I've just been reading about EA's forthcoming first-person shooter GoldenEye Rogue Agent and have been truly amazed by the developer's efforts to literalise the game title. If you haven't caught the pre-publicity surrounding this game, it works like this: you control a rogue MI5 agent who has lost an eye in a fight with legendary baddie Dr No. Luckily, however, Scaramanga – the one with three nipples in The Man With The Golden Gun – rescues the blinded agent and equips him with a robotic cyber-eye, made of gold. Hence… GoldenEye.
But the literal thinking doesn't end there.
It turns out that this eye gives your character a range of special psychic abilities, allowing you to chuck baddies around the room with the power of thought alone. But as a necessary gameplay mechanic to limit use, there's an energy bar that runs down whenever the feature is in operation, and you can only renew the bar by performing skill moves. To explain this the designers have come up with the idea that the eye draws on brain energy that is omitted when such moves are performed.
This naturalistic approach to game design is admirable, but it runs counter to the 'it just does, okay?' philosophy that quietly underpins videogaming. I'm not just talking about the highly abstract early years – the hungry yellow circles being chased round mazes by ghosts – I'm talking about the way games, even today, simply have to break a few rules to function as interactive experiences.
Take for example, the abundant health and ammo packs that litter the environments in first person shooters. When a developer tries to really deal with the unreality of this situation, they often end up looking silly. In Resident Evil for example, you were forced to pick up green and red herbs for health – fine, you might think, herbs are more likely to be littered around an old manor house than first-aid kits. However, how many herbs are there that instantly heal gaping zombie attack wounds?
Better still, in Sony's action adventure The Getaway, the player had to recover from bullet wounds by leaning against a wall and having a bit of a rest. Again, it was no more realistic than coming across a magical health pack – it simply drew more attention to the artifice underpinning the notion of universally available panaceas.
GoldenEye looks like it might be a very entertaining game, and EA's decision to let you play as the bad guy is pretty brave for such a mega-corp. But someone needs to tell the marketing chaps to lighten up. No one cared why the original movie was called GoldenEye, and no one will care why the agent they're controlling has a robot eye that must be regularly juiced up by performing special moves. This is the kind of crazy stuff that games ask us to do all the time. If the game is good enough, we'll do it without question. It's best not to draw attention to the absurdities of the videogame universe – the whole thing might unravel.
