Posted in: Comics | Tagged: games

Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh: The Path of the Hapless Psychopath!

Published Mon, 10 Sep 2012 10:00:43 -0500

Adi Tantimedh writes;

I get strange thoughts when I play video games. Other people get them from using drugs or alcohol, but with me, it's games. There's something about their inherent absurdity that never fails to get my brain going.

I was playing the new XBLA stealth game MARK OF THE NINJA over the weekend. It's a terrifically-designed game where you play as a ninja sneaking around on missions and you get higher scores and bonuses if you manage to get through an entire level without setting off alarms, getting caught by armed guards and avoiding killing anyone at all, but the option to creatively murderize them is always present.

I even had a very pleasant 20 minutes chatting with the game's lead developer Nels Anderson on Twitter when I encountered what might be a bug in the game keeping me from moving forward. He asked me to tweet him a picture of the level I was at to see what the problem might be, which I did with my phone. 21st Century First World Problems! If my 14-year-old self knew this was going to be The Future, his brain would have melted. There we were, trying to solve a problem in a video game on machines with more computing power than the capsule that took Neil Armstrong to the moon and all in real time. I was telling Nels that I tried other tricks, like deciding to kill all the guards in the room to see if that triggered a progression in the game. I think I should be disturbed that "Kill more guards to see if anything new happens" has become a common way of thinking in my wheelhouse. If nothing else, MARK OF THE NINJA, an excellent game, is making me wonder if I might have serious sociopathic tendencies.

Now in real life, I'm a pacifist. I'm one of the most boring people you could ever hope to meet, but in games, I'm a menace to society, a real danger to all life, without really meaning to be.

It's one thing to play shooter games where you're supposed to pretty much kill everything in sight, but in stealth games, you're not so overpowered that you get to do that. You have to sneak past heavily-armed guards without them detecting you to get to your objective. Unfortunately for me, I've always been a mediocre player and with stealth games, I'm especially bad.

I call my playstyle "The Hapless Psychopath."

I discovered this style while I was playing METAL GEAR SOLID 3 and 4. Missions usually go like this: Snake has to sneak into a place. He usually does okay until I do make a wrong turn. Then a guard wanders into my vicinity and sees me, that Kojima beep of alarm sounds and they start shooting, at which point Hapless Snake completely loses his shit and kills the guy, running in a panic as other guards charge in. I imagine Snake screaming like a girl as he karate chops or kills them until they kill him or he manages to run out of their field of vision and they give up on hunting him and go back standing at their posts instead of frantically running and shooting. Thank God for the short-term memories of AI guards!

The other thing I tend to do in stealth games is I try my best not to kill anyone, then they find me and try to kill me, so I have to kill them in self-defense. Seeing as they're vicious bastards, I decide that it's easier to just kill the rest of them so I don't need to worry about them coming after me anymore. Path of least resistance and all that.

I am not too happy with what this says about me as a human being.

Now, the majority of these action games are basically murder simulators designed to make the player feel like a skilled, remorseless badass. It's the fantasy every guy has. It's also getting pretty tired. We're now at the point where video games might be reaching their decadent phase and some experimentation with the storytelling is popping up with titles like SPEC OPS: THE LINE, which implicates the player in his bloodlust and desire to play hero by making him feel like shit for wanting to play with guns. Games like SPEC OPS: THE LINE basically make players feel bad. While I was on Twitter complimenting Nels Anderson for MARK OF THE NINJA, I started thinking about a different type of action game.

What if there's an action game where you don't play the badass, but a hapless idiot who can't help but get people killed?

Nels thought of the title "Path of the Hapless Psychopath". If he makes that game, I would totally play the shit out of it, a game about a guy who keeps killing people because he's totally inept at avoiding it.

In my mind, the game would go something like this: your hero is a ninja-like operative with all the mad skillz of a master assassin and spy, except there's one thing preventing him from being the badass he and the players might want: he's an accident-prone idiot.

