I’m In.
By Brice Puls
I’ve been playing more video games recently. I know that seems kind of unsurprising as a person whose entire personal culture and occupation is so entwined with games but in complete honesty when it comes to downtime, in the moments when I’m looking for relaxation and artistic stimulation, video games are rarely on my mind. I’m sure part of it has to do with them being involved in every aspect of my life, whether it’s making games as my day job, or advocating for games via my non-profit work, but perhaps more significantly than that, I fear the commitment.
I discovered games when I was young, with the adventures of King’s Quest and Mixed-up Mother Goose. Then I was given a Game Boy, where so much of my time was occupied by racing, strategy, and trivia games. From there it was creating stories and worlds with my sister in SimCity and The Sims, until (in an odd Christmas gift mix-up) I ended up in possession of a friend’s PS1 and an Xbox, where I did my best to learn more about games in their current pop culture incarnation, learning about games culture, and being fascinated by their early non-text narrative possibilities.
But throughout this entire time, my passion was still in movies, a medium long-established, with a broad audience who embraced it as a means of education, escapism, and entertainment. I desperately wanted to be part of movies, discovering how I could wield those abilities to express my own ideas, until I learned how much you must sacrifice your own wonder of an art form in order to participate in it. Games were a fallback because of that commitment. They were something I could "ruin" for myself, because of my deep interest but lack of passion.
Still, the medium excited me, because the established rules didn't exist yet. Games have some established language, but there was so much left to discover. But not being immersed in games I felt like an outsider, because I had a hard time processing the number of mechanics in large-scale games as the medium evolved. Every time I wanted to get into a game, there was a hurdle I had to overcome: that is, understanding how to play it. There’s always such a learning curve in mechanically-complex games, any time away and I would immediately forget how to control it, much less participate in all of it’s secondary mechanics.
Which brings me to the real topic of this whole useless diatribe, hacking minigames!
I’m constantly fascinated by interactive interfaces. A lot of my work involves creating pieces which have to be accessible to everyone and have a specific goal of informing/educating the user. All narrative art has to approach this hurdle in some aspect, that is, informing something is happening with the understanding that whomever is experiencing it has no concept of how it works. Usually it’s simple, for example if you have to show putting out a fire, all you need is a short montage of the literal process: a truck pulling up, uncoiling hoses and connecting them to hydrants, and using those hoses to put out the fire. But a task like that is inherently cinematic, you can visualize that montage, or concept how that interaction would occur in a game.
Other tasks are less so. Menial, yet important, narrative tasks have to be abstracted in order to engage the player. For example, so many movies that involve a character doing extensive amounts of research use the motif of a montage: clips of information on news articles and pages scrolling across the screen, and an actor poring through endless information, something that isn't inherently conducive to interactivity. But other tasks in this field are even less understood.
Lockpicking has long been a trope of storytelling, and has been used as a mechanic in countless games. But as an actual physical task, the design becomes simpler. Many games take real components of actual lockpicking such as locking pins, applying tension, or raking in order to create entertaining abstractions in order to satisfy an immersive interaction.
Lockpicking in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons: Hillsfar
But what I’m most fascinated with is the most recent minigame du-jour, hacking. Games such as Fallout, Mass Effect, Bioshock, Splinter Cell, and more have all taken stabs at creating interactivity from dull repetition. Movies “solved” this long ago, simply have a character sit in front of a screen and type or touch frantically, and hacking suddenly becomes an action-packed tension-filled event, full of unique and monochromatic custom user interfaces. But games have approached it differently.
Most minigames inherently apply puzzles in order to abstract unexplainable tasks. Whether it’s experimenting with genetics in Marvel’s Spider-Man or Bionic Commando’s block navigation wiretapping, relying on the classic mechanics of puzzling with a coat of contextual interface helps adapt a task to fit within a game’s mechanical world. Bioshock, perhaps most egregiously, uses Pipe Mania-esque gameplay to express the concept of turning an enemy mechanism against your opponent.
