What’s the Matter with Covert Action?

The article is long and entertainingly written. It has lots of references to 80s computer games that people might enjoy (like Pirates!). But the key insight, I believe, is:

If Covert Action had believable, mimetic, tantalizing — or at least interesting — plots to foil, I submit that it could have been a tremendously compelling game, without changing anything else about it. Instead, though, it’s got this painfully artificial box of whirling gears.

I suppose in the 80s, given the limitations of the box, there was a much larger emphasis on "narratology" in games, but this criticism might hold for most failed games.

Edit: Never seen this site before. Who is this guy? Now I am going down a rabbit hole...

Having just watched CirclMastr's Let's Play of Covert Action on YouTube, and playing it myself (and I think I came across this article too), I have to say that Covert Action really feels like what it ended up as: an unpolished rush-job that someone put a lot of thought into that maybe didn't come out onscreen. There's a lot of good there and further development of the ideas would have turned it into a real classic. There's a reason it's one of the long-lasting underdogs; it's not just Sid Meier's name.

I'm glad it exists, and for anyone who wants to teach kids about very basic crypto (i.e. letter replacement, removing spaces, etc.), I suggest the "training" for the Crypto skill; it's also good to go and brush up on your own skills. Similarly, the wiretapping is a genuinely interesting logic puzzle which can be used to teach the concept of physically representing 1/0 and logic gates (and how the result may not always be what you expect).

As far as "The Covert Action Rule", I guess the question is how you approach the game. If you look at it in terms of "older" games (i.e. Zork et al), having a notepad beside the computer to take notes seemed the most logical thing in the world to me. In many cases while playing games with complex storylines and puzzle-solving, it still does. I never found the tactical sections making me "lose track" of why I was in a building - either I was there to grab an Agent or I was there to get information to go and do so that I hadn't gotten by wiretapping or crypto.

> I can easily generate 10,000 bowls of plain oatmeal, with each oat being in a different position and different orientation, and mathematically speaking they will all be completely unique. But the user will likely just see a lot of oatmeal. Perceptual uniqueness is the real metric, and it’s darn tough. It is the difference between an actor being a face in a crowd scene and a character that is memorable.

This was a big problem for a recent, massively hyped game that flopped (Steam refunds, etc), No Man's Sky

Great references on procedural story generation. I used to cringe a little bit every time my students would tout the procedural generation in their project that would result in limitless replayability.

Someone has to enjoy the first play, before they'll replay. You don't know how to make one good game yet, never mind a factory that makes good games.

Interesting to compare Civilization, Alpha Centauri and Beyond Earth. I felt Alpha Centauri was far more compelling because of its additional narrative elements. Beyond Earth attempted to borrow these same narrative elements from Alpha Centauri but failed to make it compelling. In Alpha Centauri the narrative was often anchored to the ideology and personality of your leader, whereas Beyond Earth took a far less rigid approach to leaders and factions.

The classic X-COM games rely heavily on procedural content. There's only a small set of simple alien missions, but I think there are three factors that let it succeed:

1. Harsh consequences. You can't ignore the aliens. Any random alien mission might be the one that makes some country withdraw funding. It might be setting up a tactical battle that's too difficult for you to fight. The alien detection and interception mini-game always has strategic consequences.

2. Hidden information. You start with very limited view of what the aliens are doing. Even when you've researched the best radar you can't cover the enter globe. This makes it easy to imagine they're doing something more complicated than they really are. It's like the argument that text adventure games are more immersive than graphical ones because the images are only limited by your imagination.

3. Gradually unlocked story. The games have a research tree, and as you retrieve alien bodies and technology from random battles you unlock more things to research. Many of these research items serve only to explain the story. They do nothing to help you win but the first time you play they're some of the most interesting things to research. It gives you a real feeling of progress beyond just getting better weapons.

Many games feature the first two factors, eg. roguelikes, but I think the addition of the gradually unlocked story is what makes the game truly great. It combines the mimesis and diegesis that Jimmy Maher talks about in a way that makes both of them better.

Also, the games are available on GOG, but I strongly recommend using the Free Software engine reimplementation OpenXCOM if you're going to play them, because it fixes a lot of bugs and interface inconveniences.

"Because processing is, to use Crawford’s words again, “the very essence of what a computer does,” the capability that in turn enables the interactivity that makes computer games unique as a medium, games that heavily emphasize processing are purer than those that rely more heavily on fixed data."

I'd buy that. Purer, but not better. Procedural generation, in theory, has a lot of advantages, but in practice, in many areas, it hasn't matched the old school approach.

Having been an avid player at the time I can see how a specific well written narrative as opposed to procedural generated stories would have benefited the overall player experience, but in all honesty I don't think it would have made that much of a difference in the games success. You either enjoyed playing or you didn't; the story was always somewhat secondary to just solving the missions and ideally getting the mastermind. Cryptanalysis and circuit logic weren't everyone's cup of tea especially when you consider games like King's Quest 5 & Ultima 6 came out the same year and the years that followed were a blitz of games with much improved graphics and gameplay like Wolf 3d, Wing Commander 2, Dune, etc...

The author seems to think that ludology vs narratology is the same as procedural vs static content, which I don't think is true at all. You can easily make an open-world game with static content, you just need a lot more static content.

I guess this guy is much more historically focused, but it seems odd to present the thesis he does and not even mention No Man's Sky as an obvious example of the kind of failure he's talking about.

Oh, in games. I thought this was going to be about the role of the CIA.

Sid's theory about games seems to suggest that Invisible, Inc. should be boring. I have to say I've found it anything but.

Has anyone played both Covert Action and Invisible, Inc for comparison?

"One decision that hasn’t aged terribly well is the way the game lets Max score with progressively hotter secretaries as he cracks more cases."

Watched a James Bond movie lately?

> Suffice to say that generating believable fictions ... is a tough nut to crack.

Dwarf Fortress has smashed this nut to smithereens. Too bad it requires significant computing resources and a huge amount of programming work to implement.