think the next one will likely cover a pretty big visual conversion I’ve been doing the last few weeks (teaser below), and even some of the underlying systemic work that’s gone into making all that work, while the one after will be about the narrative work I’m in the process of doing. The one after that.. Well that might be the one with a link to a demo! Very exciting times.

Truly, Inoculate has been a real labour of love, both a game that feels deeply, weirdly personal to me while also being like nothing I thought I’d ever make. I am learning so much from the process of making it of course, but there is also just something radical about realizing I have the skillset required to pursue this game and make it a reality. To even have just accomplish what I have managed so far is really just a joy. And if you are reading this, thank you so much for being a part of that.

Anatomy of a Touch

2025-06-27T00:00:00Z

While I have not played the physical, real game of football in a long time, I do still remember some of what those school and weekend coaches would drill into my brain about it. What seemed to attract the most importance was the concept of the “touch”, i.e, the first touch you get on a ball in any given play. The touch was of paramount importance, not just setting the stage for whatever action was to follow, but containing within it many of the fundamental notions of the sport.

The touch can be thought to be built of three parts: Position, Intent, and Control.

Position matters because it determines your ability to even get any contact with the ball. Maybe a good pass or otherwise good luck landed you in just the right spot to receive the ball easily, but it’s more likely you’ll need to run for it, maybe jump for it, even kick out your leg or head to prevent it from flying right past you. Bear in mind that you might be jockeying for this position with any number of players too, and how a player just begins to position themselves to receive a ball is vital.

Intent is then about what you want the ball to do as a result of your touch. The most basic output is “have the ball land at your feet”, but this is often the least desired outcome outside of just handing the ball right back to your opponent. This is because a ball and / or player in motion is far harder to intercept than were they motionless. So a touch might be best used to spur the ball forwards, allowing you to follow it up the pitch with momentum. The touch could also function to pass the ball to a fellow teammate, away from opponent expectations and interference. A touch can even be what scores a goal, the ball provided just the right angle and speed to steer it to the back of the net. And ofcourse a touch can be the thing that prevents the ball from hitting the net too.

Control is the ability to execute on intent, because do you really know exactly when to jump such that the top of your head hits the ball at the right angle, speed and position such that it lands in the hands of your goalie? Isn’t it far more likely that you’ll miss it entirely, or that you’ll hit it away from your goalie and score an own goal? Control is of course influenced by positioning, because poor positioning leads to a lower chance of successful control. This risk of control can also influence intent, because if you distrust your ability to execute, then you likely simplify your intent or abandon it entirely.

So the touch is an important and deeply complicated element of football, happening hundreds, if not thousands, of times in a single game, each one fueled by a number of factors and then determining large swaths of the game to follow. It’s with this context that I ask… where is the touch in football games?

I have not played EA Sports FC (née FIFA) for a long time, longer even than since I played real football. But reviewing both my own memories and footage of the modern iterations, it’s remarkable how not present this concept of the touch is. Run a player onto a ball and it essentially magnetizes to them, the ball moving in whatever direction the player would like, up until they perform an action or an opponent performs an action on them. In this context, positioning continues to be emphasized but control is largely assumed to be perfect, and intent is thus perfectly executed.

Is this an abandonment of the core notions of football? Well, in a sense, yes. But I respect that that this abandonement isn’t totally unfair in the context of digitized sports games that games like EA Sports FC, alongside it’s contemporary ilk like Madden or NBA 2K, exist within.

Consider that these are digitized sport games about professional sports players, people whose entire careers are centered on their ability to fundamentally execute on the core mechanics of their given sport. In fact, this ease of play is an undeniable part of the fantasy of play when people come to these games. When one plays as… (googles "good footballer")... Mbappé, you simply don’t expect him to struggle with making the ball go forwards. Thus, having a set of semi-complicated inputs be required to make the ball go forward as Mbappé would be antithetical to the fantasy.

One also has to consider the fundamental conceit that the play of these games is designed around: Full team control. In most of these game’s main modes, the player is allowed to control every player on the team, swapping between whoever either has control of the ball, or whoever is closest to the ball. This has two knock on effects: For one, while the player might be engaging in the fundamental basic experience of a given sport’s play from moment to moment, they are also engaging with the large-scale strategy of a sport. In this sense, having them also engage in the complexities of base play aspects might simply overload the player cognitively. And on the other hand, consider that one of the most basic action a player can perform in this style of game is for the player to pass from themselves to an NPC, who they will then immediately take control over. If that NPC were to fumble the ball, or the player had to execute a set of inputs to simply receive the ball they passed to themselves, this basic action would become significantly more complex and frustrating than it should really be, given that the player has essentially just passed to themselves.

So, I understand why things like the touch might get left out of the large-scale digitized sports games as they pursue their larger goals and their broad swath of play modes and experiences. Yet, I do still find this a little disappointing. Because while I can enjoy these games on occasion, it is also undeniably in the awkward side-streets of the games, where anything from the fundamentals to the ancillary of a sport are highlighted, that I most enjoy them.

I had a really good time with the MyPlayer mode of NBA 2K14, because while it was ostensibly about you being a gifted basketball prodigy, I got to have a very different but even more fun play experience of absolutely sucking at basketball professionally. In this mode, you would only play as your created character and your performance on the court would be scored in real time. I, being bad at basketball and not understanding anything about it beyond the basic ruleset, would barely scrape a B+ at best, far more often landing in a C or D territory, especially because it factored in your NPC teammates' opinions of you in the process. Scoring well meant not just trying to score loads of points, but find good passes to your teammates to lay them up, or not make bad calls for a pass if you were in a bad position. This mode of play, of considering your own performance and how it relates to your team, is really cool, and fundamental to what made this gamemode interesting for me.

The thing is, I would spend the majority of most games quite literally sitting on the side of the court while my teammates played instead. This was because I was bad at the game, which the game could recognise, and so it would only send me out for only a few minutes in the 2nd and 3rd quarters before subbing me back off towards the end of the game so better players could make up for my failings. In fact, even while on the court players would try not to pass to me, even when I was in good positions, cause the game simulated their distrust in my ability to execute with the ball. Is this a very weird, in some ways just bad, situation to end up in when trying to live out the fantasy of playing a professional sport and being good at it? Yes, undeniably. But as is so often the case, I think this kind of player-antagonism rules, especially when the player’s own actions invited it.

And this all leads into perhaps my favourite part of the game: The post-match interviews. These followed a pretty basic formula, a reported asking a single question like “Your team lost, what went wrong?”, with the player getting four possible answers, in the range of “Our team did great today, I was the weak link” to “I think our coach just didn’t play us right” to “Obviously the problem was that no one passed to me”. These answers, alongside your play, would go on to inform your general standing in three categories: The aforementioned “How much do your teammates like you?” bar, but also “How much do fans of the team like you?” bar and, separately, the “How much do your fans like you?” bar. This range of scores, alongside an internal fake twitter that would commentate on your actions, would allow for really compelling roleplay: Do you sacrifice your ego for the sake of your team to try and win goodwill? Do you amp up your own reputation to get a better contract? Maybe even make your team’s fans hate you to up your chances of getting traded?

Now, were these ideas far more interesting in theory than in practice? Of course. My player was never at risk at simply being fired, which should have been the obvious outcome of my play, and I still often found myself being put into situations that simply did not befit my skillset or notoriety. Yet, what I liked about my time with NBA 2K14 was that it was not just about how I was kinda shit at basketball, but instead about the ways in which someone who is shit at basketball, yet fluked into doing it professionally, attempts to maintain a professional reputational and holds onto their spot as long as possible. To be able to play out this fantasy was far more interesting than the far more simplistic “What if you were simply the best at basketball?”.

(I feel like the increased attention and resources put into digitized sports games story modes vindicates this notion, even when they are also about being “the best”. People want story and conflict in their experiences, and if the game cannot produce that internally, having it injected via external forces is accepted. And on that note, if you have not seen tke Spike Lee directed NBA 2K16’s Livin’ Da Dream… I implore you to go look this up. Deeply fascinating and strange to see a talented if deeply complicated filmmaker do some version of their work in the context of an annualized sports game)

It is for the same reasons that I like the fantasy of “Maintaining a professional basketball career” that I think about the notion of the touch in football, even in spite of them being at opposite ends of what is actually required of playing a sport. I like them because they speak to the real and localized level of play, of base manipulation of in-game objects to the complex social politics of team sport. And it is for these reasons that I have found myself obsessed with Sloclap’s Rematch.

Rematch is a team based, multiplayer football game, from 3 to 5 a side, with simplified, almost Rocket Leage-esque rules (6 minute matches, no offsides, no outs, no fouls). You play a single player on a team, with a stamina bar you have to manage and a variety of simple yet deep actions that allow you to manipulate the ball. You might use the right bumper to augment any ball oriented moves to have them go into the air, or the left trigger to go into a defensive, more tactile stance. The game’s 3rd person camera even has you physically aim your kicks akin to how you might aim a gun in a third person shooter. But most importantly, it has a touch button.

Using the touch, you can stop the ball, push it forward in any direction, even flick it up with the aforementioned right bumper, but the player must use this (or one of the other ball interaction buttons) to meaningfully "catch" the ball. Don't press it, and your character will simply stand stil as the ball goes by them. This combines with what’s most special about Rematch: the ability to queue an action in advance.

If you’re in the right position to receive the ball, a diamond icon will appear over it. At this point, pressing any ball-oriented action input will prime your character to execute that move from the position, whether it be chesting a ball down to your feet, headering a ball over an opponent and to your teammate, or even bicycle kicking the ball into the goal. All of this is achieved via the standard interaction buttons, but it’s tailored to the best style of action you would want to perform given the scenario at hand.

Yet, what complicates this is that you also have to consider that your opponent might also be queuing up their own actions, and depending on their relative position or the speed of their action, they can absolutely beat you to the touch. Equally, they could be predicting the move you're about to make, and planning their response in advance. And while Rematch doesn’t have NPC players or teammate scoring, it certainly does have the toxicity of any multiplayer team game. Call for the ball only to make a selfish run with it and lose it? Expect not to be passed to for a while. Make a series of careful passes, or score a daring shot? Enjoy the good graces and increased trust.

In these senses, Rematch matches my experience of playing football perhaps more than any other. The fundamentals of the touch feel adequately represented without being overly complex in terms of input, and similarly, the experience of having to understand your place within a team and having a responsibility to play well for them is fully felt, though mercifully diluted by the inherent anonymity of online matchmaking.

It’s notable that I find myself drawn to this kind of digitized version of a sport, and I respect that I might feel differently about them if I closely followed the internal politics of a sporting league or was a regular player of the sport in the real world. Yet, I also think these experiences speak to what we like about sports: the complexity and skill required in the base manipulation of an object and the decision making about what to do with that object, all alongside the personal responsibility and social politics that come from executing on the former within the context of a team. These aspects are what produce interesting stories, ones that are hopefully illustrated in the final score, yet whose specific small contours and arcs are only revealed by the experience of play. This style of story is what we come to sports for, and perhaps more broadly what we seek from games in general. It is a simple yet wonderous delight to find a game that is able to, time and time again, will these stories into being, digitized or otherwise.

Virtual Realities

2025-06-10T00:00:00Z

Gemini Twins

Ultima 7, a top-down game in the Ultima series released in April of 1992, is perhaps most immediately notable for its truly disorienting camera perspective. If you can get past that, you’ll also find Ultima 7 is notable for the fidelity of its systems (fidelity defined in this essay as some combination of complexity, believability and universality in a given thing’s presence / application, for ease of discussion). Ultima 7 of course had all the standard RPG features that were expected at the time: NPC conversations, trade, combat, party recruitment, exploration, etc, but it's what it added to the series that remains impressive to this day.

