Imagine a game that took place within a gated summerhouse community. You play as a teenager on his way to dinner with his girlfriend at her parents’ house – their guest house is bigger than your house, seeing as how you are the son of the Head Security officer for the community that only numbers a dozen families. Your father is driving you to the house as the game’s opening credits roll. You are free to look outside the window, try and catch a glimpse of people in their homes. Some have their lights on, but you don’t see anybody. When you arrive at the house, a cutscene guides you to the front door. Just as you are about to knock, what sounds like a car backfire goes off somewhere in the distance. Your father tells you to have fun. He drives in the direction of the backfire.

You are now in first-person control of the teenager. You could ring the doorbell, but perhaps you realize the door is slightly ajar. Go on in – they are expecting you anyway. Go on in – it’s where you’ll find your girlfriend’s parents dying on a rug that used to be white.

It’s too late for the father. The mother, however, lives long enough to tell you what happened: a group of men broke into the house, the father told the daughter to run.

Where are they? Where is she? The mother can’t answer. She dies.

At this point you are free to do whatever you like. The game doesn’t give you mission objectives, doesn’t highlight objects or destinations. The game has already set up the premise and motives, and as the player, you should know what your goal is.

Will you play the coward and get out of the neighborhood?
Will you play the hero and find your girlfriend so that you can escape together?
Or will you play the other kind of hero and kill the bad guys?

”We all have the same sickness. And we all had the same item on our bucket list.“

Random is the key mechanic. Every time you start a new game, the neighborhood is randomly generated. So is the layout of the houses. The household items. Your girlfriend’s location. The number of bad guys, their preferred weapons. Scripted events, their rewards, and their outcomes.

The majority of the objects can be picked up and used. You can have an inventory if you pick up a bag, and you realize different bags have different properties like weight and capacity which effects your movement and effectiveness of sneaking and hiding.

The majority of the objects won’t have utility. The point is to inundate you with choices. The ability to pick up every single item is a way to remove highlighting the most effective or important items. If they shimmered or if you were only allowed to pick up items relevant to completing the game there would be no reason to explore the houses, and tension would be lacking.

Take for example the instance of a baddie spotting you. His routine will be to charge at you either for capture or for the kill. They will always be stronger than you, which is why you never want to engage them up close with empty hands. The strategy is to slow them down so that you can run away or hide. Slowing them down involves throwing what items are nearby. Some items are more effective than others. You have to decide: throw a bunch plates at him because it’s nearby and are fast to release or risk him catching you, run into the living room and throw an ashtray because it has more weight than kitchen plates. You don’t play a super soldier, and so you should have the ability to grab whatever is nearby to escape the attacker. This isn’t a first person shooter so you aren’t going to find rooms whose only source of light shines on a weapon resting on a script trigger.

Or perhaps you will. Perhaps you will find a handgun underneath scattered papers in a tossed room. You can’t find a box of ammo, but it doesn’t matter since the gun is heavy with bullets. You feel powerful. You become brave, leave the shadows and charge into the street. There is a bad guy in a track suit emerging from a house. He screams and runs frantic at you, screwdriver in hand. You aim and pull the trigger. There is a click without an explosion. You have no idea why. You have no other means to defend yourself. The guy is upon you, stabbing you and laughing at you and screaming at you I bent the firing pin and tossed the gun onto the floor for you to find die now die.

Game over. Perhaps then you’ll only be sure of guns locked safe behind an untampered box.

”Finding your girlfriend wasn’t too much trouble – there are only so many closets. Killing your father wasn’t too much trouble either – there are only so many hits a person can take to the face. How far can you run on broken glass to save her life, track star?”

Object hunting is another gameplay component. You begin weaponless. You won’t find guns on the kitchen counter or the table in the foyer. This is a rich community, meaning there will most likely be a safe which may or may not contain a firearm – a better bet is a gun storage case, but they will always be locked so you either have to find the key or the passcode – or maybe it’s better to just move along since you don’t have time to methodically go through every room every drawer. Sometimes you have to make the best of the baseball bat you found in a kid’s room or a poker next to the fireplace. Go to any kitchen and you’ll find a knife. That is, if the bad guys haven’t taken them all.

