For the last month or so, I’ve been increasingly obsessed with a TV series called Burn Notice. Described with a cheap one-liner, Burn Notice is what would happen if you combined James Bond and Angus MacGyver into one person and then set him up as a one-man A-Team. It’s about an international super-spy who is set up and fired and then dumped in Miami with all his assets frozen under orders to stay put or bad things will happen to him. He then has to take on odd little jobs to help random people for money or as personal favours, most of which tasks he is grossly overqualified for. It’s basically a whole show based on that scene in action films where a couple of unlucky thugs try to mug the secret agent and have their asses handed to them.
Since I am me, and everything I see, hear, or do makes me think of computer games somehow, I’ve been considering all along how one might turn Burn Notice into a game. Let’s assume that some irresponsible fool gives me the Burn Notice license and $25 million and puts me in charge of a game development team, how do I design a game about the sort of emergent MacGyver-as-a-gun-for-hire aesthetic that the series delivers?
My answer would be to combine the mission structure of Hitman: Blood Money with the overall structure of Alpha Protocol. It would be a singleplayer game. Friend Mads has pointed out that the spirit of Burn Notice is just as much about team work and coordination as it is about Michael Westen being an incredible badass, so it would probably be more faithful to turn it into a co-op game, but my plans are already complex enough without introducing network code and co-op dynamics to the mix, so let’s just stick to singleplayer for now.
Think of the game as a season of the TV show. Let’s say that the game consists of six “metaplot” missions and five “episode” missions. The metaplot missions are about coming closer to finding out who burned you, or at least who your current shadowy puppet masters are and what they’re using you for this time. The first metaplot mission serves as an intro to the game, with whatever tutorial pop-ups the playtests reveal a necessity for, and sets up the overarching antagonists for the game. It’s probably comparatively linear, and it ends with you needing a lot of money to get any further.
Now you get access to a map of Miami, with points of interest appearing as icons like in Alpha Protocol: your loft apartment where Fiona is staying and where you can build gadgets or pick up weapons or tools, your mother Madeline’s house where you can get new episode missions, a bar where you can find Sam, a pier where you can meet Barry the money launderer. Fiona and Sam can be recruited as mission support like in Alpha Protocol, and they can also get useful things for you – Fiona can get you new weapons and explosives, Sam can get you cover IDs for your missions or acquire intel on your clients and targets. Through your mother, you will meet people who need your help, which is how you get episode missions. Perhaps there will be two episode missions available at a time, after each of which you unlock new metaplot missions, either because you earn enough money from an episode to pay Barry for whatever you need in the metaplot, or you gain favour with somebody you needed something from, or simply because enough time has passed that there are new developments in the metaplot.
Once you get started on an episode mission, the other missions would be locked until you’ve finished it (to avoid ludo-narrative dissonance surrounding implied time pressure in the mission). Each mission would be a lot like a Hitman mission, in that it takes place in one or two locations (a museum where something has been stolen, a drug lord’s mansion and a hotel room where you can take one of his dealers to interrogate them, a bank that’s being robbed, a bar where a con man does business and the yacht where he lives, etc.) each with a system of restricted and unrestricted areas, computers to covertly access, places to hide bugs, file cabinets to search, food to poison, electrical systems to sabotage, henchmen to manipulate with an Alpha Protocol-style dialogue system, and all that good stuff.
The major difference from a Hitman game is that you can’t switch disguises mid-mission, once somebody has met you under a certain cover ID, you will have to maintain that ID while dealing with them for the rest of the mission. Each mission would probably only have one or two cover IDs, possibly with different IDs for each location involved (so you can be a different person to different people), and it’s up to you to pick the right time to drop your cover – usually when everything is falling into place and it’s time to close the deal. Another difference is that you can move freely between the available points of interest on the map during your mission, which allows you to go back to base to consult your team if something doesn’t turn out the way you expected, or you can move between two locations to play enemies against each other, or you can plant a bug somewhere and then head home to the loft to listen in on what the bug picks up.
Since social engineering is an important part of Burn Notice, Alpha Protocol’s dialogue system would be extremely well suited to the sort of aesthetic we’re trying to replicate, and we could solve one of the major problems with it by playing up the “what will Michael Westen do now?” element – a lot of the joy of the show comes from Michael always being several steps ahead of both his enemies and the audience, and by embracing that at the probable expense of full player-avatar identification, we would bypass the annoyance of picking a vague dialogue choice in Alpha Protocol and getting a result that you didn’t expect at all. Especially the special actions you can trigger in Alpha Protocol are often very vaguely described and end up doing something you didn’t intend at all. However, if a dialogue option in our hypothetical Burn Notice game says “Take pistol” and you don’t really know if that means cheating the guy holding a gun to your head into turning over his weapon or elbowing him in the face and taking it from him by force, that doesn’t have to be a problem as long as you understand that Michael may not always do what you expect in those situations.