Ultima 7 added NPC schedules, which allowed for different NPC behaviours depending on both time of day and weather (both of which were also added in this release). A new NPC bark system allowed NPCs to converse with one another in real-time without player input. Most impressively, nearly every element in the game was interactable in some way, whether it be blowing the bellows of a forge, cooking food in an oven, or, most impressively, the ability to rotate and move pieces of furniture by simply by clicking / dragging them. A clip from Baldur’s Gate 3 went viral a couple years ago that showcased the ability for players to stack boxes on top of one another, enabling their characters to scale said boxes and then jump over an otherwise impassable wall. That exact behaviour is in Ultima 7 via it's furniture manipulation system, its lack of actual 3D geometry be damned.

Ultima 7 is also notable for releasing one month after a different Ultima game, one which has a slightly more individualized legacy. Ultima Underworld was a first person RPG / dungeon crawler set in the Ultima world, once again including all of your standard features (combat, conversation, exploration, secrets); It was also, notably, the first true first person RPG / dungeon crawler.

Unlike previous games of its ilk, which operated on fixed grids, static visuals and cardinal directions for movement, Ultima Underworld had what we would consider fully modern freedom of movement, even including looking up and down (a genuine technical achievement for the time). This not only allowed players to admire the distinct floor and ceiling texture (also an achievement), but was functionally required because level design was also highly vertical, including stairs and jumps over gaps. You could even swim in water, which realistically (if jarringly) bobbed the camera as though you were struggling to stay afloat. For full context, Wolfenstein 3D, the game most often credited with introducing this style of 3D, first person graphics to video games, released 2 months after Ultima Underworld, and with both lower visual and systemic complexity to boot (no offence to Wolfenstien).

From a modern vantage, Ultima 7 and Ultima Underworld sit in almost perfect contrast to each other: 7 was interested in a sort of mechanical fidelity and simulationist oriented immersion, while Underworld was interested in visual fidelity and perspective oriented immersion. The result is both being major technical / gameplay marvels while also both having severe drawbacks, drawbacks that their temporal twin excelled at. The question that must have been on everybody’s lips, “What if you could pair the mechanical fidelity of Ultima 7 with the visual fidelity of Ultima Underworld?”, is one that still resonates today.

But to limit their impact to RPGs is to underplay their hand. Because Ultima Underworld is also considered the first true immersive sim. Immersive sims are a genre in their own right, complete with tropes, trappings and traditions, but in many ways immersive sims also represent a set of ideals, even a sort of design ideology. While Ultima Underworld might be the first immersive sim in terms of genre, it AND Ultima 7 together express the ideology that underpins the immersive sim.

The goal of any immersive sim is, at its core, to build a Virtual Reality, i.e a gameplay space that feels truly real and reactive to both player and internal action. This requires not just a simulational fidelity that can fully account for all agents in the world, but also visual fidelity that allows the results of those simulations to be visible and parsable to a player, which in turn gives the game a sense of lived reality, almost as though you are peering into this other world through the window of your screen. In turn, this also requires an interactional ease so that players can engage with this world in a naturalistic way, alongside a strong narrative that can support all actions and actors within it.

This approach to game design, and this idealized vision of what a game could be, is what many of the developers of Ultima Underworld, including the likes of Warren Spector, Paul Neurath and Doug Church, would go on to pursue. In that pursuit, they would work on some of the most important titles of the immersive sim canon, and in turn, some of the most important games of the medium: System Shock, Deus Ex and, my personal favourite, Thief.

Who's afraid of Thief VR?

“Why bother being upset about Thief VR (aka Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow)?” is a perfectly reasonable question to ask; it's one I’m struggling with myself as I write this, and in trying to answer it, I have found that it’s quite a difficult question to answer without context. Without context, Thief VR might as well be any of a number of random video game franchises with a VR spinoff.

So, I like Thief 1 (aka Thief: The Dark Project released in 1998) alot, it being an incredibly designed object in nearly all ways, title included. It’s fun to be a weird freak sneaking into the homes of the rich, fun to steal a key or coin purse off the back of a yawning guard, fun to use a water arrow to douse out a fire. Even the setting, a city simply called “The City” where fantastical elements have run head-first into an industrial revolution, is one that’s both full of character and intrigue while also constantly justifying and fueling the gameplay in really novel ways. Even if you put aside all the history that led up to Thief 1, or all the legacy that Thief 1 has come to have, Thief 1 would simply be a great game that’s worth playing today. With all that said, I’ve also never finished Thief 1.

The same goes for the rest of the games in the series, all of which I've also played and never finished. I took on this task initially as part of a project for a class I took on Immersive Sims (shoutouts and credit go to Matthew Weise, whose teaching and expertise informed large swaths of this piece), and as a result I can give a broad but solid enough summary of the history of the rest of the franchise:

Thief 2 (aka Thief 2: The Metal Age, released in 2000) is essentially just Thief 1 but with more levels and and more refined systems / focus (a significant reduction in zombie fighting, for example). It's just as good a title as Thief 1, possibly even better, if also just a mostly straightforward iteration.

Thief 3 (aka Thief: Deadly Shadows, released 2004) was made in the dying era of the original immersive sims, where the constraints of the OG Xbox combined with a commitment to graphical fidelity and gameplay ease, leading to a dumbing down of simulational complexity. While Thief 3 does have it's standout moments and ideas, and is in many ways still a perfectly adequete title, it's mostly agreed that it failed to live up to the heights of the prior titles.

Thief 4 (aka Thief / Thi4f, released 2014) was a PS3 / PS4 bridge title that basically doubled down on everything that led to Thief 3 being so poorly received. While undeniably quite pretty at times, it's also significantly more constrained, whether it be in its highly linear level layout or even just its restriction of basic actions like jumping or utilization of rope arrows. Combine this overall approach with a highly intrusive but not very compelling story, and Thief 4 unfortunately has few redeeming qualities, especially when compared to both it's forefathers, and even it's contemporaries.

What really damaged Thief 4's reception, and what would thus help put a nail in the series’ coffin, was that the video game Dishonoured had released two years prior. Dishonoured was a stealth oriented immersive sim that was an explicit spiritual successor to Thief, one made targeting the same audience as Thief 4 and with many of the same hardware and market-oriented constraints. Yet, it also managed to maintain Thief's systemic complexity, further expanded on the player's agency and impact on the world, and all while still allowing for that console oriented ease of play. The result was that Thief, as a franchise, was ultimately devoured by its own children.

Now, 10+ years since the last Thief game, the series returns in the form of a VR game. If you have this aforementioned knowledge, this comeback is notable, surprising even, but still not immediately upsetting. This is a game series with only 4 games in it, released over a decade and a half, with the last “good” one being released during the Clinton administration. At best, Thief VR could be taking one of the best games ever made and combining it with the affordances of new hardware, new control schemes and a whole new perspective. At worst, Thief VR will end up being just another bad / dissapointing Thief game, of which there are many. With that possibility space known, and neither outcome truly all that egregious, is there anything to really be upset about?

Displacement

When Half Life: Alyx was announced, an unexpected VR entry in a franchise long-thought dead, many fans were upset. It’s easy to see why. The Half Life series to that point was almost universally excellent, telling a compelling, linear and famously incomplete story across multiple titles, all alongside strong gunplay, set piece design and major technical / design innovations with each major release. In this context, having a significant follow-up title be restricted to PC VR was a sort of nightmare. PC VR is expensive, not just in the basic costs to buy everything required, but also in terms of the real estate required to play, and even time / technical investment to set it all up. And none of that is to mention that the fundamental experience of play on a controller / keyboard + mouse is just staggeringly different to a VR one. Some people can’t even play VR games for accessibility reasons, whether it be motor control issues to motion sickness or more. So the question Half Life: Alyx left many with was just “why did Half Life need VR?”. For some, there was not a clear or convincing answer, at least not beyond Valve’s massive investment in VR hardware / software, and it thus far being lacking in “killer apps”.

I don’t like playing devil’s advocate, but I do think there were compelling reasons for Half Life to transition to a VR title. To understand these, we need to identify what the main ludic goals of the Half Life series were up to that point.

Over the course of the Half Life series, there’s a central design comittment to what we could term "ludonarrative immersion": a notion that the player should always feel as though, beyond simply playing the central character, they in some sense are the player character. This is achieved by having the player character only perform gameplay verbs the player has access to, and only at the player’s request. Furthering this idea, there is a notion that the world should always react to the player appropriately, and, bar major edge cases, the player should feel enabled to take whatever route through a situation that they see fit.

The games achieve this in many ways, but I'd argue the main throughline is that they are never explicitly prescriptive about what the player should do at any point, instead being suggestive. This is to say that while game may kill or soft-lock the player if they refuse to engage properly with a given scenario, these outcomes are are usually presented a simulationist comeuppance to the player’s actions / inaction.

Take the now iconic moment the player is asked to throw a can in a trash can early in Half Life 2. While this is required to advance (because Valve wants to teach the player about physics interactions), it's not explicitly displayed as an objective anywhere on screen. Instead, a guard asks the player to perform the action, and they diegetically block the player’s forward progress until they complete the task. The player technically has only one meaningful option: Throw out the can, but the world will realistically react to other actions the player might take. For example, while the player can’t refuse to throw out the can verbally, because there is "speech" verb in Half Life, the player can just choose to not throw the can away. The guard will continue to not allow passage if the player does this, yes, but ultimately that's a reasonable response in the context of the game. The player may also choose to have a more violent response, to attempt to push past the guard or even to throw the can at them, and the result is that the guard will push or even fully attack the player. What this small sequence does is help to establish a ludonarrative guideline for the player to follow: That the player's play will be taken seriously by both the game’s narrative and systems.

When we consider the technology of VR through this lens, that Half Life desires both high levels of player expressivity and gameplay reactivity, one can see the reasoning for bringing Half Life to VR. VR allows for the player to be expressive in truly novel and personalized ways while also allowing game systems to fully account for those actions and react accordingly. Half Life: Alyx in turn dooes allow for a “true” sense of ludonarrative immersion, not just in the sense that the player’s primary senses are engulfed by the world of Half Life, but that it also allows for this extreme expresssivity and reativity.

The reveal trailer for Alyx perhaps shows this best, showing the player using their arms to sweep items off a shelf, each item reacting via a highly advanced physics system, before the player finds some ammunition for their gun and picks it up with their fingers. That level of tactility, just a simple sweeping motion, is something so personalized and unique to VR that it would be nearly impossible to pull off via another control platform, and certainly without significantly greater difficulty to control it. But most important is that reactivity: The game responds to the simple flick of an arm or fingers being pressed together. Characters follow the player’s literal head, or respond to their actual eye-line. VR helps to center the player experience in play, to ground their actions in the world and to fully enable them to be expressive actors within it. That is why Half Life found it’s way to VR: Because the goals of Half Life not just as a series, but as a set of design goals, align with and are enhanced by the affordances of VR.

When I look at the currently available marketing materials for Thief VR (which are admittedly slim), alongside my knowledge of previous titles, I keep returning to a simple question "Why VR?"

I don’t mean this in a logistic sense because I am fully, deeply aware of how difficult it is to be making games right now. I cannot emphasize enough that I am very happy for the team of people who are getting to make, and get paid for making, Thief VR, and I hope none of what I say here is taken as an attempt to diminish their efforts, nor deny their ability to work. I also would not be at all shocked to learn that a new Thief game only exists because it’s in VR, with the current nature of funding and franchising not allowing it to exist otherwise.

Yet, when we look at the history of Thief as a franchise, it’s simply hard to have faith that a VR conversion is what the series needed. This is a game franchise that was at its most compelling on the computers of the late 90s, where janky controls and muddy visuals don’t just not diminish what was on offer, but in some cases enhance it. This is not to demean Thief’s technical chops either, as it was undeniably cutting edge on release, and it's notable that we could say the same of Thief VR. Yet, when we look at the trailer (currently the only gameplay we have), there’s an odd sense that, in spite of the technological and interaction-based affordances of the new hardware, nothing has really changed.