Rummaging through drawers and closets is not a cutscene. Everything is in real time so you have to decide how much pressure is applied to opening a drawer. Do you max power toss it off its tracks and let it crash to the floor? In a hurry you might, and you just might make enough noise to alert a bad guy to your area. And even with a baseball bat, the advantage still lies with evil. You are, after all, just a teenager.

These bad guys: sometimes they will have a random weapon. The majority will be stronger than you. Being a track athlete you do have a speed advantage. They can’t control their breathing like you do, which is why running is sometimes the best option.

You will stalk through houses to find your girlfriend while avoiding the bad guys – some will be roaming the neighborhood, looking for people they may have missed. Maybe some will be hiding, intent to make their victims do all the work by tripping the wire.

With a careful play style you will most likely snake through backyards, sneak through houses as you look for her. Perhaps through the use of a headset you can determine your volume. Whisper her name and she will hear you; of course the range will be limited. Shout – she will hear you and run to you. So will nearby bad guys.

Once you do find her she will follow. You can continue to look for a weapon to fend off the bad guys or you can run to the exit. Maybe you sneak into a house, look for a weapon or keys to the car or boat. Since this room’s curtains have been pulled to the ground, you don’t want to look through the room with the lights on so that someone outside can see you. And so maybe, confident in your brilliance, you decide to turn off the lights.

Perhaps you chose her for the setup, which is merely an excuse for her outfit. The classroom. The office. The living room of your best friend’s mother. Don’t underestimate what will soon be taken off.

She walks into the office, dressed as an executive in a gray jacket and matching skirt, nylons, and high heels whose color matches the choker, the one accessory besides her mannerisms that seem out of place.

Without seduction she starts unbuttoning her blouse, hiking up her skirt. She teases you by arching her feet, the sexiest curve on a woman. She takes off her glasses, decides to keep her hair tied back. The jacket comes off. Breasts hang out of her bra, but her blouse is still on because she’s holding onto the desk, begging to be penetrated from behind.

She takes a pounding though it’s rough on her terms since she is the one dictating the pace. She swings her legs over to get into a mounting position. Blouse and bra come off. Calf muscles tighten up. Sweat is trickling down her body. Her bucking is loosening strands of hair from its clip. She is wearing herself out, is swept up and dropped onto her back. Legs are spread and held high; glamorous in its own way. Whimpers and moans. One hundred and ninety-five pounds slamming into her. She can take it.

Her breathing is rapid. There is a sheen on her skin; her chest and lower back. Her hair clip is broken. She doesn’t need to push her hair back because sweat is clinging it to her face. She has been pushed and shoved and penetrated. She is slack, can barely keep her head up. And when the dance is done, she can drop down onto her knees and find comfort in a scene well-executed.

And so the adventure begins. A common line among games trying to pull you into its gunpowder or sword and sorcery epic. You usually start as level 1, equipped with gear whose adjectives are unimpressive; there is no weight behind leather, no strength behind iron. Sometimes your origin is humble, sometimes you have proven yourself to the little world you live in.

You set out on your journey to save the world. You meet the spectrum of characters. Experience is gained with every kill. Generic equipment is sold to make room for special gear with added effects; complete an optional side quest and you just might be awarded the most powerful weapon/armor in the game. Your stats and skills will increase. There is a ceiling to your levels. When you are three-quarters of the way there, not even the final boss can touch you.

Imagine a third-person action-adventure game that lets you take control of a character on a quest to save the world. Maybe she has a humble childhood, uneventful teenage years, and when she becomes an adult, a world event shockwaves through her little existence and destroys her comforts. She knows where the detonation occurred, always has it in her sights. Her alpha has been established. The omega is something she would have never imagined.

And so the adventure begins. The premise is nothing special since it can describe quite a number of games. There may be themes, but like books, themes are usually not the hook. Whatever the pull, there is no denying the game has been designed to immerse you into an epic journey with an equally outlandish destination. The game will offer you monsters to kill, dungeons to raid, pursuers to escape from, allies that will become your family, and a love interest that will embrace you in the final shot. The difference in this game is in your character’s changing appearance.

