What’s a popular verb in games? I’m guessing a lot of you thought ‘shooting’, even though it’s not that common, in the same way that if I asked you to name an animal, a lot of people would say ‘a lion’. Shooting’s not universal, but it is endemic. It’s what non-gamers think games are about. It’s what news outlets use to illustrate headlines about how the games industry is making more than Hollywood, again. It’s the mechanic at the heart of Bioshock, Half-Life, Call of Duty.

It’s not much like actual shooting. Have you noticed that? My experience of shooting is very limited, but I know that much. An unusual uncle of mine tried to teach me to shoot in a field in Wales. I grappled a bulky, alarming object with both arms. I tried to listen to all the general instructions, I aimed at a piece of corrugated iron on the other side of the field. I pulled the trigger; there was a horrible noise in my ear and the alarming object leapt like a cow tossing its head, and the uncle told me I’d missed. Then I did it again, until we got bored, which didn’t take long.

There was no cross-hair. There was no cross-hair. I know how shooting works in games. You minutely twitch the muscles in your wrist; the cross-hair drifts until it coincides with a Nazi’s head; there’s a satisfying sound and a puff of blood and the Nazi goes down in a tangle. It’s a perfect little loop. Make a decision, wrangle feedback across seconds, interact, experience your reward. Reload, and on you go. How many Nazis and other disposables have you killed like that? I did a back of-envelope calculation, and as a middle-aged moderate-intake consumer of manshooters, it’s about twenty thousand. Don’t worry, this isn’t one of those editorials about how shooting is wrong, although I may yet do that. I thoroughly enjoy shooting, for instance, Combine soldiers. The headshot; the death static; the immediate reduction in the number of pulse rounds in the air. It’s very satisfying. It’s nothing like that field in Wales.

Healing; healing in games is the opposite of how healing actually feels. Healing is a calendar activity. It’s the careful curling of skin around wounds; it’s the uncertainty of whether muscles will ever align, whether you’ll be able to stand unaided again, whether the pain will stop and when, of sunlight and boredom and hospital ceilings. Healing in games is, by and large, less troublesome than adding funds to an Oyster card. Once you notice the differences, you can’t stop.

Have you done much jumping in real life? The whole point of jumping is gravity. Gravity is a harsh, not to mention an ankle-shattering, mistress. Jumping requires a run-up, a landing, careful consideration. You can’t jump without being immediately reminded that your consciousness is tethered to a big cluster of bones slathered in heavy flesh. Ow! Right? But look at Mario, look at Lara, look at anyone jumping over lava. Gravity is to that kind of jump what white space is to the end of this paragraph. It’s just something that comes next. We’ll continue on the other side without breaking stride.

I’m playing Bloodborne at the moment. Bloodborne has a reputation as a meaty, physical, bone-breaker, as merciless and arbitrary as an assassin’s Swiss watch: an artefact which doesn’t make compromises. But of course, it’s still a game! Every time I flick my Threaded Cane at an enemy, the whip coils in exactly the same pattern. Every time I strike enemies, it passes through (with a visceral, satisfying squelch, natch). It never misbehaves. It never tangles in a stray limb. I never slip on cobbles, my arms never get tired, my wounds don’t hurt. Bloodborne is about as realistic as chess.

Chess! It’s the comparison we all understand. It’s a battlefield, without a battle or a field, or death or soldiers or mud or uncertainty. It’s a battlefield where the sides take turns. Can you imagine the French and English at Agincourt taking turns? But it makes sense; it’s satisfying; players have enjoyed it for fifteen hundred years. Bishops don’t move diagonally, but with clerical law and privilege on their side, they could conduct refined strikes into unexpected quarters. Knights didn’t move in an L-shape, but they did obey a peculiar code that restricted their movements. Peasants didn’t become queens, but sometimes they’d raise a rebellion that threw the kingdom off its axis. Castles don’t travel, but they are blunt instruments of limited flexibility and tremendous power.

Chess makes sense because it doesn’t pretend to be a simulation. The similarities between games and reality are more striking because of their differences. We restrict the correspondences to the ones that interest us. Game design is poetry, and poetry doesn’t make daylight sense. “The world’s your oyster”? The world is nothing like an oyster, in every respect but one. If you think too hard about it, it falls apart. If you nod and move on, it works much better than a simulation. World, oyster, knife, pearl. Okay. It’s as sensible as using a mouse to place a crosshair on a Nazi’s undercut, which is to say, pretty sensible if what you want is to experience is the pleasure of decrementing the Nazi count, and not the complicated pleasures of wrangling a big hurty wooden thing.

Games are games. They’re carefully positioned port holes that we see part of the world through, and the part that we see is the part that the designer has laid out for us. They’re not simulations. Some of them pretend to be simulations, just for fun, but that’s just another designer experience. I just googled ‘simulator game’, and – okay, I got Goat Simulator: PAYDAY, which doesn’t really help my point and which frightens me a little. But my point is that no game is realistic, and that’s intentional. Realism in games – even once you get past the issues of crazy polygon counts and herniated CPUs – is as much of a fiction as jumping without fear of gravity, or taking turns at Agincourt. All these experiences are mediated, to show a particular part of the world from a particular angle. That, of course, is why we play them.

