Oh No, Not Another Shoot-'Em-Up

There is no chance in this world that I will ever be asked to design a computer game, but I'd love to get the opportunity. There have been many times in my life when I have lived and breathed games. I'm going through one of those times right now.

It all started a few weeks ago when I suddenly realised that the Xbox 360 console was now so cheap that if I traded in all my other old consoles and games I'd probably have enough to get one. Since then I have got myself the console, a 20gb hard disk, an extra controller, a VGA switching box to let me put the output through my PC monitor, and a whole bunch of (mostly) cheap games.

I've never been a fan of console first person shooters (FPS). The control mechanism just never seems to work the way it should, especially compared to the trusty old mouse/keyboard combo on the PC (my most consistent gaming platform), so it came as something of a shock when I found myself absolutely loving Halo 3, one of the most successful shooting games of all time. I found the use of the joypad to be no trouble at all.

This was surprising, and it has opened up a whole slew of similar games for my consideration. I'm looking forward to The Darkness, Time Shift and Perfect Dark Zero, amongst others.

But I must admit that slaughtering unrelenting waves of virtual aliens does eventually begin to pale, no matter how well designed the game is, and there were times in Halo 3 where the pace really began to tell. In the end I adopted a strategy of "only shoot when necessary", which left large parts of some levels filled with confused and aimless baddies, denied their one chance of glory.

Halo 3 allows these canon fodder a degree of personality usually lacking in such games. I guess Half Life 2 raised the bar here, and made it possible to add a little narrative depth to even the cardboard cut-out bad guys. They call the player character "demon", which makes perfect sense considering that from their point of view the player has destroyed entire worlds of their brethren.

But I couldn't help but wonder if there might be another way of doing things.

A few days ago I started playing Tomb Raider Underworld, a very different kind of game, sometimes disparagingly referred to by hard core gamers as " a walk-about-'em-up". Would it were so!

Here we are exploring ruins, but for some reason we have to kill Krakens and tigers and even gun toting hoodlums, a part of the game play that completely destroys the wander-about-gawping-at-the-scenery awesomeness of the main part of the game.

I've been playing Tomb Raider since the first game came out in 1996. Ridiculously primitive by modern standards, that game set in motion a whole genre of uber-platform games that continues today not only with Lara Croft but with that Prince of Persia guy and the Drake's Fortune fella over on the fading PS3.

I started thinking about the Half Life series, and I realised that my favourite moments were when non-player characters reacted to the Gordon Freeman character I played based on his previous actions in the game. So, I would fight my way through hordes of enemies and arrive at the next safe zone, where the other characters in the game would "oooh" and "awwww" about my various heroic exploits. How rewarding it was when the beautiful polygon generated lady of the piece fluttered her eyes at me beguilingly. Did I suddenly want to destroy my enemies utterly to save here lovingly rendered ass? You betcha!

So, there's a real power emerging here in what we now call "computer games" that has something to do with player created narrative. Oblivion does it too, and the Fable games make a brave stab.

Then it suddenly hit me. The best bits of these games are those where the character doesn't actually do anything, but where the created world reacts to the character.

So, that got me thinking of a new kind of game where the character doesn't do a single thing. No shooting, no leaping from ledge to ledge, no pulling levers or talking endlessly to get clues as to what to do next.

Then I thought about the character that might drive such a game, and what he or she would have to be in order to have the game world revolve around them. A President? A rock star?

Like a bolt from the blue, it came to me. The game would be called -

PROPHET OF SILENCE

You're a prophet. You turn up, stuff happens. You NEVER speak. The whole game world knows what and who you are, and all you have to do is trigger the story elements by wandering around from amazingly awesome location to amazingly awesome location. The story unfolds without you having to take direct action.

(This would probably have to be the kind of "realistic" open ended world that the likes of Oblivion has, with day and night cycles and weather patterns.)

Let's say you turn up at a village. Arrive at night and a sympathiser who works during the day hides you in his cellar. Turn up during daylight hours (when he's not available) and you trigger a riot. The circumstance of your arrival triggers a different experience, which then has a knock on effect in the game.

Of course, the whole thing would have to be scripted. The feeling of riding the narrative would be entirely illusory, but the way it unfolded would be unique for every player. I'd imagine there would be something like fifty story "nodes" each with at least two outcomes, making for potentially thousands of individual completion routes, and satisfactory multiple endings (oft quoted as the long sought Holy Grail of gaming).

I think this kind of open ended yet tailored experience will only be possible when player action is removed. If the player never directly affects the world then the design doesn't have to account for all the ways the player might interact.

So, like millions of fan-boys the world over, I think I'd make a pretty good games designer. If you are a developer and want to sign me up on the spot I'd ask that you negotiate terms with the imaginary manager who manages my imaginary music career.

[Can an imaginary manager manage an imaginary menagerie? Say it fast.]