You are still sneaking around in the dark, still stealing coin purses from guards, still putting out fires with water arrows. In fact, some of the simulational dumbing down of Thief 4 might even be present re: rope arrows (In Thief 1 these could be utilized on any wooden surface, whereas Thief 4 restricted to specific pieces of geometry).There’s a sense that Thief VR is a game whose whole premise is founded on “What if Thief, but VR?”, and it’s not hard not to see that impulse the same way that Thief 3 was “What if Thief, but on a console?” or Thief 4 was “What if Thief, but for the masses?”. Not an inherently faulty idea, not even ill-conceived. But without a strong grasp on what makes Thief good, nor without a meaningful answer as to why Thief benefits from a VR iteration… I find it hard to be excited.

Dissapointing Diamonds

Jurassic Park: Trespasser, released the same year as the original Thief, was an undeniable, catastrophic failure in just about every way. But my god is it a fascinating failure. Trespasser was an immersive sim in the ideological sense, made by developers who had worked on Ultima Underworld and System Shock. But it is not a immersive sim in the genre sense, these developers not content to rest on their laurels and simply port over those ideas or interfaces to the Jurassic Park universe. Instead, they sought to create something entirely new.

Trespasser is maybe most famous for being the game where, to check your health, you need to look down at your character's boobs. It’s a first person, fully 3D game, and in it you play a woman called Anne who, critically, has a heart tattoo on her left boob. Take damage, and that heart tattoo begins to fill; if it fills all the way, you die. This idea started with the developers not wanting any explicit UI elements, which is a perfectly reasonable design goal, and that idea's implementation is far less egregious elsewhere in the game, such as Anne verbally calling out how many bullets are left in a gun each time she pulls the trigger. But the boob tattoo is an implementation that is so juvenile, so exploitative, that somehow it also feels too dumb to be fully mean about it. And this is Jurassic Park Trespasser in microcosm: A game where reach consistently exceeds grasp to truly abysmal result.

Trespasser was also trying to be one of the first games to ground all gameplay in a physics engine (Gabe Newell would even go on to cite Trespasser as reference for Half Life 2’s physic’s based gameplay), while also allowing for an incredibly wide range of player expression. The result is that essentially every object in the game is treated as a physics object, guns included, which the player can manipulate with their in-game hand. That hand’s position on screen is controlled with the mouse, both the hand and arms rotation can be controlled indepedently, and the player is able to use their hand to pick up or push any of the aforementioned physics objects. All of this together was extremely novel at the time, and even today constitutes a wildly audacious series of design decisions. However, it cannot be overstated that the controls and general feel of this base, foundational gameplay is just really bad.

Consider that any sequence that requires the player to shoot a gun (one of the primary activities in the game), often requires the player to exert extreme amounts of effort to simply point the gun in front of them, let alone line up the sights to aim accurately. The game in theory also has melee weapons like bats, but these too are unwieldy as the player’s arm is essentially always outstretched directly in front of them. The result of this is that to utilize a melee weapon, the player has to spin their whole camera around at speed in order to imbue the weapon with enough velocity to do damage. If you’re wondering how the physics puzzles fair, then it’s also worth noting that given the genuine novelty of the tech, the game only managed objects with a box shaped physics collider, so the “puzzles” are mostly just re-positioning various boxes and planks to allow for forward traversal, with the added note that the realistic physics means that you move these items incredibly slowly. All of this is to say that the main gameplay of Trespasser, novel as it may be, is also just objectively awful in a way that’s still sort of shocking to see in a released game.

And yet, there's more! That prior commitment to a fully simulated physicalized reality even drives the game’s dinosaurs, as Trespasser was one of the first games to employ both ragdoll physics and inverse kinematics. The goal was to have essentially no pre-baked dinosaur animations, with every animation instead driven by internal behaviour, physics and IK. This, in theory, allows for a really robust and reactive animation system: A dinosaur might charge you but miss with its body, yet throw out it’s head to try and bite you, and if the player hits the dinosaurs head as it approaches, that blow to the head would ricochet down it's body and veering it off course before it crashes into the ground. This is all once again cool in theory, but in play it just looks so goofy. The way it seems to materially manifest in game is that a dinosaur's central body position is determined by physics and internal behaviours, but its legs just IK around as needed to give it the “impression” of standing or moving. The result is that the dinosaurs all look as though they are filled to the brim with helium while never having quite figured out how their legs work, and thus are totally susceptible to even the gentlest nudge or incline.

Yet, for however poorly Trespasser plays today, it's hard not to like it. I'm hardly alone in this either, as the game has its own ongoing fan community that are making patches, mechanical additions and even new levels to this day. And I think the the thing that makes Trespasser such a fascinating object to explore and analyze are those high ideals, regardless of its truly awful execution.

Look at all of Trespasser’s ideas together. A diegetic HUD, displayed entirely on the player character’s body? That’s something that Dead Space would be praised for in 2008. A fully maneuverable hand, allowing for hyper-specific and delicate physics operations? Surgeon Simulator would turn those very interactions into comedy gold in 2013. And what about physically simulated AI actors who use IK and ragdoll physics to drive animations? Just look at the majority of big budget 3D games today, where those same systems are fundamental to their graphical presentation. In fact, if you try to find a modern title that meaningfully incorporates every idea that Trespasser had, the only ones that really qualify are... high-end simulationist VR games, like Half Life: Alyx, or The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners.

Trespasser might have been a bad game in 1998, but one can't help but wonder: What if it had simply waited 20 years and stuck itself in a VR headset? In that instance, Trespasser might have been an entirely novel, even quite good game in the early VR era of 2018. And yet, I also can't help but wonder where we’d be without it’s catastophic failure as seen in our realities' 1998 version. Would the games of today have gotten where they are without the failings of Trespasser?

Virtual Realities

I know I’m being greedy when I ask for Thief VR to be more than "Thief in VR". We are, in so many senses, lucky to be getting another Thief game, lucky even to just be getting another big budget stab at the immersive sim genre! That it’s in VR will at least be intellectually interesting. If we’re lucky, it might even be good! And yet, I am nagged by that sense of playing it safe, of just being Thief in VR.

Immersive sims, since the twin Ultimas birthed them in 1992, have always been about both visual and mechanical fidelity, both perspective-based and simulational immersion. The two together comprised did not only comprise some grand vision of what games could be, but just on a more emotive level, were new. They did things never seen before in the medium, and in doing so widened the possibility space. When I look at Thief VR, and see just “Thief in VR”, it is that sense of “novelty”, of expanding the possibiliy space of the medium, that sticks out the most as a missing element.

Half Life: Alyx, side-steps this kind of criticism in two ways. For one, Half Life: Alyx was revolutionary, the fidelity of physics systems paired with the increased sense of intimacy and agency in world space completely changed the way Half Life played, even as it still felt undeniably Half Life. But more importantly, Half Life was always about centering the player, about grounding them in the world and making their play feel real. VR and its affordances simply align so well with the goals of Half Life that the jump, while still difficult to stomach for many, undeniably resulted in a game that simply couldn't exist in any other form, and whose strengths meaningfully aligned with both the hardware and the franchise.

When I think about Thief VR, I simply wonder if I will be able to make any of the same claims about it as Half Life: Alyx? As previously noted, most of its gameplay seem identical to previous entires in the Thief franchise, just made more tactile and present via the natural process of VR conversion. But more important to me, what does VR have to offer the immersive sim? Because, put simply, if the computational power of modern machines and the specific affordances of VR headsets are not used to expand the Thief experience, but rather to simply recreate it with a novel interaction interface and heightened sense of presence, then while I admit that sounds nice, I also have to admit that as a fan of both Thief and immersive sims, it in no way meaningfully addresses what I want from this franchise or genre.

Trespasser, for all its faults, was absolutely revolutionary at every turn. A complete failure in execution did not detract from it being a valuable artifact of design to this day, notable for the absolute depth of its ideals and its utter conviction to them. Were Trespasser just System Shock but in the Jurassic Park setting, it still would have been cool! But instead it reached. It reached as far and as deep as it could, and what it found was the future. A future that may have been out of reach at the time, and indeed is still out of reach for many in the present, but the future all the same.

When I look at Thief VR, I see the past. I see the same gameplay structures and ideas and goals as the Thief games, and in the successors to Thief, and in other VR games to boot. What if you could steal stuff in a cool city? What if you could fire a bow in VR? I know how these things feel, and I do not deny that they feel cool! But what I do not see is the future. I hardly even see the potential for failure. Thief VR will probably be fine, maybe even good. Yet I cannot help but wonder: where is the reach?

We are in the midst of an indie-led Immersive sim renaissance. Skin Deep takes the notion of an Immersive Sim and tilts it entirely towards absurdist slapstick. Gloomwood is a more traditionalist immersive sim but with extra emphasis on non-linearity and survival horror for new flavour. Cruelty Squad is an avant garde anti-capitalist art piece. Shadows of Doubt strips back on combat and focuses on mystery and procedural elements. And this is to say nothing of other notable big budget releases in the Immersive Sim canon, such as the Legend of Zelda games or Hitman: World of Assasination (which itself received a VR port).

It is into this modern context of the Immersive Sim that Thief VR arrives. It is one of the most well established and beloved Immersive Sim franchises of all time, brought to a platform that allows for more play opportunities than ever possible. And Thief VR seems to take not just all of that possibility, but that history, and ask, “What if we did all that old stuff again, but in VR?” And to that I respond that the immersive sim, and in many ways Thief itself, was never defined by aesthetics, by mechanics, by tradition or by hardware. Rather, it is defined by it's reach, it's ideals, and it's commitment to an impossible vision, a vision of a Virtual Reality. And VR simply has nothing on that to me.

The Unfinished Tale of Hlormar Wine-Sot, and Systemic Antics

2025-05-05T00:00:00Z

Recently, I started playing Morrowind.

In the last couple weeks many people have got on-board the Oblivion train, and I found myself wanting to join in on the experience… just without actually wanting to play Oblivion. This is partially due to the BDS boycott of Microsoft, but also because I’ve just never personally cared for Oblivion outside of the sheer, memeable goofiness of it (which I reckon might still be better experienced in the original than the remaster). Morrowind, on the other hand, I already owned. I knew of the OpenMW engine and the various vanilla friendly mods that help bring it make playable at a modern standard without overhauling it away from its original form. Moreover, it has always seemed the strangest and most compelling game of the series. Why not give it a go now?

The context for the story I’m about to tell you is that I’m playing a wood elf witch hunter and at the time was about 4 hours into the game. I’d explored a small but decent chunk of the map, helped a few NPCs and advanced a couple of bigger quests, but I have a problem: I am very bad at killing things. My build is such that I am meant to be good at conjuration magic alongside archery and blunt weapons, but at the time I didn't have access to any of those weapons, nor spells, nor the money to afford either. The best weapon / spell I had was a magical dagger I could summon at will, but because I have functionally 0 points invested in daggers, most of my attacks just don’t hit enemies. I might be able to kill a small worm or bird by just standing next to them and stabbing the air for a while, but against any actual threat? I die basically immediately. But by mostly just running through the enviroment faster than anything can hit me, and utilizing loading screens to escape more bothersome enemies, nothing thus far had managed to truly pose a threat to me making progress.

Cut to me ambling along the road outside of the town of Caldera when I meet Hlormar Wine-Sot. Hlormar is naked (bar underwear), and he says that’s because of a witch, one who used magic to knock him out last night and steal all his possessions (clothes included). Having the vague sense of where the witch might be, he asks me to help him find her and get his stuff back. This is the kind of small, standard quest RPGs are full of, and it seemed like Hlormar would accompany me and help fight any enemies that came our way. So I agreed to help him, hoping for some easy rewards.

