The circles of hell: valence as character and Hitman's obscene moral calculus

I wrote this post AGES ago and promptly forgot about it. I've just unearthed it in the guts of the blog system, and so decided to let it light, regardless of timing. Hope you enjoy it.

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If you think your family reunions are bad – and believe me, mine are Shakespearian – spare a thought for Agent 47. Every few years he has to push his way to the buffet table through crowds of identical bald men distinguishable only by their barcodes, all disguised as each other and holding syringes behind their backs. Still, 47 is used to feeling anonymous because he was designed to be that way. He is deliberately without personality, a blank human being...as long as you pretend that ‘white’ and ‘male’ are blank attributes.

But what of his enemies?

This week [actually, months ago - ed] I wrote an article over at Gameranx about how the Hitman series handles character and morality. It's a reading of Contracts and Blood Money as "socially conservative treatises on sin and moral frailty" - which, by the by, an explains the origin of Absolution's infamous leather nuns. Here's a bit about BM's rehab clinic mission:

The situation is explicitly psychological: this is a place where people are imprisoned to protect themselves from their own destructive behaviour. The militarised boundaries and guarded checkpoints which make up the game’s bread and butter exist here as much to keep the inmates sober as to keep intruders out. But the system can’t protect your targets if they insist on subverting it. The mobsters seal their own fates with regular visits to secret booze caches, which, through careful observation, you can find and poison. It’s a clever setup because we already think about addiction in this way—both a crime and a sickness, a moral trespass and a fatal weakness. We are exploiting these men, but they also allow it to happen.

Read on for a supplementary post.

When text games go to war, elsewhere

Somehow, against all odds, I have tricked left-leaning UK magazine The New Statesman to publish an article by me, John Brindle. In it, I examine several text-based war games which challenge the representation of war in mainstream games, and which manage to speak about that subject in ways that AAA can't. You can find it here.

Take 2007’s Rendition, whose title would not exist without the war on terror. Both the first two Modern Warfare games include "interrogation" sequences, once with a beating and once with electrodes. But where they coyly conceal the violence involved, Rendition makes you participate in awful detail. Try to leave the room and you’re told you haven’t done enough to Abdul. “Break Abdul’s toe,” you type, and the game replies: “Which do you mean? his left little toe, his left second toe, his left middle toe, his left fourth toe, his left big toe, his right little toe…” At this point, many players simply quit.

Below are some notes on what I think of the article and what others think of it.

Why stealth games still matter, elsewhere

You might have spotted a new gaming site creeping through the shadows in your cabbage patch; that site is Sneaky Bastards, and it’s devoted entirely to stealth in games. As lovers of the genre we Brindles are keen to support them. Today they’ve published my article arguing for the continuing value of dedicated stealth games, bless their night-black hearts.

There came a time last year when the beeping ECG beside the bed of the stealth genre seemed to flatline. Solid Snake and Sam Fisher had burst forth from the shadows, guns blazing, whilst stealth was only one part of Ezio Auditore’s parkour power fantasy. Relatives gathered round, holding their breaths; physicians uttered grim prognoses. Now, with fans uncertain about the new Hitman, and bemused by the inventive but nonsensical ‘Thi4f’, it is worth looking at just why we need dedicated stealth games – not games with stealth options, or games with stealth elements, but games built from the bottom for sneaking and snooping.

You can find the article here. Make sure you stay and peruse the rest of the site, COUGH COUGH. Particularly of note will be Justin Keverne’s series on Thief 2’s level design, if his long-running blog entries at Groping the Elephant are anything to go by.

Incidentally, did you know that the top google search keywords for this blog are ‘groping’, ‘brother groping’, ‘groping brothers’ and ‘groping and touching’? I don’t know who you are, groping enthusiast, but your secret is safe with us.

CS:GO interview, elsewhere

A secret identity of mine has colluded in an interview at fan site halflife2.net, talking to Valve's (and OldManMurray's) Chet Faliszek about the upcoming Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. This blandly-named but interesting project will simply update CS for modern systems, and the limited scope of its changes is testament to how confident Valve are in the basic rules of the game. Perhaps they have good reason to be: it's still popular, and Chet contends the world yet has a place for it. There's also some stuff about the schisms in the competetive community and how player-bases respond to changes and updates.

Read it (if it please you) in three parts:
Part 1: "We won't change the rules of CS"
Part 2: "It's hard to accept change"
Part 3: How long will CS last?