Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
undercover among Russian terrorists whose goal is to ignite a war
between their country and the United States.
In order to maintain his cover, the player character (and thus the player)
is forced by the game to either sit idly by while the Russian terrorists gun
down scores of innocent people at an airport, or actually participate in the
slaughter. Those are the two choices. The player is given no option to stop
the carnage; if she fires on the terrorists, the mission instantly fails because
the player character's cover was blown.
This level ignited much controversy at the time, and to this day stands as
a less-than-beloved memory; a risk on the developers' part that at the very
least attracted a good deal of negative attention, from within the industry
and from without. Players simply did not want to gun down innocents at
an airport, or even stand by and watch it happen as an inactive participant.
As I said, it's an extreme example and there's no way that the developers
were unaware of its potential dissonance when they created the mission
or shipped the game. It was, to one degree or another, a gambit by the de-
velopers. But “No Russian” illustrates the concept in very clear terms: mis-
sion goals that the player actively does not want to accomplish can be a
major problem.
Of course, every rule has its exception(s). A more successful version of
this kind of dissonance can be found in the first-person puzzle game
Portal
. At the beginning of Test Chamber 17 the player is introduced to the
Weighted Companion Cube. It seems identical to other cubes seen in the
game up to that point, with the exception of a pink heart design featured
on each of its six sides.
The Companion Cube, as a weighted object the player can carry and
place on the ground, is essential to completing this mission puzzle, and it
never shows any sign of life or sentience. And yet somehow—possibly due
to the cheerful heart design, or the notoriously unreliable Mentor
GlaDOS's repeated admonishments that the Cube is not alive—over the
course of the mission the player somehow gets emotionally attached to
the object.
At the end of the mission, in order to exit the test chamber and continue
the game, the player is required to “euthanize” the Companion Cube by
pushing a button to open an incinerator pit and then actively drop the
Cube into the flames. Many players reported feeling reluctance before
performing this act, and nagging guilt afterwards. Some—myself in-