After a bit of exploring, we find the witch in question, Sosia Caristiana. Against my expectations, she wasn’t immediately aggro’d towards us, nor in any sort of enemy encampment base. Instead she’s just chilling on the side of the road, in similar fashion to how I found Hlormar. Talking to her about the situation, she gives you a very different version of events: “I took Hlormar on as a travelling companion for protection only for the road to Caldera. He was getting entirely too friendly for his own good, to the point where I actually had to cast a sleep spell on him. Just to teach him a lesson in manners, I stripped him and left him by the road.” She says Hlormar can have his stuff back in three days, just by meeting her back at the Mages Guild in Caldera.

And… this all sounds pretty reasonable. Hlormar didn’t exactly give off great vibes, calling on the player to “find her and extract her entrails”. So I go back to Hlormar and tell him about Sosia’s offer, and he gets very standoff-ish with me. He asked whose “side” I was on. I said Sosia’s. And then he started punching me in the face.

This is where my problems begin. For one, Sosia doesn’t care to fight Hlormar with me, so I am fully on my own in this combat scenario. At first this seems fine, because Hlormar’s attacks don’t initially do regular damage, instead targeting my stamina. What I did not know prior to fighting Hlormar though is that when you run out of stamina via an enemy attack, you just fall to the ground for approx. 15 seconds and can’t do anything. And when I’m fully on the ground is when Hlormar starts doing actual health-based damage. It’s still not alot, Hlormar has to knock me down like 3 times in a row for him to kill me, but boy howdy is he good at knocking me out. This is in part because when the player character does stand back up, you still have functionally 0 stamina, allowing Hrolmar to very easily just knock me down again. And if I try to run away, well, running in Morrowind drains stamina, so all he has to do is get close enough to hit me again and I’ll fall back to the floor. And Hlormar is very capable of catching up to me because Hlormar has a higher athletics skill than me, which determines run speed. Add onto this what I said before, that I basically cannot hit anything, Hlormar included, and one might describe this scenario as “pretty fucking bad”.

After dying enough times to properly realize all of this (imagine me doing alot of quicksaving / quickloading throughout this whole ordeal), I realized the only way I was getting out of this was escpaing Hlormar, or getting something else to kill him for me. Without any easy loading zones to slip through, my initial hope was instead to get enough distance between me and him for him to just despawn or at least lose track of me. Now, while just running allowed him to gain on me, I soon realized that if I both ran and jumped constantly, I would move slightly faster. Thus, I began bounding across the hills, specifically looking for big, weird objects to get behind or onto to slow his advance. While this all kinda worked in terms of gaining and maintaining distance, none of it put him off, and inevitably he always seemed to catch back up and resume beating me to death.

Next, I wondered if getting something else to aggro him might help distract him, so I bounded into a big pit that I hoped would be full of monsters. Unfortunately, the wildlife in Morrowind can actually be kind of chill sometimes, so the monsters we did come across didn’t really seem to care about us. However, we are now both stuck in a giant pit with no easy escape routes, and thus I’m resigned to just keep bouncing my way through the labyrinthine crevices that make up this area, hoping to find some other opportunity. Eventually I see the town of Ald’ruhn in the distance. I assume that there will be guards there, and that of course they will definitely step in to protect me once they see Hlormar land a punch on me. I arrive, find the nearest guard, and let Hlormar land a punch on me, and watch as the guards idle next to my now prone body as Hlormar beats me to death.

In the next life, I interact with the nearest door to load into a building and try to wait a few in-game hours, hoping Hlormar would leave or despawn while I’m in another area from him. But it’s illegal to wait inside of the building for too long, so that doesn’t work, and when I emerge Hlormar is standing directly in front of the door, in prime position to continually beat me to death everytime I try to leave. After enough tries though, I manage to do some very quick jumps and dodges to maneuver around him, getting onto the roof of a building he can’t find his way onto. And by pulling him near one side of the building, only to leap over the other side and run to the nearby Silt-strider, I was able to fast-travel my way south to Balmora, far away from Hlormar’s punches. I was finally safe… for now.

See, one of the benefits of playing with things like OpenMW is being able to absolutely crank certain settings far beyond their original values. My “actor draw” setting is quite literally off the in-game scale, alongside my view distance. The result is that I’ve not yet seen an NPC “pop” in, as they seem to be loaded far before they would otherwise naturally come into view. But what was at first a cool technical overhaul that allowed for a naturalistic and immersive play experience… well now it’s a problem.

Hlormar Wine-Sot will likely load in when I am within some unknowable range of the town of Ald’ruhn, or his original spawning location. When he does load in, he will most likely start running straight for me (he does not need line of sight to know where I am), and by the time I see him, it will be too late to run away and try to unload him. And if he reaches me, he will punch me in the face until I fall to the floor, and then he will continue beating me till I’m dead. For the foreseeable future, my playthrough of Morrowind will need to contend with the ever-present threat of Hlormar Wine-Sot, a naked, angry nord without any worldly possessions, who could come at me from essentially any angle unannounced, and whose only goal in this world in to beat my ass.

I tell the tale of Hlormar in part because I want to tell everybody about Hlormar. It’s just such a juicy, weird, funny, deeply gamey story. But I also keep rotating it in my head because when I realized what was happening, what I had gotten myself into, I became obsessed with living out the consequences of my actions. That this scenario, as dire and nearly unrecoverable as it was, is also the kind of systemically driven, emergent problem that I don’t just love to solve, but that I love to be unable to solve.

The reality is that, while Hlormar is probably the “best story” to emerge from my playthrough of Morrowind, in terms of it being fun to tell and to read / hear, it’s not the only good story I've had. I’ve helped a lady make a religious pilgrimage, only to find out that two large, T-Rex like creatures consider the sought-after religious site their home, at which point they ate me alive. I’ve swam across a river totally blind, because it was filled with carniverous fish that would try to eat me, and the only way I found to avoid them was to use boots of “blinding speed” to swim too fast for them to catch me. I have done many, many, slapstick-style raids, stealing everything I can hold while an army of enemies runs after me, only for them to be eternally locked behind a loading door. And, as mentionned, I’ve spent multiple combat encounters spanning multiple real-world minutes each to fight enemies like “worm” and “rat”, just stabbing the air with a magical dagger while having my toes nipped at, praying that one of my attacks would land.

Some of these stories are results of the vintage of Morrowind as both a set of systems and an overall piece of game design. Bethesda presumably hadn’t yet figured out a system to easily track NPC actions / intentions from across loading zones, and the notion that making a CRPG also essentially required implementing D&D style combat, misses included, was very common. So too was the notion that a player could simply reload a save if something was too difficult, and so allowing players to put themselves into genuine, game-ending danger was fine, even part of the genre. Add onto this the mountain of weird technical adjustments I’ve made, from an entire new engine with massively increased draw distance, to a bevy of “Vanilla friendly” mods where I would be lying if I claimed I knew what they did. The result is a game where I don’t know what to expect, nor can I even tell what is intended behaviour, and that’s incredibly exciting to me as a player. Morrowind, both as a game and as a world, feels genuinely wild, untamed and unknown. The notion of being a stranger in a strange land has never felt quite so apt.

What Morrowind, or at least this version of Morrowind, allows for is what I’m calling “Systemic Antics”. What I mean by a “Systemic Antics” is that every “story” I’ve discussed so far was not an intentional / planned narrative / mechanical moment, but rather an almost emergent hijink or prank enabled by the systems of the game. A funny / interesting thing did not “happen”, so much as funny / interesting things are constantly able to happen, and sometimes I just happened to trigger them. I.e, it’s narratively intended that Hlormar will try to beat my ass if I don't take his side in his questline, but that he does so in such a specific, dangerous, comical way to my current character is a kind of “Systemic Antic”. That I can, by running a stupidly far way away, use a giant insect bus to fast-travel outside of his loaded range and thus escape the encounter is a “Systemic Antic”. That Hlormar will continue to try and track me down in the future when he spawns back in, becoming a sort of acciddent, emergent hunter / nemesis to my player, is a “Systemic Antic”. These antics arn’t just enabled or controlled by the systems of the game, but emerge from the systems of the game and revel in them.

I think the best way to think of the above “Systemic Antics” is like a good back and forth between a DM and player group, where each side “one’s up” or subverts the others intentions in ways totally allowed by the game systems or narrative set-up, yet that still shock / surprise the other party. In this same way, it’s also worth considering that these systemic antics require buy-in not just from the game (in that its systems need to be set-up to work in this way), but also from the player, in that I needed to be open to engaging with the game in this way. I very easily could have reloaded a save just prior to aggro-ing Hlormar and avoided the questline till I felt equipped to handle it. I even could have restarted my whole game to get a better character build that more easily allowed me to engage with the game systems in a traditional way. Would this be more fun? I certainly don’t think so. But when I think back on my early attempts to play Morrowind at a younger age, and my chafing against my inability to hit enemies, it certainly reveals that I had to “mature” into being willing to play with a game in this way.

Morrowind is hardly the only game to have systemic antics, nor are RPGs always pro-systemic antics. Immersive Sims are probably the true home of the systemic antic, which games like Skin Deep, Mosa Lina or Hitman seem deeply hooked into. But tracking where a systemic antic emerges, or even what counts as one, is pretty tricky. Narrative-heavy or puzzle games might try to push back on having systemic antics to preserve the core, intended experience, but look at any speedrun of a game and you will probably catch plenty of systemic antics. Systemic antics are a form of both player and game expression, but given this almost winking relationship between the two, they also tend to poke the edges of the game in strange and revealing ways. What kinds of systemic antics are appropriate for a given game is going to need to be addressed on a case-by-case basis. But if you are like me, and you consider games at their core to be a kind of dialogue between game and player, then there may be no better proof of this conversation than the systemic antic. So in general, where you want to talk to or guide the player, it’s best to keep the number of systemic antics down by smoothing out the edges of your systems, accounting for edge-cases and odd interactions. But if you want to allow the player not just to come up with their own solutions, but their own problems, and via that combination, their own stories? Then leave the edges of your system rough, and let the systemic antics flourish.

Metroid vs Brainia, or the Treachery of Genre

2025-04-16T00:00:00Z

It’s been interesting observing the (light) discourse surrounding Blue Prince online. On release, you had people immediately calling it a masterpiece, up there with the likes of Outer Wilds or Obra Dinn in terms of the way the game unfolds and reveals itself to the player. In response to that first contingent, another group wrote about how they felt misled, struggling with the basic gameplay and wondering just where the “masterpiece” elements were located. The former group came back, saying something that’s a mix of “Just keep going” or “You need to look closer” or “Have you tried doing RNG manipulation?”, the latter group responded with something like “I don’t want to” and “I am?” and “How?, and so the whole thing spiralled.

I don’t think either group here is wrong nor at fault, and time already is healing this divide. For context, I’m really enjoying the game, though I think in major part because I am playing it with my partner. On my initial solo run, I did about 4 runs in under an hour and just barely got to rank 5 with very little to show for it. Meanwhile, my partner and I have been playing for nearly 8 hours and only done 5 runs, but multiple got up to essentially the backwall of the house, with many big reveals and unlocks happening along the way. There’s a few reasons for the differential: For one, I genuinely think the game works better as a couch co-op game, where you have two brains who can notice, note and converse on different elements. It also helps that my partner is just very good at puzzle games! Yet, I also think that I have a skillset that helps push us forward, one that is more agile and loose. And I think our differences can be summed up by the notion of “Metroid vs Brania”

Except we’re not going to use the terms “Metroid” and “Brainia” or just anything related to “Metroidbrania” cause that would be insufferable. To be fair to everyone else, I also remember describing the Outer Wilds as a “Metroidvania for your brain” to friends in 2019, but even I knew that was a nightmare descriptor. “Metroidbrainia”, just as an actual term, might as well be a universal game concept. “Via play, I learned some things that allows me to progress through the game quicker / in new ways” applies just as much to learning a boss pattern in Dark Souls as it does understanding quantum objects in Outer Wilds, or just learning what the buttons are on a controller.