ASSASSIN’S CREED: VICE CITY

BE IT KNOWN in honour of the most noble union of YVETTE GUILLEMOT, of Ubisoft, and DAMIEN HOUSER, of Rockstar, that the FRANCHISES ARE JOINED. The Franchise ASSASSIN’S CREED has begotten upon the Franchise GRAND THEFT AUTO the Game ASSASSIN’S CREED: VICE CITY. Play it, and give thanks.

I’m confident I speak for all patriots when I say how delighted I am that Mme Yvette and Mr Damien are finally to be wed. This game has been specially commissioned to celebrate their union, and is to be generously distributed free (even the DLC and Season Pass are offered at a subsidised price).

It is a symbol both of Yvette’s and Damien’s love, and almost as importantly, of the commercial alliance between the Spiral of Montreuil and the Star of New York. The Open World Wars have claimed too many innocent personae over the last five years. Peace between Ubisoft and Rockstar is long overdue.

The vintage setting of Vice City has been recreated in Ubi’s house engine with passion, fidelity and tact (all vital principles for a successful marriage!). I was a little surprised to find that all the faces of all the characters in the whole city are those of Yvette or Damien – which can make assassination missions tricky, and disturbing – but given how very beautiful both Yvette and Damien are, this is no great hardship.

This does include the dogs and the cats, who wear Damien’s and Yvette’s faces, respectively. I will confess to experiencing a nightmare about the cats. But it was quite a small nightmare, and Yvette does have a lovely face.

The missions are smooth, straightforward, diverting, although admittedly unusual. In an early tutorial, we chauffer Yvette through the streets as she stands in a car and waves regally. Cheering crowds, also composed of Yvette, toss cash and roses; it was an honour and a pleasure to drive carefully, minimising inconvenience to the ever-elegant Yvette, and remarkably satisfying to pick up the rose power-ups. In my personal favourite, we guide Damien to a laboratory in a research hospital (were you aware that in real life, Damien holds an honorary doctorate of medicine from several quite credible universities?). We then PRESS X TO CURE CANCER – the gameplay is limited, but it is such a satisfying button-press. Of course, in a very real sense, Rockstar Games has cured cancer; by real I mean metaphorical, and by cancer I mean sub-par graphics, but I’m sure we can agree on the general direction of the sentiment.

It has been suggested by certain cynics that this game is sycophantic. I am a little embarrassed to share the honourable profession of ‘game critic’ with colleagues so eager to take such a cheap and heartless shot. Yvette’s and Damien’s Christmas wedding is an event of pageantry and honour, in the grand tradition of studio weddings. It will bring joy to billions of people around the globe, and generate trillions of dollars in revenue. And that is, after all, the spirit of Christmas.

STARCRAFT 3 MANAGER 3 LEAGUE MASTER 3

To break down the nomenclature: you’ve probably played Starcraft 3 Manager 2, or its predecessors. In case you’re one of the five per cent who’ve never touched this venerable genre, here’s how it works.

The Starcraft 3 Manager series allows you to direct the fortunes of a team of pro SC3 players – recruiting players from the streets, adding smart supplements to the team’s diet, negotiating with organised crime. Of course, SC3 has always been the pro wrestling of eSports, famous less for the intensity of its play than for its feuds, its choreography, its body-alteration-gimmick-peripherals, its staged mid-match hacks. Consequently, it’s a great story-generator for a simulation game.

Starcraft 3 Manager 3 could hardly be more different from SC3 itself. It has headline-grabbing entertainment elements – it was the first to include paparazzi, drug-related murders and true love – but it’s also carefully balanced and beautifully engineered, cut-throat as a yakuza razor, tight and intricate as a spandex clock. As a competitive eSport, it’s long since eclipsed SC3 itself. SC3M3 players are the kings and queens of their kind – and now that they’ve started marrying into the game dev dynasties, they’re one step short of becoming literal kings and queens. I would not mess with an SC3M3 player. I would not mess with her in the rain; I would not mess with her on a train.

So – stay with me here – Starcraft 3 Manager 3 League Master 3 allows you to direct the fortunes of a team of pro SC3M3 players. League Master is the troubled stepchild, or possibly the prodigal black sheep, of the family. League Master is a digital CCG with unusually arcane rules. It’s costly, buggy, beautiful, sluggish, and addictive as hell. The intricacies of SC3M3 are lost in the weird mechanics for Blackmail Showdowns. The SC3 in-jokes in the card blurb are only really comprehensible if you’ve been following the SC3 stories since the beginning. But it’s fun as all hell, and you might just like playing three games at the same time.

Should you buy and play SC3M3LM3? Yes, if you like any of the following: Zerg, CCGs, sex scandals, regression, the myriad facets of human experience, turducken.

