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?

Theoretically, they are bad. You need to create inclusive works, products of entertainment that as large a group of people as possible understand, that draw in a large audience rather than rejecting interested people with a mess of opague references and jokes that pull on background knowledge exclusive to a small group of people.

For a long time, this was the chief concern with TNM, until our testers assured us that the in-joke to out-joke(?) ratio in TNM is quite fine, that all the obscure references are supplied by a healthy helping of regular pop-culture references and normal jokes relying on clever characters being funny. But before that, while we were still worried about being too exclusive, I came to realize that I love in-jokes.

But not just my own. I mean other people’s in-jokes too. In-jokes that technically, I don’t get.

In many cases, it’s enough to realize that something is an in-joke. It’s great if I see other people laugh knowingly – I don’t feel excluded, I enjoy looking in on a community I’m not a part of and observing their culture. Often, when the in-joke in question is encountered on the Internet, I will track down the source of it, attempt to crack it open and figure out what makes it fun, and against common wisdom (jokes aren’t funny if you have to explain them) I’m usually amused upon solving the mystery. I don’t laugh as I might have if I had been in on the joke from the start, but I realize how clever it is and I smile.

Phonogram is an in-joke I’m not in on. I was never a fan of Britpop – when Suede, Blur, and Oasis were big among even my Danish friends, I was discovering Metallica, Iron Maiden, and Megadeth. As I read Rue Britannia, I didn’t know most of the bands they mentioned, I didn’t get even a quarter of the references and jokes, I had to constantly flit to the glossary in the back of the book, but I had no problem with it. It was almost anthropological, examining an artifact from and a tribute to a community that I wasn’t and never had been a part of.

Of course I’m glad that there are so many normal, regular-people jokes in TNM that players who weren’t part of the PDX community around 2002 don’t become annoyed that they’re missing something, but I hope that there are many people like me among our players, who will pick up on the in-jokes and be amused even if they don’t understand them. Because it does add another dimension to the mod when you understand that most of it’s based on the artifacts of a small, in-bred (and long-extinct) community.

Past experience shows me that I don’t really have enough commenters to end my post with a question like this, but I’d quite like to know: What do you think about other people’s in-jokes? Do they amuse you? Do they annoy you? Do they make you feel excluded? Or do you ignore them, knowing they’re not for you? Please take a moment to answer if you have time.

I’ve just finished reading C. J. Cherryh’s Fortress in the Eye of Time. Finishing a book is always a monumental achievement for me these days because I read so embarrassingly slowly and any book that catches my fancy tends to be buried beneath a mountain of computer games that I must play for the sake of my hypothetical carreer. It took me half a year to chew through Fortress’s 700 pages, a stretch of time exacerbated by the book’s very slow opening, but as far as I’m concerned it was time well spent.

Fortress stands out for a couple of reasons. First of all, it’s brilliantly written. C. J. Cherryh is a master of her trade, an author who can literally take you through sadness, anger, and joy in the space of a single page. The book is written with an eminently intelligent sense of humour, made funny by subtle and clever phrasings rather than outright jokes. The language is straight-forward and understandable, yet the phrases and the vocabulary yanks you straight back to the middle ages. It’s a book with an excellent sense of time, as well as place.

Importantly, it often seems more like history than fantasy. Magic figures prominently throughout the plot, but it usually takes a back seat to human emotions and decisions, political intrigue, and medieval life. Great care is taken to describe what life is like in this world: What the political situation is like, how people dress, what people eat, how the social hierarchy works, and how people address each other. Yet this love of culture never gets in the way of the plot, and never seems to slow down the book.

When magic does appear, it’s unlike any form of magic I’ve ever encountered before. The way it’s described makes it feel genuinely mysterious and at times completely legendary – this, I feel, is the way magic should be: Rare, elusive, difficult to understand, and impossible to describe. It’s so far from the number-crunching high-magic settings I’m used to from computer games: “Upgrade this spell to deal 10 extra points of fire damage in a 30 foot radius”. You’ll find none of that here – magic in Fortress is hard to get a handle on and impossible to quantify.

