The Will Porter column: The myth of the perfect playthrough

I was lying on a beach reading Roger Moore’s excellent autobiography My Word is My Bond the other day and (on top of the hilarious japes he got up to with David Niven) my hero’s trademark raised eyebrow got me to thinking…

Over the years I’ve hungrily sat in many hot rooms at trade shows eyeing bowlfuls of complimentary crisps while developers have played a slice of their game for my journalistic delectation. These presentations can be fascinating, and not necessarily just because of the game. They might be from live code, but the motions of the player are almost breathtakingly scripted – the vistas the developer lovingly pans over, the objects laid in his path and the point at which he pulls the trigger clearly choreographed months ago in a featureless American boardroom.

Sometimes the driver of this very peculiar guided tour is even required to feign surprise at what’s happening to him in-game. On one memorable occasion an over-excited man playing the Avatar game shouted, without irony, “Oh God! I’m having so much fun!”. On another, the painfully scripted banter between two developers playing FEAR 3 co-op could have been a scene cut from Waiting for Godot in which Vladimir and Estragon find a 360 debug hanging from the tree in a noose.

This phenomenon is, of course, necessary. Publishers need to show their audience the big sells of their games succinctly and dramatically – and we end up with genuinely jaw-dropping sequences like the Bioshock Infinite playthroughs. The process can’t afford to go wrong either, in the earliest days of STALKER: Shadows of Chernobyl GSC Gameworld were so keen to show off their ‘anything can happen!’ Forbidden Zone that their presentations were continually up-ended by roving packs of mutant dogs. “Yis,” they’d explain to a chorus of increasingly distant barking. “Here are some more men, and they too have been killed by the dogs.” Then they’d reboot and: “Yis. The dogs have killed again.”

To borrow a phrase, the majority of developer playthroughs are all too beautiful. These buffed, sheened and candyfloss-entombed runs through upcoming big-hitters simply aren’t the way we play games. We fall off ledges by accident, we blunder around corners and alert guards who cuff us viciously over the head for a misplaced tiptoe and we walk in the wrong direction wondering why the level’s so empty. Add into this every gamer’s strong desire to spell their name on walls with bullets, hide under tables during mission briefings and rapidly zoom the camera in and out of NPC cleavages and only then do you have something approaching normality.

There is a fixation with this perfect playthrough which means that actual gamer experience is rarely capitalised upon or built around. Games pile on wide and varied praise for pulling off great shots, securing great times and triumphantly trouncing our enemies – but whenever we fail there’s often silence, repetition and bounce-backs to the reload screen. Too often failure is made to feel like a dirty secret: a sin that only you have committed.

The illusion of the communal perfect playthrough also completely negates the possibility that you want to monkey around and experiment with a game’s systems. At no stage throughout the run-time of Deus Ex: Human Revolution did Pritchard say “Jensen, why exactly did you just crush a man with a fridge dropped from a Heng Sha rooftop?” or “Jensen, when you’ve quite finished power-slamming prostitutes into walls someone wants to meet you…” In DX:HR’s perfect playthrough the po-faced, and somewhat self-aggrandised, narrative means that Jensen is a very serious man - there’s no way he’d participate in fridge murder with gleeful abandon. As such, the game’s refusal to accept your playful nature creates a strong disconnect. The narrative is ultimately forced into two separate layers: one comprising of the light mischief you get up to on ground level, the other shackled to the sensible shoes your imagination has to grudgingly put back on whenever cut-scenes roll around.

In a game as vast as Human Revolution this is, I’m aware, an extraordinarily petty displeasure – but it’s a good, recent example of a problem that runs throughout gaming. When playing Crysis I longed for my military advisor to say something along the lines of “Wow! You threw that turtle miles!” or, again, “Nomad, it isn’t within US Army guidelines to bounce fridges off people’s heads”. It’s all about fridges, I guess.

Games can’t kowtow to abrasive players, clearly: only the most fiendishly complicated narrative structure could reflect every single action of the player. What they can do, however, is break down that disconnect – delivering sly nods and winks to make you (and the millions of others of people toying with the game in exactly the same way) feel different and special. The simplest thing, like Solid Snake in MGS2 sending random photo messages to Otacon of Olga’s backside and hearing the response, can create treasured gaming memories. Then there’s the simple, but legendary, line of dialogue that played in the original Deus Ex to reflect your cheeky decision to poke your nose into the Ladies’ loo. Little details: big impact.

And Roger Moore’s involvement? In The Man with the Golden Gun Moore’s Bond is the ultimate example of the unruly player, and his enemy Scaramanga (Christopher Lee) the game designer expecting nothing less than a perfect playthrough. Scaramanga’s scheme is to funnel his prey towards him through a sequence of funhouse scares, Wild West shooting galleries and mirror mazes. Bond, however, won’t play ball. He breaks the fourth wall by clambering around on the scaffolding backstage, which gets Nik-Nak really stressed as he can’t see him on the CCTV.

This dramatically concludes with Bond shooting Scaramanga through the third nipple, when Scaramanga thought that Bond was actually a waxwork of Roger Moore that he’d had installed. (For some reason.)

Is that honestly what you want Videogames? To be shot through the third nipple like Scaramanga was, by a waxwork of Roger Moore from 1974?

It’s time for gaming and Bond Villains alike to expect the unexpected. With us lot playing it’s probably going to happen…

Will Porter writes about games and for games. In a former life he was the editor of the dear departed PC Zone magazine, right now though he pulls the narrative strings on Project Zomboid and has some secret stuff that he'd like to tell you about - but probably shouldn't. If you want rolling updates on how hungry/sleepy he is then follow @Batsphinx on Twitter.


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