QUEST QUEST

I’ve been playing Quest Quest for three years. Its appeal is notoriously hard to defend. It’s the lowest common denominator of all MMOs. It’s cheap grind, it’s sexy avatars and cheesy monsters, it’s McDonalds, it’s Candy Crush, it’s an endless sugar high.

There’s always more content in Quest Quest. There’s more content than you could ever consume. This is because Quest Quest is a delightful, delirious, monstrous pyramid scheme. You play for free, forever, but from the moment you create your character, a timer begins to tick down. You have one month to play – enough time to get comfortably into the mid-levels – before your account is deleted forever. Unless you create content, of course. Every content chunk you add to the game increases your play time. Every upvote on your content incrementally increases the play time further. You could just walk away at any time and let your character die. You could. But you’d lose all that progress.

If you’re having a hard time keeping up, you can switch to Gold Membership. Gold Membership means your play time will be consumed at half the normal speed. But if your timer hits zero, you start incurring fees, until you get back on top of your content quota. Or unless you delete your account. And you could! At any time you could! But you’ve come so far!

If you were wondering how Quest Quest makes money, Gold Membership is part of the answer – but only quite a small part. Platinum Membership provides the bulk of their revenue. I have Platinum Membership.

Platinum Membership ensures that your play time will be consumed at one-tenth the normal speed. However, for each full 24 hours you spend with zero play time remaining, you forfeit one major organ. You can live a reasonably long and productive life with no spleen, no gallbladder, no reproductive organs, one kidney, one lung, and only a left eye and ear. I have first-hand experience of this.

I wouldn’t ask this lightly. Quest Quest is a deep and slippery pit. But I would be very, very grateful if you could sign up, try out my Home of the Rainbow Seductress content, and upvote it. Every upvote counts. Please, have a heart, or I won’t.

07.11.15
I borrowed the idea for this from Stanisław Lem, who wrote entertaining and faultlessly straight-faced critical essays about nonexistent books he’d invented. Ramon Llull was real, though I’ve never been sure how to pronounce him.

One commenter responded ‘I don’t know how I got to this article and now that I’m here I’m confused and alone. Help.’

Another: ‘Outraged BRICK actually got a “Yes” — massive performance issues make it almost unplayable; still waiting for the Digital Foundry article. TILE is clearly better on PS4 at 1080p.’

THE GAME OF EYES

Ramon Llull was a 13th-century troubadour, novelist, alchemist, friar, philosopher, and tutor to the king of Aragon. According to Ultimate General Entertainment, who’ve just published the Game of Eyes, he was also a video game designer.

So far so British Museum. How did we get to Game of Eyes, a surrealist RTS-chess-Tarot hybrid? Ultimate General Entertainment are based in Barcelona (Llull kick-started Catalan literature). They claim to have discovered the design for a predictive philosophical chess game in Llull’s unpublished writings, and ‘extended’ the design to work in digital form. They note that some of the finest minds in twentieth-century computing – people like Donald Knuth – regard Llull’s work as the beginning of information science.

Game of Eyes gives us thirty-two maps, three-hundred and sixty-five units, thirteen factions, twenty-four resource types, and seven physical, non-digital Llullian wheels printed on glossy card. You set the cards to starting variables to determine the setup, and you use them later to determine story events. Ultimate General are insistent that the physical design of the wheels is fundamental to the game, and the physicality does add something, although it’s a faff to keep digging them out, and the card isn’t glossy enough to absorb spilt coffee.

The process isn’t straightforward, but it’s pretty intuitive, and there’s a decent tutorial. It’s also unexpectedly good fun. You plug in some general statements about a royal dynasty; the Power Struggle and Early Bereavement events pop-out. Twenty minutes into the game, when you first capture a story node, it makes an eerie sort of sense when you turn the wheel and see the capture resolve your Early Bereavement into a Back from the Dead event.

That eerie sort of sense goes further than I expected. Ultimate General claim that when you use the variables that fit mediaeval Europe, the game will predict the Hundred Years War, the rise of the Ottoman Empire, and the Christian conquest of Granada. It’s a little subjective, but I tried it with contemporary events, and I found

[ Article redacted from this point by National United Kingdom Security Order RL 12/3213/15. ‘The innocent have nothing to fear.’ ]

BRICK

BRICK is not for everyone. But if you’re looking for a real challenge – a game that makes Dark Souls look like Bejewelled, that makes no excuses and takes no prisoners, that needs a wiki and doesn’t have it – this is where you might want to start.

A copy of BRICK will set you back 159.99 GBP, plus postage. For that sum, you get a handsome buff card package, a brushed steel BRICK box stamped with a unique number, a twenty-page contract, and the BRICK itself.

A BRICK is a handsome but outwardly unremarkable item: a grey-white calcium silicate house brick, the colour of psoriatic skin or an iPhone. It’s heavy in the hand, rough on the skin. It has no screens, ports, no moving parts. You can’t install it, except in a wall. You can’t update it, except by buying a new, identical BRICK.

So how do you play BRICK? Discovering that is part of the game. The contract forbids me from discussing details, as it does every other player. You’ll find clues in the forums, but not straightforward ones. Mostly, you’ll find a furious war between players who get it, and players who don’t.

