we say all the time that the players have some sort of sense for what's real and what's not in a game. And by real here, I don't mean real. I mean is really a game system. Um, if two people sit down with a group of people and they play a board game, you have a very strong sense that the game rules are working. Uh, you make a move, and somebody else makes a move, and something cascades. Um, and you can understand that this is like a series of constraints and tradeoffs, uh, and moves that are -- you are capable of making. Most videogames, sadly, um, it's some art and it's a movement model, uh, that you can guide your little avatar with. And then it's generally some arbitrary scripting. Uh, by contrast, when you get into a game that is made of consistent rules - uh, let's take, you know, Braid, for example, Jon Blow's brilliant, uh, time-traveling pseudo platformer. Um, you get a strong sense that your, your reverse time ability just jumps into the, uh, into the, you know, the recorded action of the game and backs it up perfectly. And then it proceeds forward from AI rules after that. Um, you know, Minecraft is a, a very solid, um, game made up of a bunch of rules that work very consistently. GTA, Grand Theft Auto, is the same way. Thief is the same way. Uh, the, the behaviors of some of the enemies in BioShock are the same way. And so, for Dishonored, when we set out, we, we wanted to make sure that everything felt algorithmic, it felt like it was a system running that had inputs and outputs. And, and we don't make fun happen for you. We don't kick off some scripting that is a Jerry Bruckheimer series of fireworks and slow-mo and music, uh, generally. We, we mostly like, uh, just let things run. So, if some rats are chasing you and, and you run through a wall of light electrical field that you've converted to be friendly to you and hostile to your enemies, those rats get fried as they try to run through it after you. But that's not a scene that we set up. That's rules. Like the rats follow you if they're hostile to you. And the wall of light is either going to fry you or let you pass, then let your -- and fry your enemies if you've inverted it. Um, similarly, we didn't use markup for our climbing, uh, or our blink teleport because players sense that almost immediately. They sense that you've left a paint-by-numbers series of, uh, spots for them that -- where they can climb up or where they can teleport to versus an algorithm or some sort of a code that runs dynamically in tests. Like the player tries to fire it, and it tests, is that ledge reachable? And as soon as players sense that they're in this like simulation that's just math and game systems, they feel this kind of like excitement. Anything can happen. They feel this kind of power. I can -- I can do this, and I won't be arbitrarily stopped. And they also feel this kind of terror. Like this system will grind me to pieces if I do the wrong thing. There's no -- there's no, uh, you know, friendly Wizard of Oz behind the curtain that will say, Oh, I should spare him at this moment.
