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?

I’ve been thinking about killing in video games recently, especially after something Quintin Smith said to me about Uncharted on Twitter: “A character who moves like a monkey, slaughters hundreds and smoothes it over with a merry quip!” A few days later I came across another mention of Uncharted that pointed out the severe disconnect between the countless murders committed by the protagonist of that game, Nathan Drake, and the game’s chirpy characterisation and bright, unconcerned aesthetics.

A lot of interesting things have been done with player death in video games, though I’ve read countless more ideas begging to be explored further, but when “kill” is among the verbs at the player’s disposal, it’s generally treated in two ways: kill many people or kill fewer people. Some games include non-lethal weapons (a mechanic that seems most popular in stealth games, cases in point: Thief, Deus Ex, Splinter Cell), and some games feature a mission or two where it’s mandatory not to kill anybody.

I think the question of whether to kill a person in a game has huge potential, and I’m not aware of a lot of games that really make interesting use of it. Deus Ex is the predictable game for me to use as an example, but in fact the best example I can think of is Hitman: Blood Money, where unnecessary kills not only count against your score and salary, but change the media coverage of your assassinations which nominally alters the difficulty of subsequent missions. It could’ve been implemented more confidently, but I thought it provided really logical motivation for me to think like Agent 47 and try to limit my collateral damage.

Rock Paper Shotgun brought the blog Design Reboot to my attention this week, and though I have a very ambivalent opinion of it (I feel that the reboot posts are generally of little value to me, vastly preferring the occasional level design post), his ideas for Deus Ex spinoffs about Gunther Hermann or Anna Navarre contain some very neat ideas about turning the player’s killing into both narrative themes and gameplay mechanics.

I love the idea of a game with multiple endings chosen from how well you’ve restrained your killing throughout the game. I feel that for it to work best, a cold-blooded play style should be markedly more effective than a less-lethal approach, so taking the high road will be the difficult option. It’s important that the players be made aware that they’re heading down a dark path if they take the easy, deadly way through a mission, but I think sticking to your principles in a game like this would be very rewarding indeed. It’s what Deus Ex seemed to be doing up until its plot twist revealed it to be a sort of extended tutorial, and I’ve always thought the first act of DX was much more interesting because of that.

The way Monahan at Design Reboot proposes to tie the kill count into Gunther’s character development reminds me a lot of the role-playing system Cyberpunk 2020 where every character has a Humanity statistic that decreases every time a cybernetic enhancement is installed in his or her body. It’s used to represent the traditional cyberpunk theme of the transformation from human to cyborg and what it might bring with it of psychological problems and identity crises. The specific implication in CP2020 is that the more of a machine you become, the more you lose your human empathy, eventually becoming so disenfranchised that you go on a killing spree. This is very much the principle Deus Ex’s Gunther character was based on.

Since Quinns’ comment, I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that Uncharted could have been a far more meaningful experience if it had fewer fire fights, but made them matter more. The game already has a lot of elements that could replace combat as the core gameplay dynamic – adventure style environmental exploration, 3rd-person platforming, puzzle solving, and trap dodging. It also features reasonably robust melee attacks and basic stealth AI.

I love the fact that the pistol in Uncharted remains powerful and useful throughout the game, thanks to its high accuracy and stopping power and the scarcity of ammunition. I’m sure that if the firefights had been very rare but extremely lethal, and if the game had relied more on fist fights and stealth, Nathan Drake would’ve been more like his obvious role model, Indiana Jones. I rarely find myself advocating authenticity (realism, if you will) in games, but in this case I think a bit more of that would’ve made Uncharted a much more fun and exhilarating game.

For a very long time, I’ve wanted to experiment with an action game with very limited gun-play, where weapons are as lethal as you’d expect in the real world, where non-lethal combat such as a plain old bar brawl make up most of the fights, where few enemies try to kill you unless you produce a weapon first, and where killing somebody has serious implications. Short of a highly detailed law enforcement dynamic, tracking the emotional stability of the player character could be a splendid way to create such an aesthetic, and on top of that a potentially unparalleled way of tying the character development directly into the gameplay.