The majority of games don’t have to establish you, the player, as the almost godlike character that will cut through an obscene amount of monster mobs to reach the last boss. You may overpower the aggressors, but the only thing about you that is truly invincible is your clothing. No matter how many times you are hit by objects of varying size and velocity, your appearance will always be pristine. There are game that have battle-damage yet is nothing more than damage from that battle – something that will heal when the stage is complete.

The kind of damage this game aspires to is fatigue. The game doesn’t aim for real-time clothing damage. Like how a character’s outfit is a reflection of their personality, the damages on the clothing reflect the physical and mental state of the character at a given point in the story; like a character’s trajectory only this plots change in appearance. It’s reasonable to have her start in clothing that is in relatively good condition. And she will go through wardrobe changes, but when she reaches the final boss, she will not be untouched.

You have put her through an adventure that has lasted fifteen of your hours. She has killed countless baddies and probably has been hit twice that. Her weapon and armor are beaten, much like her skin. You can see it. The change in appearance, the expression on her face matching her body language. Her shoulders are slouch, she can barely keep her head up. Perhaps the clip holding up her hair has broken. She doesn’t need to push her hair back because sweat is clinging it to her face. She has been pushed and shoved and penetrated yet she still has fight in her because she has to unleash herself onto one more person. And when the dance is done, she can drop down onto her knees and take comfort that it’s over.

“After work I usually hop over to the Cafe on 8th, where I watch people pass by the window. They all have a momentum I can observe from my seat without fear of loitering because coffee is the price of admission.

“Even more exciting is walking on the city streets and looking up at the apartment windows. Most of the time only a bookcase can be seen, but when it occupies an entire ten-foot wall, your heaviest emotion is envy. Sometimes I’ll take the long way to get somewhere, and these rescued minutes of mine are spent between avenues, catching glimpses of the apartments. What is the lighting like in the mornings? How comfortable is it to come home at night? When the owners look out their window, do they want to be glimpsed by people like me? I acknowledge their status even from my incomplete view down on the street.

“Creepy? Perhaps. At least there is no touching involved.”

Imagine a game where the majority of its world is a street between two city avenues, where every room in every building is populated with furniture and objects. Each room in a given apartment building has the same blueprint, each room decorated in the owner’s style. Every owner can be interacted with, every owner has a personality. Sims-like behavior within a first person adventure.

You start off in a neighborhood whose only sign of wealth is a neon sign advertising good fried food, fast free delivery. Your main HQ is a one bedroom dump. Thank your construction job that pays shit, because if it didn’t, why are you living in a toilet?

This room lives in isolation, is merely a point on a map that you fast-travel to so you can store your items or advance time. You don’t work everyday which is why you have to call in, and even if there is work open, you can decline. Dialogue trees allow you to pick your excuse, ranging from “no” to “my asshole won’t stop vomiting.”

The times you accept, you fast-travel to a construction site – an apartment building where a month’s rent is equal to ten of your paychecks. Your work objectives cycle; one day you might be installing lights, another will have you working on flooring. The gameplay during these segments plays like a first person shooter but instead of gunning down baddies, you are putting up walls with a nail gun. You even have an inventory screen similar to a Deus EX or a System Shock 2. After all, it is unreasonable to think construction workers have utility belts?

On days off you can go to that place between two avenues. At one end is a cafe; a drugstore at the other. A couple antique shops, a doctor’s office, a flower shop with a brick facade. The rest is apartments, the tallest one ten stories.

During the day you might be able to glimpse what is beyond the apartment windows; it’s during the night when the owners are home is when you get the best view. Sometimes all you see is a bookcase, a framed print. Sometimes you see someone pass by the window. Linger at the right time and you might see the same person wave to the doorman and then exit the building. But don’t loiter too long because the doorman will get suspicious.