Not all of those of us who get it are polite. I understand why. It takes a special combination of talent and doggedness to get BRICK. It can get frustrating, listening to people who don’t get it accusing us of fakery. Look, I understand. BRICK isn’t for everyone. If it’s not for you, move on.

If you’re not sure, then you should know that ROCK, the free-to-play variant, will be available in early 2016. If you don’t have the stones to get BRICK, you might be able to get by on ROCK, until you can afford an upgrade. You don’t even need to order a copy of ROCK. Just go outside.

GASLIGHT

Gaslight changes the hair colour of my avatar about every five hours. I thought I was imagining it, but I took photographs. The last time I tried to take a photograph, the hair changed back. I think Gaslight commandeered my webcam and recognised the shape of my phone. I put a piece of tape over the webcam, and it hasn’t happened again.

I might have imagined some of this. The ambient sound that Gaslight makes has been shown to cause disorientation in mammals. It’s a murmur like waves and fog and the passage of stealthy foot traffic – a plausible background sound for the nineteenth-century streets of the seaside town where Gaslight is set.

Gaslight is ostensibly a non-linear point-and-click adventure, an exploration of the last days of a writer with a brain tumour that causes him to hallucinate colours leaching from the sunset and grey dogs at his window. Or he may not be hallucinating. The dogs leave footprints, at least sometimes. Gaslight will remove the footprints when you turn your POV away. The Royal Astronomer tells you that there is something wrong with the sun, but he only says so in audio. The subtitles suggest something quite different.

I saved very carefully when I started realising what Gaslight was doing. Then Gaslight deleted my third save. Then it deleted my fifth. Then renamed my first. I think that’s what it did. I don’t recognise the names of any of my save files, not now. I dream about the old names.

Gaslight has saved images of grey dogs to my Dropbox account. Or perhaps I was taking notes.

I don’t remember updating my machine to Windows 10. I’m not even sure it is updated to Windows 10. The Gaslight shell is pervasive and aggressive. I know for a fact it disabled my AV software (inasmuch as I know anything for a fact, any more). I think it pretends to be Nethack. The names of the Nethack monsters are sometimes the names of Gaslight characters. I think. I think.

There was once a virtual world called LambdaMOO. It began when a researcher named Pavel Curtis recreated his Californian house inside a virtual space in a Californian computer, but the space was open to other players connecting from around the world. You could connect with a named avatar, chat, walk around and punch things by typing text commands –

Back up. It doesn’t sound impressive now, but it happened in 1990. This was the year of the first Wing Commander game, of the first Secret of Monkey Island. It was the year that a computer scientist in Geneva was writing the first web browser, and the year before the first website. The ZX Spectrum and the BBC Micro were still on sale. It was before Internet Explorer, before home Internet access, five years before the first graphical MMO. You connected to LambdaMOO via Telnet and a green screen terminal.

It wasn’t the first text-based virtual world. There’d been a number of text-based MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) in the 80s. These were LambdaMOO’s immediate ancestors – the MOO stood for MUD, Object Oriented’. Curtis was working for PARC, a division of Xerox which did advanced, experimental, unexpected things. (PARC invented an alarming number of things, including fripperies like the laser printer and the mouse.) LambdaMOO was an attempt to see if something serious could be built out of online social environments like MUDs. Which were obviously trivial things of limited interest, back then.

Anyway, LambdaMOO was the first shared world which could be modified and extended by its users through the MOO programming language. So this was the frontier. And like most frontiers, it was both wide open and pretty rough. It was an all-text experience with a complex syntax, prone to unpredictable and devastating lag. But you could extend it: modify your character, add verbs, use the @dig command to create new rooms leading off existing ones –

Back up again. This isn’t about nostalgia. I want to point out that the first thing Curtis did when he created a virtual world was to add geography – in other words, make it non-trivial to get around. The house was a good-sized place with a complex internal layout. There was a street, there were gardens, there were sewers full of goblins underneath the house. You could easily get lost in that alone.

But behind the living-room mirror you could find the Looking-Glass Tavern, where new players generally attached the entrances to their homes. Those homes were where the geography got really complicated. The further you went from the mundane core of the house, the stranger and more delightful everything became, and the more complicated the the geography was. LambdaMOO had its share of haunting and delightful and inventive places, and all the players who added them wanted to make them effortful to get to. The LM Architectural Review Board had its hands full dealing with applications from people wanting to go beyond their location quota.

So it took real effort to find your way to the interesting places – but it took real effort from the builders to make it require real effort. Distance doesn’t exist in a virtual world unless you put it there on purpose. Remember, this was a world designed as a social environment. The whole point was to put people in the same room and let them talk to each other. But unless there’s distance, no one will take it seriously as a world. Unless there’s distance, you can’t explore: you can only browse.

Of course, once you’ve explored the world, distance goes from device to inconvenience. Originally LambdaMOO players had (I’m told) to create rings of teleportation, and use them to travel around. By the time I got there, the @teleport command was built in. Curtis went to all that effort to make the world hard to traverse, and one of the first things the inhabitants did was to abolish distance. Because distance is also a pain in the arse.

