OK, where do I start… This chain of thought began on a thread on a discussion forum I set up for some role playing friends (by the way, feel free to join in if you want to play RPGs or geeky board games and you’re in London). Someone mentioned cheating in Choose Your Own Adventure books and I’d been thinking about cheating in games for a while, when exploiting the rules becomes cheating and stuff, anyway I wrote a big long post that was going nowhere so I kind of internalised it and it’s been stewing and I still don’t have any kind of resolution so I thought I just write a load of stuff down and see if anyone has anything to add.

With video games after you’ve been playing a while the graphics and the fiction of the game world kind of drops away and you’re just playing with the rule set. Think of Street Fighter and how totally abstracted game play becomes from the figures on the screen, when you’re totally involved it’s like high speed chess the interface between you and the computer disappears and the game is just like a mediation between the minds of the players. The same sort of thing happens in single player games, with 2d shootemups the dizzying psychedelic fireworks fade and your mind starts dealing exclusively in vectors of attack and avoidance (my favourite examples of the genre are the ones where this kind of mathematical almost puzzle game like underpinning is brought to the fore eg. bangai-oh, god that game is a thing of beauty). Another example would be in Resident Evil 4 once you’ve completed the main story you unlock this fictionless version of the game where you just run around and shoot stuff for ever against a brutal time limit, pushing it back with the body count, the crowd control mechanic is brought to the fore and your interacting with the game at a much higher frequency than at any time during the main narrative part of the title. Once a game crosses this line from fictional world to mental exercise it seems to me that exploiting the rule set is no longer cheating but is actually what the game is all about. At this point you are, in a way, playing against the game designer rather than the your characters fictional adversaries.

The best piece of player toy removal ever!

Some video games never cross this line, in Ico it never feels right to run everywhere even though it would speed your progress in the game, the fiction demands that you walk around, slowly exploring the architecture of your Borges-ian prison.

Some deal with it very well. Trauma centre switches brilliantly between high melodrama story exposition - the pro-euthenasia doctors sister is being torn apart by parasites OMG! Tough moral decisions are thrashed out without being brushed over and then bang you’re operating and it’s one of the most high tension gaming experiences I’ve ever had on a purely mechanical level, which is how it should be, as a surgeon you have to leave your emotions at the operating room door.

In pen and paper RPGs this kind of rule manipulation (minimaxing if you want to get game theoretical about it) is never really going to be acceptable,it’ll always feel like cheating unless it’s going to be constrained to portions of the game where a character’s mechanical training takes over warriors in combat (this is how soldiers are trained in real life isn’t it? They make following orders and killing a mechanical act), healers in healing etc. Dogs in the Vineyard handles this brilliantly, by assigning vague traits rather than concrete stats and focusing on the relationship/moral decision side of things, the bit that video games don’t do very well at all. For me any kind of game that relies to heavily on simulating mechanical skills over exploring and collaborating on imaginary situations is likely to be an inferior experience to something like Disgaea which has a far and more nuanced combat and reward system than anything someone’s going to be able to work out in their head or from lookup tables.

OK, running out of steam now but finally, I went to see Mission: Impossible 3 (that colon placement always annoys me) the other day and it’s like a fictionless action film, it works well but it’s on a purely mechanical level, Tom Cruise isn’t a human being he’s an action figure, moving from one plot point to the next, the mechanics are absolutely spot on and the tension is dryly ratcheted up throughout. The weird thing about the film is that there are a couple of moments where you feel the film cheats, it’s exploiting the rule set for maximum mechanical impact whilst battering the fiction. Never mind all the video game adaptations that I’ve seen, this is the first film I’ve seen that actually felt like a video game (the recent Star Wars films had moments of this esp. Ep. 3 but the overriding feeling was of advertising rather than a game). Interestingly the new M:I film is directed by the guy who does Lost which is another example of shameless mechanical exploitation. (see also : Adaptation esp. the final act for good commentary on action film mechanics)