Many games take a similar approach to hacking, repurposing classic game mechanics with a hacking interface. The first Mass Effect and Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag both employed Frogger as an abstraction of breaching a firewall. Recent games like Terminator: Resistance have even put less effort in abstracting the mechanic. Prey’s digital interface is akin to the “don’t touch the sides” games I would make using mouse-over PowerPoint transitions and sell on floppy disks in primary school. The concept is understandable, in real life, hacking is usually tedious. It’s an endless list of techniques such as phishing, bug exploitation, malware, and more. But the terminology is exciting, we’ve heard the classic tropes of “brute-forcing passwords” and “breaching firewalls,” and choosing to use established gameplay to express those actions is accessible and easy to visually adapt into your environment.
Termifrogger: Resistance
Other games try to create mechanics out of the actual mechanics hacking employs. Mass Effect 2 chose to eschew its predecessor’s Frogger minigame in favor of a matching game, where players presented with blocks of code must identify mismatches in order to gain control as a means of abstracting the concept of exploiting bugs. Fallout has a similar structure, presenting the play with a word puzzle where they must select a term, receive feedback on what characters were correct, and find the solution in a set amount of attempts, much like brute-force hacking. Games such as Quadrilateral Cowboy employ small puzzles that need to be solved by typing in commands, similar to employing DDOS attacks or script exploits.
Fallout’s Password Hacking
What’s been drawing my interest recently though has been the idea of abstracting the hacking trope itself. Games like Uplink and Hacknet have taken the joys of wild hacking interfaces and fast-paced Unix commands which movies employ and turned them into games themselves. Titles like Duskers use the idea of keyboard interfaces as the core concept, as players type in commands to control a fleet of salvaging drones in a science-fiction thriller.
It’s an interesting challenge to take a concept that can be mechanically important but realistically mundane and create a minigame that encompasses the desired feeling, challenge, and commitment. This most recent era of command-based hacking interfaces makes me wonder if this will be a mechanic adopted by higher-profile games, much like how The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion evolved it’s lockpicking minigame on mechanics of earlier, smaller titles.
We usually consider the idea of tropes to be only narrative, and the term itself has grown to have it's own negative connotations. But tropes exist because they work as shortcuts, to express something quickly that would usually require an amount of time a show, movie, book, or game wouldn’t have. A trope only becomes negative when it becomes culturally acknowledged, when the awareness of its use overwhelms the intent of its place in a story or design.
HACK THE PLANET
Hacking has inherently become the ultimate definition of this issue, because so many people know that’s not how hacking works, but so few have actual experience with how it does work. We don’t have an accepted abstraction that doesn’t feel rote or unbelievable, which leads us as artists to continue to experiment with how we choose to employ such a necessary task. We know when it feels wrong or boring, but we haven’t necessarily agreed on when it feels right.
I definitely don’t have the solve to this problem, that’s why I’m writing why I’m thinking about it rather than making it. I’d like to see more games try to play with the idea of abstracting actual aspects of hacking, phishing and SQL injection; both seem ripe for puzzle possibilities. And I really enjoy the idea of taking advantage of the inherent silliness of hacking in movies and TV; I still get a lot of joy from sites like hackertyper.net. But I wonder if we’ll ever get to the point of the culturally agreed-upon abstraction for tasks like this.
Just please don’t let it be Frogger.
Brice Puls (Director of Operations) (they/them) is an interactive artist, game developer, and exhibit designer based in Chicago. They also are the logistics director for Bit Bash Chicago, an annual non-profit interactive arts festival seeking to expose unique and culturally important games to new audiences. Additionally, they are an independent game designer, developing on work for various educational institutions, studios, and games such as Young Horses, Activision, the Museum of Science and Industry, the Field Museum, the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, the Tony Hawk Pro Skater series, TumbleSeed, Sausage Sports Club, Manifold Garden, and Killer Queen Black. Email