This is our old friend the Skyrim Problem. The first time you climb the Throat of the World, it’s an experience. It takes so long and you rise so far that there’s a real sense of achieving the sky. And once you reach the summit, when you look down at the road from Whiterun, it means something because you travelled that road. (Meeting the frost troll and having to backpedal and kite it to death with fire spells and keep reloading until that works spoils the mood, but that’s my fault for rolling a mage.)

I’ll remember that moment (the summit, not the frost troll) long after I’ve forgotten the dragon fights. But you need to go back and forth a dozen times from the monastery at the top of the mountain, and of course you’re usually going to use fast-travel. You’re going to use fast-travel to get from one end of Skyrim to another, to tick quests off, to get loot home in a hurry. You’ll stop experiencing the main point of Skyrim – all that stunningly realised distance.

And, you know, that’s actually okay. We often curate our experiences. The credit sequence of True Detective is stunning, but you might want to fast-forward when you see it for the tenth time. You don’t always listen to an album from beginning to end. You don’t have to eat all your vegetables every meal.

It’s funny when you think about it, though. Bethesda went to all that effort to put all the distance in the game. Then they went to more effort to let players take the distance out with fast-travel, under certain circumstances. And then – then – a minority of players built and used mods that blocked fast-travel. In other words, they went to more effort to put the distance back in again. (Conversely, we’re expecting to see a fast-travel Sunless Sea mod any day now.)

And, you know, that’s okay, too. But it’s not a solution, just a difference of approach for a few hardcore players. It’s not practical for many players to spend that amount of time walking around a map. When we complain about fast-travel, what we actually mean is, we wish we could relive the first part of a game – that sweet unfolding of possibilities – over again. We resent fast-travel because we think it’s robbed us of that experience, but usually that experience is already past.

The fact it’s past doesn’t mean it’s gone, though. Once you’ve experienced the geography, it’s in you. It’s part of your story. If the experience is a good one, you’ll regret its passing, and you’ll yearn to revisit it – but that’s the nature of the past. It can only be grasped in moments, and in its absence.

Julian Dibbell wrote a memoir of his time in LambdaMOO, My Tiny Life. He describes an attempt to get an overview of the essence of the LambdaMOO environment – a bird’s-eye view, a map. He used a hot-air balloon. But it was a virtual, entirely text-based hot-air balloon. Its output was snippets of descriptions of random locations, as if he was drifting over each one in turn. It could probably have spat out an ASCII map or something, but that wouldn’t exactly have given him the essence of what he was looking for. (If this sounds daft, remember this was a journalist in an experimental environment twenty-five years ago.)

So he’s pottering around the notional sky in his virtual balloon, and it hits him: the map really is the territory. The best map of an invented place is the place itself, because every distance is there by design. You can only read that map by travelling the distance. And reading it is like reading a novel. You can’t expect the experience to remain the same the second time, whether fast-travel is enabled or not.

Pavel Curtis left PARC Xerox to found a company that built conferencing software. Microsoft acquired that company, and the software became Microsoft Office Live Meeting which became Microsoft Lync which became Skype for Business. That’s what LambdaMOO spawned, and that’s how the dream lives on. You can find that depressing, if you like. But I’d like to believe that under every Skype for Business conversation, there’s a sewer full of goblins.

What’s the difference between a labyrinth and a maze? The original, primal Labyrinth – the first in human history – the one from which all others derive – is of course Jim Henson’s 1986 David Bowie vehicle. That labyrinth had a thousand paths – that labyrinth was all about choices. But, confusingly, most reference works will tell you that that this is the difference between the two: a maze has choices and many paths, while a labyrinth is unicursal, with a single choiceless path to the centre.

You’ll have seen the design of the classical and mediaeval labyrinths – the symmetrical single-path concentric-rings that look like a piece of jewellery or a ball of unusually elegant string. Henson’s Labyrinth wasn’t like that, and neither was the Cretan one. But they were both designed experiences.

One was intended to bring the protagonist to David Bowie, and the other was intended to feed the protagonist to the Minotaur. Unicursal knot-labyrinths were experiences too – in prayer, in ritual, for luck. Pilgrims shuffled round cathedral labyrinths on their knees; fishermen used them to ensure favourable winds and good catches; Lapp herdsmen walked labyrinths, and I love that I’m writing this sentence, ‘to protect their reindeer from the ravages of wolverines’.

Okay, we’re drifting off into history here, and away from the main point that you’ve probably already guessed. The main point is this: games are also designed experiences. And, just like labyrinths, they’re spatial experiences.

“Ts’ui Pe must have said once: I am withdrawing to write a book. And another time: I am withdrawing to construct a labyrinth. Every one imagined two works; to no one did it occur that the book and the maze were one and the same thing.”

— Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths

All – all – games involve spatial relationships. Often it’s tourism, exploring a virtual world. Often it’s pacing. Often it’s strategic placement. Even in card games, space and positioning are fundamental. Even in choice-based interactive fiction, the placement of links and choices in text is important. Not all decisions in games – probably not even most decisions in games – are spatial ones, but you will be making spatial decisions, constantly, from second to second. What to explore, where to move next, how to reconfigure the relationship of your avatars and tokens.

One of the many brilliant, subtle tweaks from the original X-COM to Firaxis’ rebooted XCOM is that the maps are long, not wide. There is a spatial choice to be made from the beginning, but that choice isn’t a dozen different directions. It is, more or less, left or right or straight on. XCOM is less of a maze, and more of a labyrinth. Firaxis thought carefully about the choices you’d have from moment to moment, and tuned them carefully to make an intended experience. XCOM doesn’t bombard you with demands. It asks you a series of curated questions, many of them encoded in the space around you.

So I’m going to go a bit further than ‘labyrinths are designed experiences’: I’m going to say that ‘a labyrinth is architecture that asks a question.’

Every choice you make in a labyrinth – or a game – is an answer to a question. Every question you answer builds up an experience. The most fundamental and intimate question in a game is: where do you want to go next? We navigate space instinctively – WSAD, left stick / right stick, mouse-click. We answer a series of questions without consciously realising it, and our answers are drawn behind us like a line on a map.

“Everything that you wanted, I have done. You asked that the child be taken, I took him. You cowered before me, and I was frightening. I have reordered time, I have turned the world upside down, and I have done it all for you! I am exhausted from living up to your expectations of me. Isn’t that generous?”

— Jareth the Goblin King, Labyrinth

A decision is an answered question. Sid Meier (probably the most famous living game designer – and one of the Firaxis founders) issued the dictum (probably the most famous living game design dictum) that ‘a game is a series of interesting decisions’. What does this mean here?

A decision does not become more interesting the more options you have, any more than a game becomes better the more features it has. However, a series of layered decisions, one after another, so that each choice is more interesting than the last… now we’re talking. This is how the best games work. One of the reason roguelikes are so popular is that they work this way not only at a game level but at a meta level. We build up a kind of superstructure of understanding, from this run and previous ones. This superstructure is like you seeing the labyrinth from above.

Games exist for you. They might look like opponents, they might be challenges, but they need you to complete them. All the tunnels in a labyrinth and all the questions in a game are created in advance. Even procedurally generated content occurs because someone set the rules, six years ago and half a world away. So a game is a conversation between a player and a designer, but it’s a conversation where the designer has had to work out their half ahead of time. This is why game design is hard! But it’s also why game design is exciting, because you can see the answers people bring to your questions, especially in the age of instant social media.

Every interesting art form depends on the audience bringing something to the experience, but with a game or a labyrinth, that’s much more so. The Minotaur has nothing better to do than sit around waiting for you: he only exists so you can decide how to kill him. Every time a guard in Thief says ‘Must have been rats’, he’s wrong. Definitionally, he’s wrong. If you weren’t there for him to have been wrong about, he wouldn’t have said it.

“A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.”

— Jorge Luis Borges, Dreamtigers

David Mamet once said that the outcome of a plot should be ‘both surprising and inevitable’. The same applies to interesting choice outcomes. But both to be surprised, and to know what’s coming, we need to see the shape of the world in advance.

That’s what game-labyrinths allow. A game is a designed experience: experiences have a duration. A labyrinth is architecture that asks a question: answering questions allows you to establish a context. In a well-designed game, you see the outcome begin to emerge before the end of the experience. You know you’re low on food, you know your alliances are fraying, you know you’re a hair away from the end of the level, you know what might come next. It might be success or it might be failure, but it will make sense in terms of what came before. It’ll seem inevitable.

But of course it won’t be inevitable the same way for different people. Making choices in a game is an expression of your identity. A satisfying array of choices lets you express yourself. It responds to that expression. It lets us determine who we are. There is a mountain of hippy crap talked about labyrinths, but here and now I’m going to stand on top of that mountain and say: it’s true, you know. If you walk a labyrinth, it teaches you something about yourself.

Jack Cohen is a reproductive biologist who gives talks on speculative xenobiology. I once heard him explain how we had happened to evolve from a species of fish that kept its reproductive organs next to the pipes it used to eliminate waste from its body. Here are the things, he suggested, that this gave the world: our whole attitude to sex; the sense that it was something filthy (pleasantly or unpleasantly); the design of toilets. We might have evolved into creatures with our genitals in our heads, which would make hats more complicated, toilets simpler and, more significantly, would have completely transformed our attitude to procreation. But it happened to happen the way it did.

In 1971, two guys in Wisconsin – indie developers, in today’s terms – released Chainmail, a ruleset for miniatures wargaming. It included rules for pitched battles, for jousting and for castle sieges. It did pretty well for what it was – it sold a thousand copies in its first year. One of those two guys happened to add a fourteen-page ‘Fantasy Supplement’ to the end of the book, with rules for wizards and dragons and whatnot.