For the purposes of this blog I’m swapping out “Metroidbrainia” and with “Tactile Mystery Games”, or TMGs, with Tactile and Mystery being both linked and separate terms. "Tactile" alone refers to the concept of how “Low-order” play operates in these games, with them often focusing on a refined set of compelling, kinetic actions that directly interface with major game systems. "Mystery" is more straightforward in it's reference to "high-order" play, indicating that there are one or more mysteries to solve, which by being solved, complete the game (i.e this “Mystery-oriented Structure” must take precedence over any form of level-based or narrative structure). “Tactile Mystery”, in unison, refers to the idea that these are games where low-order manipulation of the mechanical systems alongside advancements in high-order knowledge gathering or strategy provide mixed low and high order rewards. Indeed, one might say that low-order and high-order play get slightly blurred in TMGs, given the way the genre privileges high-order goals. Games I would consider TMGs under this defintion are Blue Prince, Outer Wilds, Paradise Killer, Immortality or even Gnosia.

Having laid out this theory, can you see where an issue might creep into the genre? What if the player experiences friction with how the low-order and high-order play relate to one another? Well, a great example of this friction is, perhaps ironically, Outer Wilds. Outer Wilds is, from the perspective of high-order play, a game of many mysteries: Unexplored, dangerous planets, a long lost civilization of scientists, missing astronauts, the explosion of the sun, a timeloop, etc. This all intrigues and excites the player from the perspective of high-order play. However, Outer Wilds is also, from the perspective of low-level play, a 3D platformer with semi-accurate orbital physics. And not an easy one!

I know this because I’ve helped multiple people “Get into” Outer Wilds; All of those people were compelled by the premise of Outer Wilds, and all ran into the same basic issue: Both the spaceship and player character are hard to control, and as such death came easy and confusion / frustration came with it. This is somewhat intentional, I would even call it core to the game’s themes and gameplay. Yet, it did stop these people from advancing on their own without guidance and support. What's notable is that TMGs make this kind of low-order gameplay frustration much harder to parse than normal. For one, just lookoing up a guide is inherently disencouraged (What if the player accidentally encountered information they didn't yet have?), so most have to struggle on their own. When these players did have a guide in me, what they would often ask is if a particular element of the game was a “mystery” or not. I.e:

Was a given scenario hard because:

a) the thing they were trying to do was impossible,

b) the thing they were trying to do was possible but they could / were required to find more information before continuing, or

c) the thing they were trying to do was possible and there was no more information to find, they just needed to pull it off.

Truly, I found it was generally a 33:33:33 split between these options. Of course, this subsided over time as players got to grips with the controls and began to grok the nature of the gameworld. But it’s worth noting that these issues in part stem from the fact that TMGs almost require that just the basic operations of play, the things that link low and high order play, be semi-obscured. That these games' fundamental appeal lies somewhat in their systemic mysteries is relatively obvious. That players can easily be left adrift by this same requirement is a much harder notion to swallow.

From a bird’s eye view, I believe this is essentially what’s happening with Blue Prince discourse. Players who have been praising the game have been focusing on the high-level play, the long term strategies and opportunities, and the various reveals and surprises that came about while playing. New players, then encountering the reality of low-level play, get confused. Is the high-level play everyone is praising just placing down room tiles effectively, or doing some math on a dart board? Consider aswell how this contrasts to something like Outer Wilds: When you hear Outer Wilds is a grand puzzle game, and then the game starts with 3D platforming mechanics, it's fairly easy to go "ah, the puzzles must be located elsewhere". When you hear the Blue Prince is a grand puzzle game, and then the game starts with a puzzle game, it's not unreasonable to go "Is this the whole puzzle?". Indeed, there are many low level puzzles to solve in Blue Prince, including even how one walks from room to room. Without clear signalling (at least at first), combined with some bad RNG or failed strategies, players run the risk of not only thinking the low-level play they are engaging with is the high-level play, but that their access to that high-level play is handicapped by the luck of the draw.

Both Outer Wilds and Blue Prince attempt to prime the player to first come to grips with low-level play, before increasingly pointing the player towards high-level play, including even just spelling out reveals in text as a reward for good low-level play. Outer Wilds is flashier about these reveals, more kinetic, and I think also more willing to hold a low-level players hand to guide them to the finish line. Having not yet finished the Blue Prince, I can definitely say some of the puzzles are really quite fiendish, requiring multiple (not-unreasonable, just notable) logical deductions to put the pieces together. I can see how this threatens to result in players who, while still successful at the low-level play, struggle to find access to the high-level play: To a certain degree, they have to climb that ladder on their own.

What do we do with all this… I don’t know! I mean at the very least I just want to kill Metroidbrania. If you don’t like Tactile Mystery Games, I would love to hear an alternative! I do think what’s also worth noting is that while many games, in terms of high-level play, are Tactile Mystery games, the way the low-level play takes shape can be really varied and might be worth recognizing as a genre of it’s own: Outer Wilds is a 3D platformer, Blue Prince is a deck-based resource management puzzle game, Gnosia is a Visual Novel, Paradise Killer is a 3D Platformer + Visual Novel, Immortality is a DVD chapters menu. While it may seem weird, even obtuse, to classify a game as being a part of multiple simultaneous genres (and I do think the Tactile Mystery game is the part to focus on), I think this is a genre where the relationship between those constituent parts is very unique and important, with the interplay between the two levels being paramount to the enjoyment of the whole. People bouncing off of "3D Platformer" or "Deck-builder" are not unreasonable, especially when nothing makes clear that's the primary genre of game they are going to be interacting with!

To jump back to the title of this post, where my partner excels at the high-order play required by Blue Prince, I excel at the low-order play. I love to place rooms and walk around and just try new shit, whereas my partner considers all the options while taking careful notes about every step we take. I think it's fair to say that had I continued my own, solo playthough, I would have done dozens more runs in a short amount of time, maybe even solving some other low-order mysteries, but would have completely missed out on some of the more high-level mysteries and likely fallen off the game as a result. Meanwhile, my partner might have still solved a number of the grand mysteries, but just as much may have been caught up in decision paralysis regarding the countless low-order decisions a player needs to make every few steps. I think this speaks to why I probably prefer Outer Wilds (highly kinetic, very low-order play friendly) while Blue Prince is much more her speed (no major dexterity skill checks required, all focused on very high-level goals). All said, it's worth considering when designing a TMG the different types of players who find themselves drawn to the genre, and how the kinds of help they need differ greatly from player to player.

I would also just note that this genre generally has a problem with the classic notion of “Developer intentionality”, magnified by the “secret” natures of the game that make parsing this, or even just googling it, very hard. Marketing or conversations about TMGs often has to hinge on pointing to secret, compelling things without any ability to show them, which in turn can lead to all kinds of mis-messaging. I’ve seen so many posts of people going “Wow, I can’t believe the puzzles in Blue Prince are so basic“ only for multiple people to have to jump in and go “No I promise you the REAL puzzles are weird I swear”. If the separating line between your low-level and high-level play isn’t clear, nor the ways in which the two are linked, players will just be left not knowing which game they are playing. How do you solve that without also taking away from the mystique of a unexplained mystery box? I truly don’t know, and it may not be worth it. But then I guess you do need to be prepared to be the subject of some confused bickering on Bluesky.

Devlog 1 - Representational Politics

2025-04-10T00:00:00Z

Welcome to the inaugural INOCULATE Devlog! This is the first in a series of devlogs detailing the current progress I’m making on INOCULATE, alongside explaining my design process.

If you’re wondering what INCOLUATE is, the elevator pitch is that it’s a node-based pseudo-RTS about ideological warfare. For further details, I’d recommend you play the game jam build here , which is serving as the springboard for the rest of the game.

Now, with all that out of the way:

The Political Spectrum

The first major change I knew I wanted to make to INOCULATE was the way political opinions were tracked and displayed, though I don’t do this without some internal debate. One of the big goals for Game Jam INOCULATE was specificity : You believe in Climate Change, the rights of minorities and that wealth inequality is a problem, and you are trying to ensure others believe the same thing. For a game that was gonna be out publicly and that iintentionally has a kind of nasty energy, I wanted to ensure my politics were clear in the game, less they become warped.

That said, this approach comes with problems, one of which is that very political specificity. While my political worldview being present in the game is important, it also feels somewhat natural that I might want players to work within different ideological factions over the course of a campaign. That said, I do not feel comfortable with asking, nor allowing, any player to deny the rights of minorities, nor climate change, nor wealth inequality. In this sense, some abstraction is good for stopping players from being in moral quagmires. In terms of game design affordances, it also doesn’t help that the three perspectives felt completely detached from one another, failing to form a coherent ideology. Given I already had some plans for special abilities based on ideological viewpoint, I knew I needed these to be more clearly linked to one another. And that relates to perhaps the most fundamental problem, UI / UX: A Node’s political ideology is the most important piece of information in the game, and in the game jam build, the player needs to do alot of reading before they can act. Given this data is functionally discrete, I knew there would be a way to abstract it out to make it way easier to parse at a glance.

In trying to resolve this, I went immediately to the notion of a 2 dimensional political axes diagram. This methodology for displaying political ideology isn’t one I particularly like in reality, and it’s really on the opposite end of specificity from what I had previously. However, one of the fun things for me to navigate in designing this game is that compromise, i.e when and where I tilt in the design favour of real-world politics or fun gameplay (for example, the unreal but fun notion that almost everyone is willing to change their political ideology). Moving people around on the political spectrum map sits right in the middle of that compromise, being easy and intuitive to understand at a glance while also still being connected to some form of political reality.*

This does change alot gameplay-wise, most notably that there are now just 2 vectors on which ideology is judged rather than 3 (an ideology cube seemed like a bit of a nightmare). However, this does massively simplify the player’s actions, changing them from “Educate on Climate Change” to just various arrows representing the ideological direction you want that node to move in. Having toyed with how many discrete spaces on the grid there should be for ideology, I’ve landed on a 5 x 5 grid with for a total of 25 possible “ideologies” for a node to inhabit for now, which does land us close to the original game jams 27 possible states. While I'm not totally convinced, this does feel like the sweet-spot, as more spots make reading the political spectrum at a glance tricky, while less makes moving from one end of the ideological spectrum to another feel too fast.

Representing Politics

This has necessitated, or perhaps just sped up, a total HUD re-design. As you can see above, early integrations of this system featured the political axis appearing above each Node like the old HUD. But combining this level of detailed information alongside all of the possible buttons a player might be able to press, alongside all of the information already displayed on the screen that shows how Nodes connect or what actions are being taken, was just overwhelming. It even affected the level design of maps, as they needed to account for the massive amount of space the HUD would take up. To combat this, I’ve made a new, static piece of HUD that sits on the left hand side of the screen that can display the HUD in full, alongside all available player actions. While this does expand the aspect ratio the game is played in from 4:3 to 16:9, it does keep the main game view in 4:3, which makes me happy!**

An interesting consequence of this change was that, at first, I hated how the new menu felt, and for a reason that helped highlight what's core to what I think makes INOCULATE fun and distinct from it's contemporaries: Pace and momentum. In a more traditional RTS, you generally need to first click on a allied unit that you want to act, then then click on the unit that you want them to perform an action on. This multi-step process was something I wanted to avoid, not only because it slows down pacing but also because it lacks a certain kinetic energy. So in INOCULATE, you click on the node you want to act on, choose the action you want and then the game chooses which unit acts for you.*** But by introducing this new side-screen menu, suddenly the player was back to clicking a node on the right side of the screen, then sweeping their mouse across the screen to the left to perform an action, then sweeping the mouse back to the right to line up their next action, and on and on. Maybe this would feel more ok on a phone or tablet, but even so that kinetic, almost clicker-like action of immediately performing actions on a given node was lost.