Magic never gets in the way of the actual people. If there’s one thing Cherryh does, it’s to create entirely believable characters. The protagonist, Tristen, is such a pure and good person that you might dismiss him as uninteresting if this quality didn’t stem from a thorough childlike naïvety and a general lack of knowledge about the world around him. This makes him a perfect contrast to Prince Cefwyn, another main character, who is a good guy in spite of his political savvy and his royal power, and who is noticeably changed through his friendship with Tristen. Cherryh makes you like these characters because you believe in them.

As is my wont, I’ve been thinking about how this approach to fantasy could be brought into a computer game. Incidentally I think Cherryh’s specific take on magic could be very well implemented into a game, but in more general terms, I think the best way to pull off low fantasy in a game is to simply not allow the player to use magic. To properly use magic, the player needs to understand how it works, and when you understand magic, it becomes no longer mysterious and frightening – it’s just numbers represented by pretty visual effects.

In a low fantasy game, magic is best reserved for the NPC’s – an evil wizard toying with your mind and your reality, a sorcerous companion fighting unseen dangers in ways that are never really explained to you. Magic should be something that happens to you, it shouldn’t be a tool on par with your sword. That may not fulfil the power fantasy of blowing up a group of bandits with your mind, but it’d do more justice to the old idea of magic that put such fear into righteous people before the dawn of science.

If nothing else, it’d make for some really badass scripted sequences.

It’s made up of some of my favourite people-who-write-about-games. In the beginning they were mainly favourites because I realized they all love Deus Ex almost as much as I, but I have since grown to love the way they write as well as their opinions on games and game design. There’s something very British about the general tone of the site, and I’ve always appreciated a good Britishness.

A lot of the best stuff on there was paid for by other sites or actual publications (more often than not the brilliant PC Gamer UK, to which I subscribe), and it amazes me that they’re allowed to post these commissioned articles on their own blog. But sometimes they do post some completely new stuff that blows me away. Here are a couple of my favourite posts of theirs:

Quintin Smith isn’t technically affiliated with RPS, but he still writes some great articles for them once in a while. He just posted this brilliant little essay about Planetside. All his posts on RPS (click his name right up there) are well worth the read, but especially these three articles about the Russian FPS/RPG/adventure Pathologic must not be missed.

Speaking of recent stuff, Rossignol reposted a piece from Edge (to which I also subscribe, but never get around to reading) about game audio. The idea that many game design students neglect the audio aspect of games infuriates me. As a game designer you have to think about the whole package, you can’t just focus on gameplay and visuals and then completely forget about the importance of sound effects and music!

I’d also like to mention Walker’s fine observations on a particular aspect of Bioware’s RPG’s, specifically a certain mini-quest in Mass Effect. He brought opinions to the fore that I’ve been wrestling with for a while, and made me realize exactly what the problem is. It takes a special sort of article to make you go “Oh, but of course! That’s the problem! Why didn’t I realize that?” If nothing else, the article deserves mention for Bioware writer Patrick Weekes dropping into the comments to explain how that scene came to be in the first place.

I believe I’ve already linked to Rossignol’s rant about exploration, but I feel compelled to mention it again because it quite accurately describes my own love of this, the most purely escapistic aspect of games.

A little closer to home, Gillen once had a great interview with Warren Spector. So great, in fact, that it merited an exclamation point in the title. And in the same general sphere of interest, he reposted a feature about Harvey Smith from PC Format.

Speaking of interviews, I loved their piece about The Witcher, as it explained quite a few things about the game. John Walker also conducted an adorably fanboyish interview with Funcom’s Ragnar Tørnquist about lots of things – it was split into many parts, but I’ll just link to the piece on the meaning of faith in Dreamfall, as it illustrates what sort of dedication we need to show if games want to compete with the stories in films and books. Only… I’d like it if stories in games could generally be a bit less bloody linear than Dreamfall’s. If you like that article, I recommend clicking here, as Tørnquist seems like a very nice guy and has a lot of insights.