Our hero's mission and reputation depends on being stealthy and restrained, which he tries very hard to be, but he's unfortunately a coward and prone to panic. As an operative on missions, he has to be hidden in the shadows, with an array of special weapons, traps and tricks like any ninja superspy, but no matter what he does, people keep dying, even when he doesn't mean to. His traps and ploys are so elaborate that they become Heath Robinson-style death traps for everyone in range. Programming the physics engine might be hell or the programmers can just leave it wide open to glitches in order to allow for all kinds of insane and creative murderous mayhem to occur.

You could have a tutorial level where he's still a civilian and asked to help his elderly neighbour get her cat out of a tree. This is where you learn his basic moves and skillset… and ends with him accidentally burning down the whole street. His old life is over because he's now a wanted fugitive, but his talent for mayhem is recognised by a supersecret organisation of high tech ninja spies, who recruit him to be one of their deadly operatives. Now you get the rest of the tutorial where he's taught the weapons, traps and tricks he would need to get through his missions – and also ends with him inadvertently killing everyone at the training facility. The bosses mistake his ineptitude for ruthlessness and are unsuitably impressed, so they send him on a Top Secret mission where the fate of nations are at stake. All the while he's shitting himself, utterly bewildered at how he's ended up in this situation.

The hero's reputation takes a hit the more people he kills. He's supposed to be restrained and discriminating after all, but when he trips an alarm and every machine gun-toting PMC soldier comes gunning for him, he's gong to scream like a girl and run around trying frantically not to get killed with hiding no longer an option. If they don't kill him first and you end up with a killscreen and restart, and his heat gauge fills up enough and he's not dead yet, he'll have the ability to freak the fuck out and kill everybody in the room in the most undignified manner imaginable. In other games, this would be considered an overpowered "win" button, but here, it is not a desired result at all. The hero will lose more money, points, stamina, charisma and reputation in the process, and perhaps he might then be presented with an even harder way to complete the mission. Say for instance he's on a rescue mission. Now the hostage knows he's turned the whole place into a bloodbath and decides, perfectly reasonably, to run away from him. This results in the hostage running into a hail or bullets or getting hit by a bus or falling out the window of a very tall building. At the end of the sequence, there would be an animation of the hero utterly crestfallen and muttering "Aw, shit."

The more people he kills, directly or indirectly, the more penalties the hero is going to incur. Your bosses are keeping tabs on you, and have made it clear that if too many people die on your missions, you're going to be arrested and imprisoned at best, and at worst, you have exposed the supersecret organisation to public scrutiny, in which case they will be very unhappy and send all the other supersecret operatives after you in revenge. If you achieve a near-genocidal bodycount, you're going to have to face a world where everyone with a weapon wants to kill you, everyone is afraid of you, you will be a social pariah, you will be alone because nobody wants to be anywhere near you except when they want to kill you in order to rid the world of the horrible menace that you have become. How's that for an incentive to play nice? But here's how the deck is stacked: no matter how hard you try, the hero will keep killing lots of people. He's the Inspector Clouseau of ninjas. The best he can do is try to kill as few people as possible. By the end of the game, he has done his job all too well. The supersecret organisation is in ruins by his unintentional hands and he has plunged the world into utter chaos. While everyone is busy trying to kill each other, he finally has the chance to quietly slip away to an island somewhere, but even then he might accidentally blow it up. You could call it a really messed up allegory for life: you try your best not to screw up but it happens anyway, but you have no other choice but to soldier on. I should add that this is not my worldview, by the way, it's just one worldview I like to use to torture my fictional characters for more laughs. .

Did I say this game is a comedy?

This is probably why I'm not a games developer.

(Thanks to Nels Anderson for unwittingly inspiring me here, including supplying the title of this week's column. He is a cool dude. You should totally follow him on Twitter.)

Reluctant ninja at lookitmoves@gmail.com

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