The solution to this was pretty simple but also really fun: Keep the main action buttons on the node when you click on it, but also have them appear on the menu. If the player wants to move over to the menu for a closer look, the actions are all there. But if they just want to do a sideways glance at the axes and then start clicking away at the node, that is also supported. Having the actions be accessible from both feels great, and means the player can always keep moving the game forward regardless of where their current focus is. I think especially as I keep pushing the UX of the game forward and more info becomes available on either side of the screen, it will really open up the game for players to essentially play the game from whichever screen best suits their strategy at the time.

Big Tent Alliances

This all ties into the final new element I will talk about today : Alliances. In the game jam version, a node became allied to the player when they fully believed all the same things the player believed, with allying just stopping that Node from making independent actions. This worked fine, but with a now more diverse board, upcoming new level objectives and the possibility of different ideologies unlocking different abilities, I realized it just wouldn't be always as tactically advantageous or fun to be constantly be pulling Nodes towards your same ideological state. Moreover, the game jam version also has a slight problem in that the player feels like the only true, meaningful political actor, with everyone else being mostly independent in how they spread ideology. I want there to be a notion that other political alliances and coalitions are forming, and that you would need to be trying to stop the spread of your opponents ideology as much as you are spreading your own political ideology.

Thus, I’ve currently landed on the idea that if two nodes are adjacent to each other on the political axes (i.e only one vertical OR horizontal move away from being in the same spot), those nodes are allied. If a string of alliances connects back to the player, then the player can control those nodes. If unconnected to the player, the Nodes will essentially form their own political faction, based on their position on the political spectrumn, and will attempt to advance that faction's ideological goals. This is true even if that faction belongs to same ideology as the player, with those nodes then being essentially rival pollitical collective making their own plays. And if one node could be connected to multiple ideologies, then it’s connected to none, and the factions will have to vie to either pull that node closer, or perhaps even go up the opponent’s chain and try to sever the chain of alliances that led to that stalemate.

This essentially represents a “Big Tent” political alliances, which is yet again a political notion that doesn't necessarily allign with my vision of poltics but does speak again to a political reality: That people sometimes vote or act politically for ideologies that are adjacent to, or even opposed to, their own beliefs if those ideologies are positioned in a certain way. In turn, this also can sort of represent the way factions that are ideoligically alligned can still combat one another, or that large, seemingly un-alligned coalitions can suddenly unite behind a common cause. Meanwhile, from a gameplay perspective, the player is encouraged to form chains of nodes that allow them to get access to wider swaths of the network or special abilities, even though that may go against their ultimate end goal of pulling everyone back towards their base ideology, while also leaving them much more exposed to attack from an enemy. This is also why nodes connected to the selected node are shown in various colours on the political ideology board, as it shows how the various allances they are either already in, or could form, with their neighbouring nodes.

That said, the notion that nodes are able to appropriately act on these alliances is currently mostly theorhetical. Fundamentally uprooting all of your games systems, changing the information they all access and act upon is, as it turns out, a big undertaking! While it’s mostly all gotten there, what’s left is an AI overhaul, to try and make the nodes act in ways that are “smart”, advancing their own ideologies, pursuing alliances and protecting their nodes. This isn’t to try and put the cart before the horse, there are plenty of other systematic changes and additions to come, but it’s reached the point where in testing this version of the game seems to “work” and “is fun”, but tthe now mostly outdated AI fails to imbue the game with stakes and meaningful risk-reward. Fixing that is going to be one of my trickiest overhauls to date, both design and programming-wise, but I think I know how to tackle it, which is an exciting position to be in.

And again, this points to alot of UI / UX overhaul, the most recent of which was making alliances change the colour of connection lines to a colour that alligns with that alliances's ideology. This not only makes it really clear how nodes are connected to one another (though perhaps too clear, a proper “Fog of War” system is on the docket for future implementation), but just kinda looks cool? It does make the current way actions are displayed less clear (they are also currently represented by bright neon lines that slowly move to connect nodes), but I had plans to change those up anyways to make them feel more unique and interesting, so again this just pushes me to tackle that problem. Ask me soon about how I'm planning to make all of this work for colour-blind players too, which will be its own fun task!

Which all points towards the next devlog! Smarter AI systems, better legibility on actions, maybe Fog of War, maybe even my already semi-implemented concept of “Influencer” nodes. As mentioned, there are some bigger systemic changes to come that are really exciting for me, but getting all of these base systems working in a smaller, simpler scope feels important before I really start pushing everything to it’s limit. I also do want to try and make a couple more levels in the future. I currently have “Tiny tutorial map” and “A large amount of Nodes that can represent 4 factions!”, but making sure the game has enough mechanical variety is key to my goals here. The final game probably will pace out all of the described and yet to be implemented systems over various levels, so it’s ok if things at the moment feel somewhere either side of "flat" or "decision stew". But, like with my goals with the AI, if I can get something that feels almost too complicated and difficult, then it’s much easier to start paring that down to something grokkable and fun. And I think that’s very possible. By next time? Probably not. But I’d love to be wrong!

*This is also where INOCULATE’s framing will come into play. I’m already toying with the notion of the game taking place in the lead-up to an election or series of elections / political events. In this sense, consider any person’s position on the political spectrum less of a “They fully believe in the ideas core to this area of the political spectrum” and more “In what way do they want their government to move” / “In whose name do they take political action in?”, which feels both politically and ludically quite juicy.

**If you’re wondering why I’m attached to the 4:3 ratio, it’s for a couple reasons. For one, as the rest of the aesthetic implies, I want this game to feel somewhat grainy and gritty, like you’re accessing some old system for tracking political thought that hasn’t been updated in a quarter-century. Whether that sticks in up in the air, but it feels like a solid enough base for now and one I want to keep building on. More importantly though, 16:9 creates level design problems, as the player would have significantly easier access to Nodes on the left and right of the screen vs top and bottom, which in turn would drastically change how levels would need to be designed. With 4:3 being much closer to a square aspect ratio, this imbalance is equalled out greatly.

***This is probably the most controversial game design choice I’m making, but I make it with good reason. INOCULATE is, in most ways, less complicated than your average RTS. Often times, you only have one node that could make any given action, so needing to actively select that node would just feel like fluff. However, it's also important to me was that the game feel a bit more like you are a apart of a political movement: You may know what action you want taken, and you can propagate that idea through your movement, but that doesn’t mean you have direct control of who is going to do it. That said, when the player performs an action, I do run that action through a system to determine which allied node should be the “actor”, with the “best” actor being loosely defined as “The Node who has access to the least overall number of interesting actions". How we define a "interesting action" is its own can of worms, but I'll save that for another blog post down the line!

In the HOLE

2025-03-24T00:00:00Z

I’ve been playing alot of HOLE.

HOLE is a pretty simple and tightly scoped single player extraction shooter. The player is trying to earn money and other resources to upgrade their base, guns and stats. They do this by dropping into maps and grabbing loot either from the dead bodies of enemies (who spawn in increasing numbers and difficulties as times goes on), or by grabbing loot from boxes and fridges around the map. Escape the level via a hole-generating microwave and keep any loot you acquired. Die, and you lose essentially all of it.

HOLE is also a tactical FPS. Your gun will jam occasionally if it overheats, and reloading often involves some gun manipulation to ensure rounds are properly chambered. This combines with the very high lethality of weapons to result in the player approaching situations slowly and tactically, leaning around corners, hugging cover, and generally prioritizing defence over offence. This is aided by an almost Battle Royale touch to the game, where the enemies spawned in will belong to one of three factions. These enemy teams will not only get into firefights with one another (dropping the resources you want to extract with you) but are also looking for the same loot piles you are. Just like a Battle Royale, you switch constantly between truly open exploration and following the sounds of gunfire.

All of the above makes HOLE pretty fun (along with it being called HOLE, which just has great mouth / typing feel). But the reason I’m so into it isn’t purely because it’s just very good at what it does (which to be clear, it is). It’s also because, while I theoretically enjoy many games in the tactical FPS genre, the aesthetics and traditions they tend to mine from just… give me bad vibes.

These vibes are perhaps best represented by the contemporary pinnacle of the genre, Ready or Not, a sort of spiritual successor to the infamous Swat series. Following in that series' vein, you play a leader of a SWAT team dispatched to various high-danger situations, needing to kill or apprehend “bad guys” while rescuing civilians. It's worth noting that the ability to aprehend bad guys is an enticing addition to the systems of a traditional Tactical shooter, allowing for non-lethal options in a genre primarily concerned with shooting dudes in the face. But this is not how non-lethal options are utilized in Ready or Not.

While you can in theory be non-lethal, many enemies just won’t allow themselves to be captured, and because lethality is high, you also never want to drop your guard in case the guy you’re shouting at suddenly fires back. The ludic result is less that the non-lethal systems represent an end goal to be pursued, but rather a thing "good play" requires despite it revealing the player's position and losing them the tactical advantage. Most of the time, the result is the player and enemy briefly exchanging expletives at eachother around a corner, rasing the tension until it's ultimately broken by gunfire. You can, occasionally, actually handcuff a suspect by talking them down. You can even shoot someone non-lethally, allowing them to be handcuffed afterwards (though you will hear their pained screams for the rest of your time in the mission). But even this leaves you exposed, prone to being shot at by a hidden assailent. All of this comes together, alongside the other systems, to build tension, to create a certain “viscerality” and “rawness” that the framing of the game implies should be present. And it just feels icky to me.

In fact, Ready or Not is such a good example of the Tactical FPS genre because of all the ways it leans into this icky excess. Graphically, textures and lighting models are not just meant to seem realistic, but further utilize low saturation, and dim lighting for a harsher, bleaker visual presentation. The audiowork reinforces this, not only with gunshots and door kicks that are unfathomably loud, but also in the way everyone is constantly talking, shouting, and / or swearing. There is an emphasis on the civilian, not just in the mechanical sense of civilians you need to rescue, but also in the sense that the world inhabits a certain view of “reality”, that again serves to heighten tension. This is perhaps no better represented then the game’s most contraversial map, Elephant, which takes place at a college during an active school shooting, complete with the enemy AI searching for and shooting students while you raid the building. Meanwhile, players get to unlock and outfit themselves in a variety of military hardware, with the awkward effect of making the team seem less like a unified government force and more like some sort of ragtag militia taking matters into their own hands. The end result is that the game is an almost idealistic militarized cop fantasy: A pure expression of the notion that not only is any location in the world always mere seconds away from devolving into a bullet strewn nightmare, but that those responding to the crisis must be given ultimate authority and power. They alone can solve it with big guns, loud voices and badass vibes.

This is not all to shit on Ready or Not. So much of what I’m discussing here could just as much apply to the fantasies of Call of Duty, Rainbow Six: Siege, Six Days in Fallujah, or any other number of shooters that integrate military or cop roleplay. In some ways I even commend Ready or Not's commitment to making these situations feel altogether horrific, unlike many of its peers. But more importantly, we do ourselves a disservice by outright denying the appeal of the fantasy at play here. Especially in a culture like the US, where the prevalence of gun culture, militaristic police forces and actual horrific scenarios like the ones depicted in Ready or Not (alongside the fearmongering and scapegoating around them drummed up by politicians and media), the notion of wanting to play out one of these scenarios, to try and understand how they might work, makes sense in the foundational ways that we understand play.

However, if these off-putting vibes and this, for lack of better term (I'm sure academics have a better one), "Reality play" are meant to help people work through complex emotions, then people LOVE working through complex emotions. The game has over 170,000 reviews, making it an incredibly successful game almost regardless of it's scale or budget. When looking for footage to reference for this piece, I was able to find multiple multi-million view youtube videos just specifically about the school shooter map, while a video promising “REAL Marines DESTROY the Hospital MAP on Ready or Not” has over 5 million views. Even if people are finding this game uncomfortable or horrific (which many comments, reviews and videos do seem to imply), they are also finding it fun. They find the fantasy it represents appealing to partake in, and even have a desire of seeing that fantasy not just translated into reality, affirmed by the same people who perpetuate the fantasy in the first place.