Okay, I notice I’ve let myself get carried away a bit with the linkage, but before I press Publish, I’ll just squeeze in two more great articles. One is Jim Rossignol’s repost of his PCG piece The Joy Of Co-Op, the other (and more important) is Kieron Gillen’s psychic essay about the future of games criticism. To the latter, I can only say that I desperately hope it comes to pass, because a world where the enthusiast press exists to point out the more obscure parts of the medium is a world I want to live in. And RPS is remarkable for already largely catering to that need.

Kotaku: EA Calls Fox Out on “Insulting” Mass Effect Inaccuracies

I especially enjoyed this particular huge burn:

As video games continue to take audiences away from television, we expect to see more TV news stories warning parents about the corrupting influence of interactive entertainment. But this represents a new level of recklessness.

Ouch. Touché, EA! Touché

Click here to download it as an .mpg file in a .rar archive (edit: The sound was out of sync on the .mp4 – this is 20 megs bigger, but the sound fits). I tried to make it stream from the page as well, but the audio was out of sync, so until I find a better solution (possibly YouTube), you’ll have to download it if you want to see it.

Read my comments after the jump, but not before you’ve seen the film, lest I ruin it for you.

I think some self-criticism would be appropriate here. The part I focus on the most is the script, because my group was generous enough to let me write it. Now that the film is done, it’s clear that I made a few mistakes. First of all, the beginning is a little dull. It was meant to be about a minute until Peter found the corpse, but it was supposed to be a minute of character portrayal, where we would get a glimpse of Peter’s environment and his personality. Unfortunately that requires a couple of things, like good set design, well-planned photography, and really good acting. What we had was somebody’s apartment generously lent to us and equipped with a few select props (men’s magazines, a withered house plant, a knife block), three media students with a year of AV studies but no practical experience to their name, and amateur actors.

Secondly, the film has way too much dialogue. It’s practically a kammerspiel, taking place almost entirely within a single room and being driven completely by its dialogue for about 5 whole minutes. The beginning at least theoretically succeeds in showing rather than telling and the ending I feel succeeds in what we set out to do, but the large middle part is nothing but dialogue. And… I’m ashamed to admit that the dialogue isn’t very good. I mean it does the trick, it conveys the information we need it to convey, but it sounds like it’s taken straight from a soap opera. Especially “it’s Brian’s baby” would be completely at home in Days of our Lives.

Annoyingly, I’m not sure how much of that is my fault and how much can be blamed on the actors. In general I don’t want to blame the actors at all, they’re amateurs, they did this in their weekend for free, and we’re deeply grateful for their help – but they are amateurs. I think part of the problem is I didn’t consider that I was writing dialogue for amateurs to act, I just assumed I’d have some good actors, and I wrote dialogue that was pretty hard to remember and speak naturally. I’ve uploaded the script , so any of you who speaks Danish can see how much of it was changed on the set – nary a single line remains intact. The dialogue that ended up in the film is much more casual than what I wrote, but it’s also less structured, less precise, and contains more repetition.

Technically, we did all right. We should’ve filmed more close-ups and we should’ve experimented more with the camera, but I think the film itself looks surprisingly good considering we didn’t set up any lights at all apart from what was on the set. There’s some genuinely good stuff in there, like the camera angle and movement in the shot where Solveig comes up the stairs, or the disconcerting camera work in the scene where Peter picks the knife up from the floor at the end. We also managed to experiment ever so slightly with the difference between a wide-angle lens (that we used in most of the film) and a regular 35-55mm lens that we used in the shot/reverse between Solveig and Brian in the hallway and in the outdoor scenes. I just wish there were more of those experiments.

