So I got this great idea for a game, right?

This is a post about the failure of the FPS to try something new, and a look at one way to return some spice to the genre.

I played around with Singularity (here is a good review) and was thus able to pinpoint the exact moment in which I would lose interest in super soldier projects going tragically awry. I was poking around in a ruined Soviet laboratory and found this old note, which said that the rats treated with E-99 showed exponential muscle growth and that one should attempt and then my eyes glazed over.

First person shooters have been used before, similar to horror films, to convey the social fears of their audience. It is often a subtext, but it is nonetheless present and shapes the gaming experiences. Doom 3 dealt with the pressures of the modern corporate workplace, the scattered audio logs and e-mails conveying the fears and frustrations of the common office drone. Half-Life and Half-Life 2 were angry and rousing indictments of the treatment commonly suffered by doctoral and postdoctoral students, with Dr. Breen standing in for a thesis supervisor everyone could recognize. Resident Evil 4 gave voice to the half-conscious dread everyone feels in the presence of people speaking Spanish. The list goes on.

But looking at the central plot of many shooters, one would be forced that the main fear of our age is super soldiers. Future cultural historians will think that we feared nothing so much as military experiments about bulky fighters with low self-preservation instincts when they do their studies from their levitating reclining chairs. As they twiddle their dayglo tresses and stroke their pheromone lapdogs, they will say: “The old civilization fell due to an influx of super soldiers with miniguns, as long predicted by the dominant idiom in their cultural record. Tragically, even as they trained their youth in simulations to deal with this threat, it was not enough to stave of the inevitable, the inevitable being partly-invisible super soldiers which jumped from wall to wall while small lightings crackled all over their armor.” And then they will take a sip from their genesplice cocktails and sigh with the sighs of people being right.

Another thing strikes me as conspicuous: Apart from large, evil corporations (f.i. UAC) and the Nazis nobody is in the business of villains. The soviets have entered this small club, mainly because the swastika seems to be sucked dry as a symbol of evil, while Stalin’s portrait and the hammer and sickle still create a kind of frisson, and the USSR appears as a suitable sponsor for crazy science, while Belgium, for example, does not.

So this is my idea: Make a cool company the villain. A company the gamer knows firsthand, because he uses its product every day. A company that the player cannot live without – and most players can live without corporations creating viral zombies. And let’s make a subtext that everyone can recognize and get queasy about – privacy.

Let us call this company Bongle, for the moment. Or until the lawyers tear down the front door. In the world built for this game, Bongle is the dominant search engine. It is crazy good, having eliminated all competitors two years after its introduction. They present the ideal repository of all possible knowledge. Your term paper, your nuclear research, the speech at your daughter’s wedding: They are unthinkable without Bongle. You use it, your mother uses it, the grocer at the corner uses it. And everybody uses it every day. If you are not findable by Bongle, then you must be nonexistent. And it is a cool company. Everybody likes them, they make cool gadgets and they are obviously a force of good in the world.

You play a visitor to Bongle’s headquarters. You start out as the customary cipher we all know and love from shooters (basically because they keep their mouth shut). You have a name, something like “Dave Webster”, and looking in a mirror you see a nondescript hipster with a funny t-shirt. You are Dr. Gordon Freeman without the powered suit and the PhD. You don’t say much.

Something goes horrible wrong as you enter the HQ. Not satisfied in knowing and describing the world in the tiniest detail, but bent on changing it according to its whim, Bongle has found the algorithm to transforming the world itself, and the changes wrought are bizarre and inimical to human life, to say the least. It is upon you to put things right.

Yawn. Right? Wrong!

- There is no Gate to Hell, no Citadel or volcano base. The algorithm is everywhere; it suffuses the reality completely and changes it. All the Dave can hope for is to master it and force a reality into being that he can live with.
- There will be e-mails, databases and audio logs: Apart from information about the algorithm and Bongle, they will contain all kinds of information about Dave Webster. One of the themes would be Bongle’s power to know everything about a person. All of Dave’s surfing habits, downloads (legal and illegal) and other personal information will become available to the player. Step by step, the figure you are playing will be filled out. He is no mass murderer or secret operative, but the level of info you get on him is astounding: especially private stuff, making this an r-rated game – his ex made some pictures and put them online. At the end of the game he will be one of the most fully realized characters in a game ever, with the player in the position of a voyeur.
- Bongle’s HQ is the coolest and nicest office environment you will ever see. It presents the right mixture between the ideal, funky workplace and advanced techniques to squeeze the last drop of performance from the office plankton. As the reality becomes dominated by the algorithm, this ideal office becomes a surreal labyrinth of distorted hallways and cubicles, peopled by crazed office drones and the wandering “effects” of the algorithm.
And I’m thinking demons. Yes, definitely demons. Not the Doom kind, but some really crazy, M C Escher stuff with a bad attitude and heavy use of high-end graphics to make it tick. Think Hound of Tindalos and go from there. Also, changing gravity.
- The player finds a journal early on that allows him to effect changes using the algorithm: It is basically Half-Life’s gravgun, the Portal gun, plus Singularity’s time manipulation device and a few other crazy powers rolled into a block of yellowing paper. The journal looks like a small moleskine, full of mad scribblings and strange geometric drawings. The source of the algorithm can be anything. At the moment, I’m going with an Assyrian kind of metamathematics, which uses sympathetic magic – but it could be anything, apart from a super soldier program, of course. So, more riddles, and less shooting. But still a bit of shooting. It’s a shooter, you know?
- One of the powers uses the algorithm to access the luxurious beach house of Bongle’s founder, now a crazed hermit, deeply desperate about the damage his garage-project has done. It serves as kind of base – a very Mies van der Rohe kind of base. You use the algorithm to change the founder’s personal history and personality, and change the beach house as well. If you want to gun up, you make him an arms collector and plunder his private museum of rare firearms. If you need further information on the “weaponized memes” running amok, you make him a hobby philosopher and hope that he can answer your questions. But with every visit, the possible changes for the beach house narrow down…
- The Game Options are designed like an official Wikipedia-page. You choose the entry “the game was lauded for its friendliness towards beginners” instead of “The game is thought to be one of the hardest shooters in existence”, and the game difficulty goes from “very difficult” to "easy".
- And the end? Well, what will a hipster named Dave Webster with 45.000 illegal downloads do with the power to change the world in whatever kind he chooses?

So, there you have it: a shooter with a new villain, a new environment, a new subtext and nary a super soldier in sight. Any Russian oligarch with a billion to spare and no fear of litigation may pick up this idea, as long as the resulting game is good.