In lack of a full-on co-op option, thorough implementation of Fiona’s and Sam’s mission support would be paramount to replicating the spirit of the show. Alpha Protocol offers some good examples of how it can be done, with your friends leaving equipment pickups for you in certain places, working as handlers to give you hints, information, and optional objectives over the radio, or even showing up guns blazing to take some of the heat off of you if things go wrong. Clearly, there would also have to be an option to get Fiona to blow everything up, which I imagine would have its uses. Some cover IDs might simply require you to not show up alone, in which case Sam or Fiona would have to come with you and hang around in the mission area to sell the lie convincingly. You might even be able to split up and have them handle certain optional objectives for you while you do something else, when you need to be in multiple places at once.
All of this hinges on being able to add as many different points of interaction to each mission as Blood Money, preferably even more, and not having them depend too strictly on each other. Blood Money is so open because it’s not too strictly scripted, many of the things you can do in that game simply stimulate the AI in certain ways, meaning you can set up your own string of actions and effects to deal with each mission. If cutting the power box to the TV meant you had to rig it with a proximity mine next, to take out the guard who comes out to fix it, and then call the target’s telephone from across the street so he comes over to the window, which requires you to first poison the guard dog in the house across from his… it would be a lot less interesting than finding your own combination of interactions to achieve your objective.
It’s very important that a game like this not simply turn into a point and click puzzle game where you must discover the correct pre-defined sequence of events that lead to success, it has to be as emergent as possible, which comes down to how complex and flexible the artificial intelligence is, and how many different ways for the player to stimulate it you can squeeze into each mission.
Now that everything is accounted for, all I need is the Burn Notice license, $25 million, and a game development team. Any takers?
Actually, the AI in hitman is itself fairly scripted, from my understanding. That is to say, in each mission, the AI is adapted such that it has a certain behaviour – there’s a lot of hooks that have to be placed in the actual 3d environment for the AI to function.
To call this scripting is a half truth, of course – it’s not scripting in the usual half-lifey sense, but rather in a sort of semi-simulation sortof sense.
Being a bit technical here will probably help: Even half lifes scripted sequences are unique when they playy out in that the player is usually able to control his point of view and perhaps influence the sequence in some way, though the outcome is always set in stone – it doesn’t matter to the outcome if you shoot your shotgun at a big green claw swooping out of the flaw an nailing a friendly scienist through the chest, but the narrative you experienced as a player would be different if you did (at least your character, Gordon Freeman, did _something_ in one case, whereas he could also have frozen in panic and done nothing!)
What Hitman does is, it introduces more “interesting” unique experiences, where the scripted sequences you see through a playthrough will actually be different – you get to choose which ones you see. Someone running for the safe-room when the shit hits the fan is a scripted sequence, and that same someone pulling a gun out and investigating a noise you made is also a scripted sequence, technically speaking – but the more adaptive this scripted sequences are, the more emergeance, the more feeling of simulation.
Now I’m not trying to pick a nit here – the AI will clearly play a major part in doing emergeance – but it’s also a question of having many adaptive reusable scripts. The AI examples are obvious – but for Michaels forays into kitchens and hardware stores to be interesting, there needs to be a variety of tools and supplies for him to pick and choose from, and they need to be able to interact with the environment in a variety of places. Most obvious is to allow him to use any and all tools as improvised weapons, but giving them general uses in addition to specific uses (batmans exploding gel in arkham asylum, his batclaw, etc.) obscures just how much you can do with them – implement a lot of more or less generalized paths and scripts to accomodate, and the player will no longer have to “guess” the path the designer thought of.
Commando’s – behind enemy lines is a great example of an early game that did these things…the decoy, for instance, was a remote controlled noisebox that could be used for any number of things because it simply attracts attention. The Germans were scripted to head to it, scratch their heads, turn it off and pick it up. But it could also be planted, hidden, turned on briefly, and then turned off – the AI soldiers picking up on it would go look, find nothing, and head back on patrol – for a cost of delaying them for a shorter amount of time, you could delay them again later. Another, more simply example – a hand grenade could be thrown if a weird location, making a huge ruckus, and distracting everybody – or it could be thrown at somebody blowing them up. Both are general scripts, but you could surely think of some specific ones too in the case of the hand grenade – for instance during conversations where someone is going to have a gun trained on your head.
In other words, I see the solution as dynamic scripting, which I feel is a level up in abstraction from dynamic AI. It would often be adapted to an individual level or location, but other times it would be completely general and something you wouldn’t really call a script at all…but either way, both would be required and would need to be associated with the same ingame objects.
I’d totally play this. Unfortunately, I have a feeling that in reality, any game would be summed up as “When you’re a spy, your life is a generic third-person shooter.”
I watch Burn Notice too, and I’d have to say that that what you describe is a great idea for a licensed game.
Mads: Thanks for going into the technical details, I agree with everything.
Richard: I almost think I’d rather have a point and click puzzle-adventure game than a generic third-person shooter; I don’t like puzzles, but at least it’d probably get more of the character of the license across. The least you could do with this license is some sort of action-adventure game with mild puzzles like Uncharted.
I could imagine the mission in which Fiona is undercover as a model and you have to cover her ass, only there are so many way the mission could possibly go down. It’s really quite intriguing. If a game like this were to be developed, it’d take a LOT of work to get everything done right. I think a karmic option would be too black and white in my opinion.