Optical Wargames

 

It's been a while since I did any non Barony non short fiction posting, and this is another one of those ideas that's been swirling around in my head forever and ever. 

Some short history: I used to play the very very great classic Unreal Tournament 99 a lot when I was a kid. I played its equally great, but quite different sequel UT2004 as well, quite possibly more than any other single game in my life (I never got on with UT3). 

In Unreal Tournament, there is a gun called the Shock Rifle - for my money one of the best deathmatch weapons ever designed. It's primary fire is a quick-firing hitscan beam that kills in three hits, and it has secondaries you can play with at closer range for higher lethality - it's a high skill/hire reward kind of weapon. There is also a mutator (game mode, for those unlettered in XTREME nineties naming cultures) in those games called Instagib, which gives everyone a shock rifle that always kills in one hit. What this does, obviously, is turn a deathmatch game into the most extreme form of rocket tag, where movement, aim, and reflexes need to be microseconds better than your opponents' at all times for you to have any chance of surviving at all. 

Now, I am not a good deathmath player really. I love deathmatch games to pieces, but I don't have the hand-eye coordination and twitch reflexes necessary for high level play - even more so now that I'm no longer 16. Even so, I was always absolutely fascinated by Instagib as a concept. What does it mean for the design space when every single person gets handed a sort of 'absolute' lethality from the jump?

One of the greatest ever. Oddly no Instagib gifs out there!

In modern warfare (I am an enthusiastic amateur reader of war theory but I am not a specialist, and I may well be wrong about specific points) there is a diagram called The Survivability Onion. It is pictured above, and what it aims to describe are the threshold at which one can be considered safe in a warfighting environment. The best thing to be is not there at all. The second best thing to be is not identified (seen), the third best is not acquired, etc. etc., all the way down to penetration and death. It is better not to be killed, and by extension, it is better not to be seen. If you are up against a sophisticated military threat, to be seen is breathtakingly close to being killed.

I am interested in this as a design space. When I was younger I used to fantasise about a specific type of first person shooter game - one in which everyone had some expy of the Instagib shock rifle, but which was played in nearly total darkness, inside a complicated and vertically arranged 3d environment. So you also have flares, NVGs, spotlights, triplines, sensors, alarms, traversal gear etc. - you have a bunch of tools that you have to make use of to facilitate target acquisition, and to make sure that you yourself are never acquired. Once acquisition has taken place, the actual firing of the weapon, the kill manoeuvre, is trivial - you could even abstract it out entirely and have the player press a button to kill the enemy once acquired, although I like the (now very old fashioned) insistence of having a trigger to pull on the supergun. 

This type of contest - effectively invisible (or at least very low visibility) antagonists with ultra-lethal capacities, trying to control a space using optical machinery (and spoofing tech) to acquire their enemies before the same is done to them - can be extrapolated into other designs as a formal model; it doesn't have to be a shooter. I had some wild ideas for an entirely optical RTS/adversarial citybuilder game at one point, which saw players (again, in pitch blackness) building logistical machines and assemblages to power and deploy their sensor apparatuses more quickly and efficiently than their opponents.

Is there a way to make this kind of combat interesting (to anyone other than Louis)? I suspect that many players would find the absolutely all or nothing approach a turn off - you are effectively playing the game until you are arbitrarily deleted, without knowing how or why it happened. Possibly the joy of arbitrarily deleting your opponent some of the time would make up for this, but I think it would be crucial for blind luck to play a minimal role in target acquisition. 

Another option: group PVE play, under strict time pressure - although what is it you're acquiring here? NPC bad guys? Part of the joy of this sort of play is knowing that a human is trying their best NOT to be seen. 

A rambling little post to say that this has recently been rekindled in my brain, and that I would like to try my hand at designing a little rpg/wargame system that tackles some of this. That system experiment is NOT in this post. Sorry :) But hopefully coming soon :)