Above all, I’d just like to do something new and cool with the concept of killing in games, something that’ll make you rethink the traditional role of combat in action games, and I’m grateful to both Quinns and Monahan for getting me to think about these things in the first place.

Remember back in the days of Jazz Jackrabbit and Wolfenstein 3D when all games had Secrets™? Secrets could vary from doors that looked like part of the wall and invisible holes in the ground where you could fall through if you stood still to props that served as triggers for bookcases sliding aside to reveal hidden rooms. My experience with action and platform games back then, though, is that the former type of secret was much more common: Hidden areas completely unmotivated in the fiction of the game. Why have a section of wall that slides away when you nudge it?

Deus Ex was one of the first games to consistently motivate its secrets in the fiction. Liberty Island, the first level in the game, has a couple of secret stashes: Two crates floating in the water under the dock, a sunken barge with equipment in its storage compartment, two containers full of medical bots. These are secrets that make sense – the crates were in a cage ostensibly meant for cargo storage, the barge was the ship that brought the ambrosia to the island before the NSF sunk it and made away with the cargo, and the medical bots are in storage containers, ostensibly about to be shipped into the UNATCO HQ or off of the island.

When you find a secret in Deus Ex, it doesn’t feel like a secret the developers placed there for you to discover, it feels like somebody in the game placed it there, out of the way, and you just found it by virtue of your inquisitiveness. Rather than being external to the fictional world of the game, these secrets are part of it. They aren’t really secrets, they’re just out of the way – they’re not expressly hidden from you, but you have to look around to find them. And since Deus Ex gives you skillpoints for exploration, there’s always an extra little nod from the developers when you find these areas.

Mysterious spaces is something the developers of the Hitman series are very good at as well. Hidden areas fit the Hitman games so well: The first part of a mission is often spent casing the locations, finding out how the level is laid out and looking for good places from which to snipe, ambush, or cause an “accident” to your target. The New Orleans mission The Murder of Crows in Blood Money is an excellent example of this, having a main outdoors area full of civilians and then a series of courtyards and alleys from which you can enter apartments and bars.

And Thief 3 is exactly the same, especially its city levels – you sneak around, trying to avoid the city watch, looking for shadows and niches you can hide in, all the while looking for the alluring glint of loot. In that way, it presses some of the same buttons as Wolfenstein 3D used to do: The nazi gold providing great motivation to find those hidden areas. But in Thief 3, the loot you find isn’t simply padding for your high score, it can be sold to your fences for money you can then use to buy equipment for your next mission – the reward is internal to the fiction. It all stays in the story, see? And of course another brilliant aspect of Thief 3 is that once you have the whole city figured out, you get the wall-climbing gloves and whole new spaces open up to you.

What these games have in common is a medium-freeform approach to level design. We’re not talking S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or Oblivion here, the game is divided into a linear string of confined levels, but each of these levels (each of the pearls on the string) is an open area within which you may move freely. Hidden areas are perfectly possible to include in more micro-linear levels such as in Half-Life or Call of Duty, but it doesn’t give you (or rather: me) quite the same joy of discovery. And the funny thing is, because the levels are so open, the areas don’t even really have to be hidden. It can just be an open window leading from the street into an apartment or a locked door you can pick to find a storage room with goodies.

If pressed to explain this thrill of intruding on the privacy of fictional characters, I can come up with a few reasons. First of all it plays to a curiosity that I think most of us have – an urge to look behind the building facades we see every day. In games we have the freedom to do that – to break into homes and take whatever we please without fear of repercussions or (less selfishly) without hurting anybody. This overlaps with the compelling nature of mystery and adventure – we tend to enjoy finding things we weren’t meant to find or being in on secrets. Certain structures will feel more fascinating to explore than others: Breaking into a generic apartment and robbing the place is all well and good, but finding out that I can jump out the window on the second floor of a tavern and grab onto the balcony outside, which offers access to that apartment without having to sneak past the guard posted at the front door – that is the sort of thing that makes me smile broadly or perhaps even chuckle quietly to myself as I play.