If you’re a geek of a certain age, you’ve guessed this was Gary Gygax, and the Fantasy Supplement was what became Dungeons and Dragons. Here are some of the things that Dungeons and Dragons gave the world: classes, levels, experience points, stat scores at the top of a character sheet, health points topped up by potions or priestly healing spells, Tolkien-based ecologies, random loot drops, and the equipment upgrade treadmill that powers everything from Borderlands to FTL to Diablo.

Okay, but these are all pretty obvious ways for a system to evolve, right? Not particularly. You might have heard of Traveller. It’s a science-fiction pen-and-paper RPG that post-dated D&D by only three years – it was part-inspired by D&D, but it didn’t have classes or levels or experience points or a loot drop upgrade treadmill. Its influences were Asimov and Niven, not Tolkien and Vance.

In Traveller, you weren’t a group of adventurers who explored ruins. A Traveller party was a crew of ex-military types who travelled round the galaxy on their own starship, looking for odd jobs from patrons to pay the fuel and repair bills. That’s right: it had a supply and survival mechanism baked in, 40 years before the roguelike revolution, 40 years before FTL.

(Traveller did have stat scores (in the high single digits) at the top of a character sheet, but any combat damage came directly off those stats. If one stat dropped to zero you passed out, if three dropped to zero you’d die. It was an elegant system, but evolution, in its random, ham-fisted way, left it to die by the side of the road.)

It had some great ideas and some ordinary ideas, just like D&D. It did okay; it went through a number of reboots; and it’s now all but dead. It left traces, but it hasn’t had anything like the geological impact of D&D. Everyone knows what liches and drow are. Almost no-one remembers Traveller‘s k’kree and vargr. That’s evolution. Some species happen to be better adapted, and become part of the nature of things. Some end up as an odd pattern in a limestone stratum.

LEVELLING OUT

The first edition of the Advanced D&D Player’s Handbook talks about how you might think it’s confusing that characters, spells and dungeons all have levels – so a 12th-level character might cast a 3rd-level spell on the 5th level of a dungeon. Apparently the TSR guys considered making it rank for characters and power for spells, but it was too late to change. That’s the only reason, now, that we talk about ‘levelling up’ not ‘ranking up’. One game designer in an office in Wisconsin determined how a hundred million gamers would talk for the next 50 years, probably in the course of one meeting.

But I’m writing the rest of this column from a universe where Wisconsin was hit by a dinosaur in 1971, so D&D didn’t survive… and Traveller did. How do games look different?

The obvious: no Baldur’s Gate, no Planescape, no Elder Scrolls. No CRPGs in the traditional sense at all. Games are skill-based rather than power-based, with puzzles and action elements, and character life is cheap. We had our DOOM, we have a million skill-based ARPGs. Here on my alternate desk is a collector’s edition copy of the CD of the horror FPS System Shark, but I’ve never finished the electrocution jumping trap that SHODAN sets in the last act.

Stories are about tribes and crews and noble families, not individuals. Characters in story-driven games reproduce, age, and die in combat. The picture is big and the lifespans are short. Game writers are notoriously envious of genre franchises like Peter Jackson’s Dune, where you can keep the same protagonist all the way through and not have to write round their inevitable death.

With no grind, there’s no MMOs in the sense you know them. MMOs are half EVE, half Counterstrike, half MOBA. That’s too many halves for any one game, and in fact they’re sold as multiple games. Some players are always younger or better or more gifted with leisure time than others: so all online multiplayer games have a meta-tiering system, where the best players get to be generals or relic-bearers or champions who fight each other in single combat with an entirely different game client. You can’t grind your way to better skills and equipment – you can only prove yourself and seek election. The alt-universe politics of selecting higher-tier players are a heady mix of tournament and nepotism.

eSports hit ten years earlier (though there’s no Starcraft: no D&D means no Diablo, no Warcraft and so no Blizzard). Corruption in alternate-world MMOs is a big issue. That extra decade is enough time for the ecosystem to pick up big money, and the match-fixing and scandals that come with it.

One cluster of scandals had an odd outcome. It’s now legal to use bots for some of the roles in these complex multi-tier game. In fact some roles in some games, like logistics and support, can only be filled by AI players. These are totally custom software built and maintained by each esport team’s cadre of developers, with the kind of expense and effort and ingenuity that goes into racing cars. Inevitably, some leagues are AI-centric, with human players as more mascots than competitors. The USAF and the CIA Special Operations Division both sponsor leagues as training grounds for their autonomous UAV programme…

Back to our timeline! … where DOOM sparked the FPS. Dune sparked the RTS. MMOs were, approximately, invented in Essex in 1978. We might never have had any of these genres. Or we might have had them in a completely different form. Rush, tech, turtle – quick-time events – DPS/tank/healer – FedEx quests – right-click to move – none of this might ever have happened. Genres look as eternal and fundamental as gravity, but somewhere, right now, an indie developer is about to do something tiny and casual that will alter the whole of gaming for the next 50 years. Possibly it’s you.

If you like it, take a look at my previous columns. They’ve included pieces on gravity in games, an alternative history without D&D, the People’s Crusade as it relates to Kickstarter, and six reviews of nonexistent games.