Perhaps after a while you begin to notice something about the people who live here. That man with the checkered necktie looks up from his Blackberry whenever a female passes by. The kid in the blazer-hoodie combo likes to walk with his left hand in pocket. The woman in the cafe has a habit of hooking behind her ear a tendril of hair whenever she looks at her watch.

What other fidgets do they have? What are her habits when she has company? What is her routine? Perhaps you spend more time at the cafe, which is where she spends every other night between seven and eight. She likes to read, prefers to look down at the book flat on the table. Sometimes her phone rings. The cafe is loud with chatter yet maybe you are only concerned with her conversations.

You know her apartment is on the second floor. The color of her living room is white, while the study has a red velvet color. Well, from the street it looks like the study. Does her kitchen have an island? What color is the hardwood floor? Do they creak? What part of the couch does she like to read on? These are the questions you want to know, but you simply can’t walk up to her door and activate it open because it’s locked.

You can activate her and start a dialogue tree. Pick the right choices -based on your eavesdropping, her books or other possessions – and she might become friendly. Continue the relationship and you might be able to ask her out. Charm her and she will invite you upstairs. You’re on the other side now.

Every film fits in a genre, carries with it certain elements. A romantic comedy won’t ask you to digest anything heavier than love at first sight. Someone will die in a horror movie. Action-adventure, we have explosives.

Games carry expectations also. Level-grinding in JRPGs; dialogue-trees for the west. 3rd person action games, we usually don’t have to be told that the right analog controls the camera. Adventures games won’t ask us to drive to the target’s location and kill him without being spotted.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that when you’re not at work, you don’t have any objectives. There are no flashing indicators. Look around, there are no arrows telling you who the apartment owners are. Perhaps you’ve also noticed that your inventory screen carries over from the job segments. After all, is it unreasonable to think you carry a shoulder bag?

In first person shooters, if you’re in a location occupied by story-time NPCs, your currently equipped weapon will most likely either lower, not appear at all or be disabled when the crosshair hovers over the NPC.

Perhaps then you notice you can not only equip items from your inventory but use them without any constraints. And where are these items coming from? Well, you can buy stuff from the antique shop. Or the drug store. Roses from the flower shop? The other location you can take items from is the construction site.

You have to ask yourself, “there must be a reason why such mechanics are in place, why this particular camera has been chosen for this game.”

And then you have to ask:

“What kind of monster are you?”

As the distinguished veteran, you decide how the child should level up. Should her strength lie in physical prowess; should acuity be her definition? She gains experience by following you around, by you commanding her, by her watching you. Every one of your actions – direct or otherwise – is muscle memory, an impression on her mind. She is a sponge regardless of how you treat her. Will you be encouraging or will you never be satisfied and demand the impossible?

In combat, you can tell her what weapon and style she should use; if you use the same weapon and style she currently has equipped, she will watch your movements, gain more experience points. Or you can put her on point, observe her maneuvers and adjust accordingly. Do you want her to be more offensive or defensive?

The instances where you can temporarily remove her from your party – perhaps you want to complete a personal quest without her, perhaps you want her to be in “study book” mode – there could be a chance that she will disobey and shadow you, and whatever you do when you think you’re alone will give her experience points in the appropriate stats. Does she see you lying, indulging in excessive behavior?

It’s an adventure RPG that has a sense of time, a story that spans decades; gameplay without time limits. The game takes you through its seasons, and more importantly, every major and minor character has a wardrobe. Cosmetics since they have no gameplay consequence, though still important in creating a breathing world with characters that don’t feel like they are stage performers in a one act play.

Natalie is handed over to you when she is a teen. When she becomes an adult and the training ends, the relationship continues, mostly because of her – if you treated her like an animal, if you treated her like your daughter, she will have valid reasons; perhaps she feels she can still learn from you, perhaps she sees you as a father-figure. Or perhaps it is something romantic. For you maybe; she marries and has a daughter.