So that’s why I love these intricate, open levels, and it’s why I tend to love the hub areas with safe zones more than I love the real missions where you’re trespassing everywhere. I love constantly moving between public spaces and prohibited spaces, sneaking off the beaten path populated by friendly NPC’s to explore the places where I’m not supposed to be. And fun as playing such games are, it’s even more rewarding to build those levels.

The idea is that you can approach the creation of a challenge for a game in two ways: You can treat it as a puzzle, where there is only one way for your player to overcome the obstacle you place for him, or you can treat it as a problem where no specific solution is given, just a premise and a set of “tools”. Let me exemplify.

Half-Life 2 is a fantastic game which is heavily puzzle-oriented on several levels. Most obviously, the ordinary run ‘n’ gun shooter gameplay is frequently interrupted by an honest-to-God puzzle – generally based on some aspect of Havok’s impressive physics engine – which you have to solve in order to proceed through the game. On a somewhat higher level, the whole game is extremely linear and gives you only one choice in how to handle enemies: Kill them. The only choices you have in Half-Life 2 is whether to search for hidden items in certain nooks and crannies or just run past them, and which weapon to kill your enemies with. It’s a great shooter, but it’s definitely not going to ask you what you want to do.

By contrast, Hitman 4 puts you in a situation and presents you with a huge array of tools and tells you simply “Kill this guy and find the microfilm he’s hiding.” The tools at your disposal include going in guns blazing, sneaking past guards and security cameras, distracting guards into leaving their posts, climbing over walls and through windows a’la Splinter Cell, conning your way past obstacles with good old social engineering, neutralizing enemies or civilians more or less discretely and donning their clothes to pass effortlessly through restricted areas, or poisoning food and letting servants do the rest of the job. To take the optimal route through each level, you’ll usually have to use many of these techniques at different times in a mission, but often it’s possible to choose a single technique and stick with it, it’ll just be a lot harder. Additionally, Blood Money has a scoring system to steer you in the direction of playing the game like the developers want you to (so if you go in guns blazing, you’ll barely get paid), but once you’ve completed a mission by the book, you can always go back and play it again as a regular terrorist, blasting through to your target with full kevlar and a pimped-out assault rifle.

That’s what I mean by problem-oriented gameplay. Your problem is that you need to kill somebody, but he’s protected by approximately 20 well-armed and paranoid guards and sitting in a Las Vegas casino surrounded by civilians. You have a whole arsenal of weapons at your disposal and more tricks up your sleeve than David Copperfield. The game’s artificial intelligence is equipped to handle anything you can possibly think to throw at it, and it’s now up to you to devise a strategy and combine all these options to take out your target and not get yourself killed in the process. Even if you play the game by the book, laying low and carefully getting close enough to your target that you can safely take him or her out, you still have many many options for how to make the kill. Personally I enjoy creating “accidents” whenever possible – they look particularly good on the post-mission score board.

I want more games like this. I want more games that don’t tell you exactly how to complete your objectives, but just give you a bunch of options and drop you into a complicated situation. In fact I would like to try and take it further. I would like an entire game constructed as one big problem with an overall objective and no predefined path through the game. This game would simply consist of a large world, a micro-cosmos a’la Black Mesa or Citadel Station but structured more like Cyrodiil, filled with interesting situations and complicated, wide-open problems for the player to solve as part of his or her efforts to achieve the final objectives of the game.

To vent my frustrations, I opened the game again and loaded up the mission armed to the teeth. I killed… everyone. But it didn’t make me feel any better.