HOLE does not represent a fantasy, nor does it really bear really any resemblance to reality outside of the complicated and lethal nature of firearms and the universal notions of “gravity”, “infrastructure”, "money" and “humans”. The levels you run through are abstract, endless and inescapable, taking the form of offices, sewers and apartment complexes that are completely devoid of any sense of lived reality. A pixelated filter covers the screen, which combines with the goofy, almost infantile masks your enemies wear, the animal crossing-like speech they employ, and the classically video-game-y “Ting!” of picking up money to make the whole thing feel entirely separate from our lived reality. That is to say that, despite it’s many mechanical similarities and even connected lineage to games like Ready or Not, at no point does it feel like an active shooter situation. Rather, HOLE employs the exact opposite approach of Ready or Not, a sort of hyper-unreality, that allows players to focus on the fun of the game’s mechanics and internal logic, without needing it to be connected to contexts or fantasies found in the outside world.

This isn’t to say that HOLE doesn’t engage in politics nor fantasies, but rather those elements are focused on its own internal logic and context. It wants you to think about money, and what people are willing to do for it. It also wants you to think about guns, what they are capable of and used for. And the fantasy being presented is that you get so good with guns that you can kill everyone, and have essentially infinite money. But your “home-base” is just an isolated section of sewer, and the only thing you can spend money on is gun attachments and things to shoot at. What any of it is meant to be about, in the loosest of terms, is oblique. What any given player pulls out of HOLE is thus far more likely to result in something far more personal and frankly interesting than if the game were connected to a much firmer reality or fantasy. But perhaps even more more important is that I just don’t feel actively uncomfortable when engaging with it.

The Tactical FPS genre presents fun and interesting mechanics that heighten tension and provide a compelling framework with which to interact with the world (in many ways connected to my piece on Stalker 2’s spatial intimacy, as that game also has tactical FPS elements). By having weapons of hyper lethality that need to be treated very carefully, alongside having active and unpredictable dangers put against you, the one thing that becomes both your most reliable aid and greatest obstacle is space. Do you know where you are, where the enemy is, how to flank them and how they could flank you? Corners become spaces of heightened fear and then relief, hallways are a ramp of tension, and junctions are just a no man’s land that you can only pray someone else walks into before you. It’s this need to understand how multiple systems interact with space that make me so enamoured by the notion of the Tactical FPS. But due to the nature of play, they often manifest as power fantasies. Due to modern traditions of the FPS genre, they are nearly always cop or military fantasies. Combine that with some progression systems and a gritty edge, and the whole thing turns into hyper-militaristic, almost fascistic roleplay. My fun, interesting space play is still there, but it's surrounded by such a despicable crust that I just can't imagine “having fun” without also feeling deeply gross about the whole thing.

But it’s important we remember, not just about this genre but any genre, that there are ways of harnessing the fun or compelling elements in a thing we enjoy without necessitating that despicable crust. Traditional immersive sims, while also prone to violence, can produce the same sorts of careful understanding of space and utilization of player tools and systems that any tactical FPS does. Moreover, in being able to remove themselves from the cop / military fantasy, they are also able to provide more interesting objectives than just “kill all the baddies”, more interesting tools than just “gun and handcuffs”, and structurally they are far better equipped to represent the results of the player’s actions or question player choices. On a completely separate track, and while I didn’t make the connection until writing this piece, I do think The Crush House (a game I worked on previously) actually takes on many of the aspects of the Tactical shooter (careful positioning and sightline management, awareness of NPC pathing and behaviour), but via placing them in an entirely different context (using a camera to film contestants on a reality TV show), The Crush House is able to use that same gameplay input to explore entirely different kinds of fantasies and contexts.

Yet HOLE is the kind of game, and game design, that I also really love to see. HOLE is undeniably straightforward in its adaptation of the Tactical FPS genre, but is in no way subservient to it’s aesthetics or traditions. And this is important, not just for maintaining the core of a genre, but also for enticing players away from other, more harmful fantasies. I would love a world in which we had just way less games about guns or violence in favour of other mechanical interfaces, but we can’t ignore, not resent, the public for desiring this kind of work. But it’s then just as important that we internalize that we don't need to give an audience exactly what they want. We can filter, refine or challenge their desires, even while maintaining the exact kinds of genre, mechanical and even narrative aspects they came for. And that needn't always be an exercise in discomfort or direct opposition to the player fantasy. Sometimes, it's just as worthwhile to be like HOLE, and have a little fun with it.

Spatial Intimacy in Stalker 2’s The Zone

2025-03-17T00:00:00Z

In Stalker 2, the player must become intimate with the Zone.

This intimacy is borne out of, in part, the standard ways any open world game breeds familiarity and engagement with its world: Stalker 2 requires you to go from one place to another, this act of moving between locations takes time, and often it requires moving through other locations or encounters on your journey. You may get into fights, which drain resources, or find loot, which increases resources. Too many resources and you move slower and are more vulnerable to attack. Too few and you may not be able to survive the next fight. So you slowly plod through the environment, taking wide berths around danger and exploring / looting when in relative safety. Occasionally, safety reveals itself to be danger, or vice versa, and the surprise is notable and requires you to adjust your intuitions. This is good, fun, video game-y stuff, and Stalker 2 executes it all well. But I would not yet describe this as intimate.

The first mechanical aspect that genuinely endears the player to the Zone are the anomalies. Anomalies are strange and supernatural phenomena, with dozens of types revealing themselves over the course of the game. While rarely consciously hostile, many can damage the player just via contact, and thus they need to be vigilant when exploring. This is especially true because most of the time, the anomalies are functionally invisible.

One of the most common anomaly types is essentially an air bubble, only visible via a slight spherical distortion it applies to the frame around it, that ranges from half a meter to 5m or even 10m wide. If the player walks into it, they burst the bubble, causing the pressure to crush the player for a massive, near lethal amount of damage. Within a couple seconds, the bubble will return, and if the player hasn’t moved in that time, it will crush them again. Other anomalies include scorched floors that burst into flame cyclones when the player steps over them, small whirlwinds of debris that launch the player if they enter them, and, my personal favourite, fields of floating glass that cut the player's skin as they walk through.

There are non-visual indicators for the anomalies, like an audio cue that adjusts in frequency relative to the player’s proximity to an anomaly, and the player is able to throw bolts to try and trigger an anomaly from a distance. And sometimes, like in the image above, larger scale anomalies can signal that there are smaller ones in its orbit. But it's those base visual tells that, however slight, becomes the most important. Spotting an anomaly at a distance allows the player to plot a safer path around it, or bring combat encounters to it so that it can function as a defence or weapon. Equally, many NPCs in the game store loot in areas with anomalies, meaning that they are often worth exploring so long as players can find a safe root to navigate them.

Anomalies thus serve a dual purpose. For one, the player cannot trust that the walking between major locations will function as “downtime”. Any area may hold an anomaly, and if the player is not vigilant, they may be hurt or even killed by one at any time. At the same time, by having the level design and world-building engage with the anomalies, this vigilant, mechanical engagement becomes narrative engagement. The player wonders what the anomalies are, or why they specifically occupy a specific area, or how other people may have reacted to these situations. Their strange forms and visual appearances endears the player to observe and understand them, even if they are dangerous and unpredictable. This all, in turn, sparks that intimacy within the player. It’s not just about surviving the Zone, but knowing the Zone, and intuiting your place in it.

That this mechanical intimacy is seemingly reflected in or shared by other characters in the world pushes the player to try and understand the history of the Zone and its people. I use the word “history” over “lore” here intentionally. Lore, while important and useful in its own right, implies the kind of world-building that might only explain the base nature of the player’s current surroundings, and in turn might not be materially useful to any situation the player encounters. But this is not how Stalker 2 treats its history.

Take Wild Island. Wild Island was (as I understand it) the end goal of Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl. It’s an island with only a few small, half-flooded and anomaly infested land bridges to approach it by, and in the past it was defended by dozens of mind-controlled Stalkers called Monolithians. In Stalker 1 it was the home of the “The Wish Master”, a character who could grant any Stalkers’ wish (for a price). In Stalker 1’s ending (now Stalker 2’s history), that game’s main character, Strelok, killed the The Wish Master and freed those enslaved by it. But in Stalker 2, Strelok is still there, along with nearly all of the surviving Monolithians.

Talking to Strelok and the Monolithians, they provide good answers for why they never left Wild Island. The Monolithians were freed from their mind-control, but didn’t get back any of their memories. As a result, because the Monolithians don't know how the outside world functions, nor even who they were in it, it's not clear how they would manage to survive anywhere but the Zone. Strelok, being the person who freed them, felt indebted to take care of them, and helps manage and provide for the community. Strelok does allows Monolithians to leave the island if they wish, but he highly discourages it. Even if a Monolithian wanted to leave the island but stay in the Zone, many in the Zone are prejudiced against the Monolithians for their past actions, and will attack Monolithians on sight. So, the reasoning by which many Monolithians choose to stay on Wild Island seems to make alot of sense.

Yet, many Monolithians disagree with, or at least push back on, this perspective on their situation. The island they live on is mostly just a dessicated old bunker, one that is actively irradiated and holds many dangers of its own, Monsters hang on on the nearby coasts and forest, and when you first arrive there's a zombie hanging out on the roof of the base that no one has the heart to kill. Many Monolithians you talk to wonder why they couldn't just move elsewhere, reamining united as a community but without all the dangers present on the island or in the Zone generally. The aforementionned zombie, and a later quest that has you encounter some Monolithians just off-island who died to mutant capable of mind-control, imply the Monolithians are perhaps more mentally succeptible than most humans in the area. Meanwhile, your conversations with Strelok and other characters heavily imply that Strelok has his own fears about leaving the Zone, ones he may be projecting onto the Monolithians in his care.

The player, rather than just witnessing this complex situation, is actively invited to participate in it. Multiple side-quests in the area require you working with specific Monolithians to undermine Strelok, or have you learn about some Monolithians who are attempting to leave, and those who have already left. But perhaps the most interesting element of this is that the player can deny these side-quests if they don't allign with the player's perspective on the situation. There are even lines of dialogue that allow the player to express that this is, in essence, a Monolithian struggle, and not one they feel comfortable intervening in. These sidequests are thus illustrated to not be just about loot or experience, but worldview and consequence. The result is a sense that the situation on Wild Island is alive, and that even being passive about it is a meaningful choice that may have an impact later.

This narrative design approach, which is present across just about every community and quest in the game, results in this feeling of the Zone having a living and ongoing “history”. This is especially heightened if the player has played previous Stalker games, as many areas from those games return not just with shared layout or details, but even updated narrative stakes (like with an endgame boss area now being a settlement in Wild Island). The player’s own history can thus become part of the history of the Zone, and inform the way they interact with the space. This all results in the player feeling as though their actions are capable of carving history into the landscape of the Zone, with a scale of output that is nearly impossible to predict. When the player can, intentionally or not, enforce their politics on the world via simple mechanical engagement, they are encouraged to care about their actions and care about the Zone, lest they bring about a consequence they do not believe in. And with care, once again, comes intimacy.

So with mechanical intimacy and narrative intimacy, there is one more way that intimacy can also emerge within the Zone, and it is perhaps the simplest: The Zone can be pretty.

"Can" is the operative word there. Often the Zone is actually pretty ugly, for a number of reasons. To get briefly technical, Stalker 2 essentially requires a temporal rendering solution to cover up massive issues with aliasing alongside noise / inconsistencies from their lighting set-up. However, using these solutions doesn’t particularly solve them (I’m using DLAA at 1080p, for reference). Grass is less jagged and pixelated, but in motion grass can look almost liquid, as various blades are combined and separated between frames. And while indirect lighting is less noisey, it remains blotchy and inconsistent from frame to frame, especially after quick camera moves when the game hasn’t had time to get enough temporal information from the screen.

