Dishonored: World-Building 101

Only a few hours into Dishonored, and but it seems pretty great. Not so much as a stealth game, although it's a good one, but as a world, a fictional experience, independent of linear story.

While the writing and acting in Dishonored has its issues - like the odd preponderance of American accents or the cartoonish villains - I'm impressed by how solid the world-building itself is. It has a very fleshed out world, one where science, history, technology, religion, and economics all feel meaningfully interwoven. It's world-building 101 really, but so few video games do it decently it's refreshing to see one with such a solid grasp of the basics.

You begin to see how eccentric Dishonored is once you realize its entire world is based on whaling. This is weird. It reminds me of Dune, with the whales serving a similar function to the spice worms of Arrakis. All of human society in Dishonored is built on the harvesting of whale oil. It is the fuel that makes possible the futuristic technology of its sea-faring, not-quite-steampunk retro-world, the elixir that cures the mysterious plague threatening its people, and the reagent that alters human biology, opening new dimensions of consciousness. You slowly untangle the cascading effect this has on society, until the City of Dunwall, with its tangled mess of privilege, starvation, fascism, horror, magic, sex, and death, begins to take on a fractured coherence not unlike China Mieville (only with 99% less fucked-up-ness).

At one point you fall asleep and have a vision of the whole world floating in some blue abyss. Whaling vessels, oars, and small tugboats float in mid-air, among street lamps and Nazi-esque iconography of Dunwall's repressive government. I've played lots of games with dreamscapes, but this one is built on a foundation that has the right kind of logic, the kind that makes you ask questions which you feel have real answers. You feel like paying attention to Dishonored because it's been crafted like a gigantic puzzle, where everything has a purpose, and nothing's been just tossed in for stylistic flair. This puts it closer to the likes of Silent Hill, Catherine, or The Void than the stealth/FPS/RPGs it will be compared to. 

Coherence and depth is key here - the interconnected-ness of setting, character, mechanics, visual design, and plot - rather than the individual quality of any of these elements alone. I feel like those who have been down on Dishonored's storytelling aren't recognizing how carefully these elements reinforce each other, how they go a level beyond what typical narrative-driven games do. Some of Dishonored's narrative elements are on-the-nose, but most are just woven into the fabric of the game's design economy.

At one point you are given a bloody, slippery human heart, which you just walk around with in your hand. It whispers to you in a woman's voice, telling you secrets about the people you see, about their lives, their troubles, their quiet desperations. It's a running commentary on the socio-political-economic state of the world and how it affects the lives of whomever you might be killing next.

At first this just registers as random Mieville-esque weirdness, until you realize the heart itself might be the heart of the Empress whom you saw assassinated in the intro. This suggests a reason why the heart is such an expert on the country and its problems, why it wants to talk to you all the time, why it seems so sad, and why the hell you even feel compelled to have it with you, since it's basically makes the Empress - who you thought was just a throw away character with one scene - into a narrator from beyond the grave. The fact that she only has as much prevalence as you choose to give her, or whether you even realize its her heart you are carrying, is a good example of how subtle Dishonored can be. But the player won't realize this unless they are subtle to begin with.

I have no idea where Dishonored is going with all this, how it may or may not pay off. Maybe by the end these things will not seem as subtle. Maybe a lot of these connections I am discovering myself will be beaten into me at some point and they will lose their appeal, become less mine. I don't know. Even if this happens, I think I'd still recommend the early sections of Dishonored as a good primer on world-building in video games. It at least has the decency to be the right kind of weird.

A Brief History of Darkness

Darkness isn't what it used to be. What was once an inky wall hovering before you has been reduced to normal light. The march towards realism has robbed darkness of its poetry. Darkness used to be awesome. It curled around you like a hand when graphics were less detailed. When you could see the pixels that also meant you could see the darkness.

It's unfortunate to be a 90s 3D video game nowadays, and perhaps forever. Unlike 2D pixel art, which has comfortably grown into being recognized as its own aesthetic, the comparably lo-fi visuals of early 3D tickle people's uncanny valley bone too much. To the modern eye they register as failed modern games, not successful retro games.

This why darkness, in all its poetic terror, may be lost. Most would agree that Silent Hill 2 has better visuals than Silent Hill 1, but Silent Hill 1 has better darkness. It has some of the best darkness ever, a darkness that would be much harder to achieve on modern tech. Silent Hill 1 is a grainy and pixelated game, but this means you can literally see the darkness creeping around corners, condensing like water droplets on walls and floors. Because the Playstation 1 could not do subtle lighting effects, its darkness is the most unsubtle thing imaginable, a black abyss that stares right back into you.

Silent Hill 1 was one of the last games to portray darkness this way, coming right at the end of the 90s, in the twilight of early 3D experimentation. With the advent of dedicated graphics cards, this kind of in-your-face unsubtle darkness disappeared almost overnight. And what's worse... no one quite seemed to realize it was there to begin with, or how effective it was.

Just look at the difference between Ultima Underworld, the very game that pioneered immersive 3D graphics to begin with, and Arx Fatalis, released almost a decade later. Underworld's darkness is the juicy kind, the kind the creeps, each massive pixel a finger. I was thrilled when heard Arx Fatalis was going to be a spiritual successor to Underworld, but I remember being strangely disappointed when the game only offered you a hazy green-ish cloud as your draw distance. In many ways Arx was a good imitation of Underworld, finding a lot of its rhythms and quirks, but its lighting - of all things - drained my enthusiasm.

Some games post-3D revolution do darkness well. Thief is one notable example, as is Doom III or Chronicles of Riddick, and several others. These are games where darkness is an important part of gameplay, not just atmosphere, so it's unsurprising they did it well. However, with ever-depressing emphasis on advancing computer graphics, light and shadow have been more or less claimed as a simulation element, an aspect of realism, not a poetic substance to be conceived and tailored for expressive impact.

Darkness is one of the oldest concepts in the human imagination, the thing we've all been afraid of for the past several thousand years. There was a brief era in video game graphics when, because they lacked subtelty, these poetics were brought to the surface through a fortuitous collision of technology and subject matter. 

Now, if developers wish to leverage this awesome power, they will have to do it on purpose.