Imagine a second act, some fifteen years later, of you and her against the neighboring country that has increased its attacks against your homeland. Your hair has streaks of gray; dark colors dominate Natalie’s wardrobe. You work well together – her attacks compliment yours, so seamless and elegant that it feels like you are controlling two characters at once. Depending on how you trained her, perhaps this time around you are the brute, the accurate cyclops who can smash heavy obstacles while she is the speed demon reckless with her attacks; in the time you two were apart, between the first and second acts, she taught herself a few tricks, like detecting traps.

The beats between the action set pieces are playful and intimate; if these moments felt forced, it would weaken the relationship, their motives. Their consequences.

Imagine the final act is the point where the world and your rhythms fall apart. Natalie questions the motives of both sides, re-evaluates the good guys and bad, and realizes that we have been fighting for the wrong side, that “in this moment, we are the villains in this story.” Yet you have no reason to believe today’s victories will lead to future genocide. You have no reason to doubt your allegiance. Your country has treated you well with treasure chests, and you know that you have helped secure your country’s place as the lone shining tower amid the plains. Natalie is just as passionate as you, but her affections are for the people you call the enemy.

“If you kill me, promise that you will take my daughter someplace far away from here, from what’s to come.”
“She will grow up to kill me.”
“I didn’t plan this. This wasn’t how things were supposed to turn out. We were supposed to be together.”
“I know, kiddo. I imagined the two of us ruling the world or something equally silly.”
“That’s not how I pictured us.”

Natalie is the final boss, her patterns based on the techniques you taught her in the first act. She knows your most frequently used attacks from the second and will counter them. But you know her strengths and weaknesses also. You know she isn’t as accurate as you, isn’t as strong as you. And with your high damage resistance, for the final blow you step into her fury and depending on your weapon of choice you either bring the hammer down on her with enough force that you break your arm or drive your blade through her attacks and into her neck.

Her death doesn’t end the war, does not even intimidate others to pick a side. A meaningless battle fought in a vacuum. But was it? You trained her to be the next-generation version of you. Whoever she fought for, they would win. Natalie chose to betray her homeland, the country your parents sent you to so that it could train you to become an officer whose future would play out from eye level but with the powers of a god.

Your country thanks you for sacrificing so much to ensure the war is won by the better half. You accept their rewards, continue to fight the enemy, but your motivation isn’t for love of country. You want to kill the people who brainwashed Natalie.

But as years pass, you begin to notice changes that Natalie spoke of; social and economic shifts that put future generations in danger of a genocide led by the system the people elected to ensure victory. Your equals – the ones responsible for winning the war – are being given too much power. If they demanded, you would have noticed. You now see this was all planned. Patience was their strength.

Perhaps you were blinded by your allegiance, by the treasure chests they offered you. Physically stronger you may have been, but Natalie was always good at detecting traps.

What makes you feel uncomfortable? For me it’s 70’s movies, especially the foreign ones. There is something about that decade that makes me nauseated and terrified. The graininess, the colors; even the oranges and yellows, all dark and dirty. The image that sticks is of a living room; beige walls, brown ceilings, door frames of a darker shade, and a white fur rug underneath a glass coffee table. The owners – lying on the floor – dying. The woman’s right hand clutches the fur rug. It isn’t white anymore.

Imagine a game where you play a torturer for the government. The intro opens in a room with two chairs, one of which a man is strapped to. He is terrified, unable to take his eyes off the rust-colored hammers and pliers on your left side. On your right is a calfskin attache case, with brush metal instruments fit snug in their compartments.

Your goal is to get a confession. Use the construction tools to be brutal. Use the instruments for precision. Whatever style you choose – perhaps you choose both – the scenario will end the same way every time: Cassandra, a colleague, will ask you to step outside because she has to tell you something.

“We fucked up. This man is innocent.”

Your in-game character will walk back inside the room, will either apologize or close the attache case and leave. As the player, you have to look inward and answer one question: did you enjoy torturing your victim?

As the game progresses, you transition between work and home. You’re a family man; your wife Madeline and daughter Zoe know you work for the government and that you roll up your sleeves because sometimes your office can get a bit stuffy, not because you don’t want your cufflinks to catch on your victim’s open wounds.