These technical woes combine with intentional art direction decisions, especially within the game's weather system. The Zone feels like its in its grim, late autumnal / early Winter era. Most things are various shades of decayed brown, and the sky is often overcast and drizzly, which has an effect of often desaturating and decontrasting the whole scene. This, combined with the aforementionned technical issues, can blur the whole world together into a sort of brown, grey sludge that can be very hard to parse. And if its nighttime, then just imagine seeing the same brown, grey sludge, but only for the few feet in front of you that your flashlight allows for. Past that, the world fades into an oppressive and impenetrable dark.

The thing is though that, despite how we may feel about how the game arrives at the above, it doesn’t feel inconsistent with our understanding of the Zone. The Zone is weird and gross and complex, it’s hard to parse and hides secrets. If a bit of DLAA smoothing and lighting flickering and an overall muted image helps hide an already semi-invisible anomaly, then isn’t it just on the player for not stopping earlier and more diligently peering into the distance? If the player can’t trust the Zone, why should they trust the engine the Zone is running on, or the artistic choices it’s developers made?

This overall intentional grimness and smear means that when the Zone does decide to be pretty (and it does feel like it’s deciding to), it is truly beautiful. This is especially so in interiors where light penetrates through windows and cracks, which then bounces around to ambiently illuminate the decaying remnants of humanity, but just as much applies to the sun flitting through the ever moving foliage of the trees. The fine details of the game, from beautifully detailed, uniquely tiled bus stops to carefully arranged fields of flowers, can catch the player off-guard even in heightened, dangerous situations. And this beauty is enhanced by its rarity. A beautiful sunrise may only be glimpsed after trudging through a dangerous night, and minutes later it might just be replaced by cloud and rain. This rareity is perhaps most notable in severe weather states called “emissions”, which have the sky turns bright red while lighting flashes across the sky. To survive these emissions, the player is required to hide inside of boarded up buildings or bunkers. The beautiful and unique weather state can only be glimpsed through the cracks in boarded up windows, only fully felt during the dangerous sprint to safety. Thus this beauty isn’t just due to the game’s “realism”, nor is it technical successes, though undeniably some element of both is at play and deserves credit. It's more acutely because, as everything we have discussed here does, it places the player in the material reality of the Stalker.

Stalker 2 is a game about the Zone, narratively, mechanically, artistically and thematically. The Zone is large, dangerous, ugly and, in so many ways, deeply unfun to inhabit. Yet, for the game to work, the player must learn to not just understand but intuit the nature of the Zone. So the anomalies serve as a vector for which the players are forced to learn to intuit the Zone mechanically, to see how it hides both danger and opportunities in the same breath. In turn, the player engages with the various histories of the Zone, and by being confronted with meaningful choices about them, the player learns to care for them. And the player encounters beauty. Pure, simple aesthetic beauty, in places that may have seconds earlier been ugly, and may seconds later be ugly again. And if the Zone is capable of aesthetic beauty, then maybe its capable of narrative beauty, of mechaniiical beauty. The player just needs to understand the Zone, to care for it, to predict it and respond to it. And that is, in its way, intimacy.

How one translates this intimacy to other games, I don't know. Weirdly, I felt similar feelings watching people play through the Museum of All Things, a game that Wikipedia into a museum that can be walked through, complete with benches, lighting rigs and marble floors. I think you could relate this notion of "Intimacy" to the notion of "Player Fantasy", that both the role of the Stalker and the museum goer is understanding, and that both have a world that adapts to and pushes against that fantasy. Both enforce the idea that the player cannot simply summon their desired state of the world, that the world is bigger than themselves and defined by its own rules, and that all the player can do is respond to it. But that in learning how to respond to the world, and learning how the world responds back, the player and the world may work together to achieve their goals. The player is thus encouraged to build a model of the world, and, in turn, each surprising response from the world becomes something that changes the players internal model, and something they will try to understand and look out for in future.

Intimacy is, in essence, this act of prediction. It's not just about two or more actors engaging with one another, but intuiting one another, the joy of a correct prediction and the surprise / safety of being predicted. Intimacy equally comes from the ways in which actors navigate conflicts or faults within their predictions, and the route from that conflict back to safety. Intimacy cannot be bred from simply being served, which is likely why games of pure power fantasy don't have quite this same notion of intimacy within them. There must be back and forth, call and response, highs and lows. To have a game pursue intimacy is tricky, because it requires the design to accomidate and challenge a wide-range of player behaviours and actions. But it's worth exploring how we endear this intimacy, because it is that personal connection, that active conversation between player and game, that makes our medium so unique.

Why Necromorphs aren't Scary

2025-03-11T00:00:00Z

“Awww, they’re so goofy” was the disappointing, though not entirely unexpected, reaction that my partner had to the first Necromorph of Dead Space Remake. Given the horror title’s legendary status and the Necromorph’s significant part in that, you would hope their first impression would help carry that weight. But the reaction was not unexpected for a simple reason : they are a bit goofy.

This first Necromorph, known as a "Slasher", has long limbs that look gangly and unwieldy, and even when sprinting they can’t help but do a bit of a waddle. Their attacks just fling themselves at you, hoping some element of their body will catch you at an obtuse angle and knock you to the floor. They may occasionally shoot acid, but the projectiles move comically slowly, and the player's omni-directional movement allows them to simply walk out of the way. On closer inspection, the ways the human body contorts to form its elongated, backwards appendages is undeniably grotesque, doubly so if you manage to catch one mid-transformation. However, the overall impression they leave is often a bit sad. That initial Necromorphs’ whole deal seems to be trying to kill you, every contortion of their body seems to be built to achieve this goal, but they just prima facie have built themselves in such a way as to not be very good at it.

None of this is to say that the Slasher never inspires fear though. They have a habit of only making noise when seen, allowing them to act as a sort of semi-dynamic jump scare. They also love to skulk in the shadows and vents of the USS Ishimura, sometimes retreating back into unreachable locations to hide from the player, only to jump out and sprint at the player at a shockingly high speed. Necromorphs in generally are undeniably animalistic, undeniably predatory, and while they lack meaningful intellect or strategy, they can easily overwhelm in numbers, speed and their sheer force of nature.

So, why arn’t they scary? Is this an artistic issue, a mechanically interesting enemy with a vissually limp execution? Certainly not, and I only raise the option to explicitly reject it. Dead Space undeniably excels artistically in just about every other area. The Ishimura’s interior, giant and rusting and monolithic and tragic, with it’s matte metals and stark lighting is a triumph. The character designs are top notch, with Isaac Clark’s hulking suit being immediately iconic for its combination of high sci-fi and industrial labor aesthetics, and that’s even without counting its in-built HUD. More importantly though, the creature designs are good. They are horrific mutilations of the human form, each contortion of flesh imagined and rendered is such terrible detail that one finds themselves compelled to peer deeply into their forms, only to catch some detail so genuinely unsettling that they must immediately turn away.

There’s no deep fault in the Necromorphs’ design, not mechanical, not narrative, not artistic, not animation. So why “goofy”? Why “aw”? Well, let’s revisit that initial Necromorph encounter with some additional context.

Dead Space’s time to Necromorph is about ~5 minutes. In that time, the name of the game, the stated genre, the legacy of the work, the internal narrative and artistic elements and the overall vibes, all point to this being a horror game. The mechanical framework, with a behind the back camera and a lack of dialogue choices or cinematic camera angles or other modes of gameplay, all point to this not just being a third person shooter, but one whose primary focus is on being a third person shooter. So the sense is pretty immediately established that not only are you in for some horror, but that the horror is probably going to be pretty damn shootable. And rather than build any tension around this fact, maybe by trying to pull a bait and switch on the genre or narrative or really anything, the game speedruns its way towards its shootable horrors as fast as it can. You have an opening cutscene, you walk down a big hallway, and then you meet your first Necromorph.

This is, in many ways, a direct copy of horror icon and on record direct inspiration, Resident Evil 4. While a full diagnosis of how that game’s opening works where Dead Space doesn’t is outside of our scope, it’s worth bringing up here because of how Resident Evil plays with both expectations and pacing. For one, Resident Evil as a series had been, up to that point, mostly about shooting zombies. When your first enemy is thus a largely normal looking guy, there’s a reversal of expectations that is actually a bit unsettling. Moreover, Resident Evil 4 is explicitly quite camp and doesn’t try to instill genuine, lurking fear in the player until much later, in contrast to Dead Space which attempts this immediately.

So when a Necromorph first appears, you’re not just not particularly shocked, you’re actually probably ready to get going with both the shooting and the being mauled. But instead, the Necromorph’s first appearance is witnessed in it's entirety while its behind bulletproof glass while it performs a scripted kiilled sequence. While it slowly kills a character who wasn’t even present in the opening cutscene, and while your player character does his standard idle animation, you have plenty of time to first react to and then really fully consider the Necromorph in question. Given everything we just said, your first thoughts about the Necromorph probably go something like this:

“Ah, the enemies are here! I guess the game proper has now started…”

“And I seem safe, it can’t get through glass…”

“God it’s got so much stuff to hit, those big ass limbs”

“And it doesn’t even look that threatening! All its limbs point down, I’d have to be pretty close to its to get hit”

“And I’m wearing this giant ass metal suit! I’m sure it can hurt me, but how much trouble could those spiky little elbows be? Surely I’ll be fine…”

”And now he’s just waddling away all slow… awwww”

“What a freak…. what a goofy little guy!”

To be fair, cut to 45 seconds later when a couple of Slashers are chasing you down a hallway and your reaction gets amended with a “Oh shit they’re fast” and “I really would prefer not be near them”. Certainly, there’s never any doubt that between being in a room with a Necromorph and a room with nothing, you’d prefer to have the nothing. But regardless, I don’t think any of those initial reactions are untrue or unfair. The Slasher is a little goofy, is a little tragic, and is these things in part because they are a tutorial / grunt enemy. The player is given all this time to consider them because soon they will be running away from the monsters, and soon after shooting at the monsters, and the devs thought the player might need a bit of time to acclimate to them (time not necissarily granted to subsequent Necromorph reveals). And of course more terrifying, dangerous Necromorphs do lurk in the game: The Slasher in some ways stands in intentional contrast to them by being lesser than all the rest. Its design needs to seem kinda threatening, kinda dangerous, but also something that in time will give the player a false sense of security that “Hey, maybe this game isn’t so scary after all.”

So, in some ways, one has to feel bad for this jobber Necromorph. This read of it being goofy, even quaint, isn’t entirely deserved. It only happens because of the aforementioned context, being that the player knows they are about to embark on a multi-hour Survival horror adventure. It's not hard to imagine that the Necromoprh in a context other than this would be far more able to conjure the fear it's design seems to so desperately imply.

But again, we can note how the initial Resident Evil 4 villager enemy functions in a very similar role of tutorializing basic mechanics and setting up player expectations. Yet, by being so explicitly unhorrific, they manage to subvert themselves and become scary and iconic in their own right. There is almost something too scary about the initial Necromorph, a design that so explicitly evokes horror yet also so explicitly educates the player that the overwhelming sense of having been designed detracts from the whole.

The Necromorph in turn elucidates something about the nature of the horror creature in a ludic context, a terrifyingly un-horrific contradiction laid bare: While the horror creature must be scary in visual design, in ruleset and in deployment, it must also be “trackable” in some sense, allow itself to be broken down into understandable chunks of behaviour and function. We cannot just find a horror creature scary, we must be able to categorize its individual components as individually scary, and this analysis threatens the whole. For as indescribably horrific as it may be, it must inevtiably be wikiable.