The real experiments took place in the editing room, and although I think we largely succeeded in cutting the film like we’d intended and creating the subjective effects that we wanted, it’s pretty obviously an amateur film – it’s disappointingly conventionally filmed and cut and has a few really bad cuts, like the cut between Peter finding the corpse and the shot where he gets up from the floor and goes to open the door (I tried to salvage it with a dissolve, but it still looks terrible) or the cut between the two shots of Brian and Peter entering the living room (where Peter is suddenly looking in a different direction).

Still, it was a lot of fun to work on, and I think we succeeded on one count: The ending is exactly as powerful as we intended. Groupwise, we wanted to experiment with interesting camera work and subjective effects, which I think turned out well, and personally it was an experiment of writing the music into the actual script – if you do read the script, you’ll note the soundtrack actually appears in there and is even explicitly timed to the action. I’m really happy it turned out well, because I’m under the impression it’s a pretty unorthodox way to treat your music.

In closing, I have to say that although I feel the script is my baby (slightly handicapped and unintelligent baby though it may be), the film itself is definitely a group effort. It’s been great fun working with Carina and Anne, and I’m quite shocked with how much we all agreed throughout the production.

I’d like to establish a certain synergy between the film and its soundtrack, using the song to define and build a particular style in the way the story is presented. As I work on the script, I keep Hurt running on repeat so I remain in that mellow, slightly threatening and sinister mindset. I’ve only written the first few minutes of the film, but I think the intro is really good and I know pretty much exactly how the ending will be structured according to the song. I only hope I can cut up the song like I want so we won’t end up making a glorified music video

Of course I still have to sell the idea of integrating this song so strongly in the film to the others, but I think they’ll agree when I show them the first draft of the script.

The Bourne Ultimatum
Watch Identity one day. Then watch Supremacy the next. And then go to the cinema and watch Ultimatum. I know it’s “just an action movie”, but it’s one of the best action movies I’ve ever seen. Of course I read the original comic book series many years ago, so I was a fan of the concept before it ever became a movie. The Bourne trilogy has given me an immense respect for Matt Damon, who is one of the few Hollywood superstars to consistently transcend his own identity and make you forget he’s an actor. Ultimatum’s only weakness is that it’s sorely missing Franka Potente, but then on the other hand it features some moderate political commentary, and that almost makes up for it.

Not playing Knights of the Old Republic 2
…until Team Gizka finish and release their patch. That said, I’m glad I’ve played the original and experienced what a rushed and wounded game it is. I believe I’ve learned something from observing the choices Obsidian made when they had to cut important pieces, and seeing the consequences it had for the integrity and coherence of their story. Also, that game is in need of some serious balance testing.

I have never seen a film in my life that so consistently managed to not make war seem awesome. Platoon was supposedly an anti-war movie, but it was also really cool. Deer Hunter was supposedly an anti-war movie, but it made the Vietnamese out to be sadistic psychopaths. Even Apocalypse Now, one of my favourite (anti-)war movies, had a few (satiric!) sequences that were just really awesome with explosions and helicopters and Ride of the Valkyries and everything.

Iwo Jima shows that both sides have good guys and both sides have bad guys and killing each other systematically is just so goddamn futile. I really don’t know how Clint Eastwood turned out to be such a fantastic director, but I hope he keeps them coming.

I also managed to get 5 stars on the final song (Carry Me Home) in Guitar Hero 2 on medium, and have moved on to Hard, which has indeed proved to be… if not hard, then at least challenging; and I ordered Halo 2 for my Xbox and bought Hitman 4, 2, and 1 via Steam, to reward myself for a job well done. Now, I’m going to start working on a QFG post-mortem. The campaign ended last Wednesday, and I never managed to give it a proper farewell. I will also work a lot on TNM over the summer, especially if Chris manages to finish the last level soon. Mmm, it will be glorious. Just you wait, never have so much entertainment been so free.