When you’re not home, your bosses assign you bad guys, each one having a piece of information that, according to your superiors, will prevent the loss of innocent life while killing the ones that need killing.

You have various tools and objects you can use on your victim, employing a sub-targeting system for focused punishment. Deprivation is another option – perhaps one has a high tolerance for physical pain but loses the threshold when he’s being starved. Sometimes pulling up that second chair and asking questions in a calming voice will do the job. Offer a cold smile that says this is my cooldown period; if I don’t get what I want when this smile fades, you’re going to beg me to feed you a bullet. And if you do too much damage, well, that’s what medkits are for.

Perhaps you – the player – cannot tolerate this kind of violence. If that’s the case, there is always the option to dodge your responsibilities and ask your colleagues for help.

Perhaps there is an especially uncooperative case, a Mr. Moncrieff. He is high priority, but the only things coming out of his mouth besides teeth and blood are screams.

When you’re not putting the cursor over tools, you are home playing husband and father. It’s a change of pace and intensity, allowing the player to relax and not worry about health meters, time limits and such. Perhaps there is a scene where Zoe comes home way past curfew. Your wife demands an answer, to which Zoe responds with an unoriginal “just out with my friends, ok.” Zoe storms off. You step inside her room, pull up a chair, and in a calming voice ask her to tell you the truth.

“We were hanging out at my boyfriend’s place.”
“Who’s we?”
“Natalie, Emma, the usual gang.”
“The thing is, how come this is the first time I’m hearing about this boyfriend? Does daddy have to get his baseball bat?”
“Jesus, dad. Lighten up. Alex’s father and uncle were hanging out with us, so we didn’t drink or do any drugs, ok.”

At work, you begin to think of ways to break Moncrieff, which has the added headache of being an off-site assignment on the other side of the country; this also means you cannot ask your colleagues for help. They say he’s one tough turd. Medical reports say a good many of his bones have been broken at least once, and he has had numerous surgeries to prolong his existence. You begin like you always do – applying either charisma or bruises.

When both options fail, you investigate his personal life and come across a childhood friend he hasn’t spoken to in years. You put on your hat, flip your collar up and shadow this woman. You create a situation where an accidental bump turns into a friendly conversation which turns into a casual friendship by proximity – like having someone you regularly talk with while doing laundry but never see outside this routine. After you’re satisfied, you return to Moncrieff.

“Alma says she might go back to school. She also recalled for me her childhood ambitions, that she was going to grow up to be a famous painter while her best friend would become a famous violinist. I’d be surprised if you could still play after we’re done here. The thing is….”

The game will never judge you, will never take your decisions and place you on the appropriate binary path. You can make choices that affect how you complete cases, but only one story is being told. For the people who like torturing the bad guys, they may believe that every time flesh is split open secures our country’s safety. For those players who cannot stomach the atrocities, while you cannot go against your superiors, you can ask for help. Your colleagues are not heartless. They are your friends, and know you must be going through a difficult time.

After all, you did torture an innocent man.

For the players who feel uncomfortable, the Moncrieff assignment may have taken a lot out of you. You question the actions of your colleagues and your own. Perhaps you feel we have gone too far. You formed a friendship under false pretenses, and you ask yourself if you were ready to have a third chair in the room. Can you continue doing this? Have the punishments you’ve inflicted been a necessity or a pleasure? Are there better ways to get a confession? Does anyone truly deserve this kind of treatment?

The phone rings. It’s Madeline. You tell her to slow down, what’s wrong.

“Zoe said she was almost attacked by Alex’s father and uncle. She was walking home and they came up to her and they cornered her and she got away before they could…please come home.”

Hours later, Cassandra picks you up from the airport. Instead of taking you home, she takes you to work. Easy, babe. We have a surprise for you.

She takes you to the room from the opening scene. Inside you find two men strapped into chairs.

“I stopped by your house to drop off your air mattress,” Cassandra says. “Your wife told me everything. A couple of us did the legwork. Now all you have to do is roll up your sleeves.”

She closes the door, leaves you alone with the two men.

What do you do?