Fallen London’s an oddity. More than a million and a half words of sort-of-multiplayer online interactive fiction, free-to-play but polite about it, kinda grindy but absolutely crammed with story: a videogame with no moving pictures at all.* I originally built it, and I founded Failbetter Games, who still run FL. Yesterday I left Failbetter, so I can finally use Fallen London to illustrate a point without feeling like I’m plugging it. I don’t want to talk about Fallen London, exactly: I want to talk about endings.

For years (FL has been running for seven) people asked: how the hell is it going to end? It’s a story-based game, and one of the defining qualities of stories is that they have an end as well as a beginning and a middle. There are exceptions, but one of the defining qualities of a horse is that there’s a leg at each corner, even though some horses have three legs. Stories, basically, end.

How do you do that with a free-to-play game where players want to keep going forever? If a player can still play, their story isn’t over; if they can’t still play, they’re upset (and, candidly, they won’t make a free-to-play game any more money). This is a problem that (eg) MMOs face, too, but the story in MMOs is generally an afterthought. Fallen London, notoriously, has almost no gameplay. It’s all story.

We did settle on a solution – in fact, a couple. I’ll talk about that in a moment, but I want to say a few things about endings generally first.

One of my favourite, and Frenchest, quotes is something Balzac said: that coming up with ideas for stories is the fun bit like ‘smoking enchanted cigarettes’. Beginnings are fun; they’re barely more than an idea, and a promise of an ending. It’s much easier to make a promise than it is to fulfil it. To finish a story you need an ending, and endings are hard. (Middles are even harder, sometimes, but that’s another column.) There are a bunch of reasons for this – fulfilling that initial promise, being both surprising and inevitable, all that good stuff – but also, just finishing something, deciding when to call it done, is something that only seems easy to everyone who’s never tried to do it.

Deciding when to call a story done is even harder when player action can alter what happens. What if they do something that takes the plot elsewhere? The first-pass response to this, the one people usually expect, is to add multiple branching endings. The first problem with that is: when the hell do you know when to stop? You’ve just gone from a flat to a three-dimensional problem, and every writer of non-linear narrative knows the devouring temptation of adding just one more ending.

But in any case, multiple endings generally aren’t multiple endings, exactly, if the player keeps going after the first ending to look at the others. The first (second, third…) endings become late middle, epilogues to the real ending. Or, sometimes, the first ending is the Real Ending, the one that you chose in your personal headcanon. So even multiple-ending games still have one ending, and then one kind of epilogue or another.

Some games lock this down hard. Big CRPGs branch their endings based on stuff that happens earlier, so you have to replay the whole game to see something different – and that feels more like a reboot or a retelling, an extension of the same story. No one sane will reload a game from five hours back to view an alternate ending (although there are plenty of non-sane YouTubers to whom I am very grateful for their ending videos).

So if you have a big, long, slow feedback loop, you can make multiple endings feel like different endings. But that still doesn’t help with a game that can’t afford an ending at all. So Fallen London took two distinct approaches, with two different strategies: one, make sense of the desire to choose have an ending, but allow them continuity. Two, make players want an ending anyway.

The first approach was Destinies: what some people have called an ‘equippable ending’. At rare times of the year, characters can experience a dream of the future. They get to choose a really cool but also horrible thing that will happen to them as the first scene of the last act of their life. They bring back the memory of that dream, and equip it as a trophy item that gives stat buffs. They can change the dream later – exploring multiple endings – but in the meantime, they get to continue in the knowledge of the ending, seeing it have a real effect. “If you can’t solve the problem of players wanting closure or continuity, give them both.”

And the second approach was FL’s most demanding, aggressive, ridiculous storyline: the Search for Mr Eaten’s Name. Players are told that this quest will not end well, and that they’ll destroy themselves and everything they love (especially and mostly, their cool tools and phat lewts, but also their friends, spouses, past, future and more). If you know anything about human nature, you’ll have guessed that this is a tremendous hit with a minority of really core players – because of, not despite, the fact they’re working hard over a long period of time to set fire to their character and watch it burn. It’s not a con or a trick. There’s a huge amount of story in the Search. But the Search isn’t joking around when it gives the player a quality called A Bad End. “If you can’t solve the problem of players wanting closure or continuity, make them want closure.”

Non-linear stories work like and unlike linear stories. We’re still learning the unlike things that make them work. Even endings can be unlike. Sometimes, with a non-linear experience, you need to embed the ending in the middle, or, as it were, crush it up and stir it into the rest of the game. It’s even harder to decide when you’re done, but if you can’t decide when you’re done, you don’t have a story, just a mess of offcuts. And not all stories are tidy, even linear ones. Sometimes you just have to stop, right in the middle of everything.

* I was at the ceremony when Fallen London won Best Browser Game in 2009. The games in other categories were things like Warcraft and Arkham Asylum, so the looping ceremony video cut from high-end fight scenes to a camera panning optimistically across a beige web page. I couldn’t look anyone in the eye.