A downloadable game

The paper was originally a final assignment of Looking Glass Legacy class at NYU

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          Superpowers and magic are not something new and rare in videogames, such as vampiric skills in Vampyr, time travel in Quantum Break, and possession in Murdered: Soul Suspect. Even though these powers are distinctive in style and have fancy particle effects, they taste bland in my view after repetitive uses — all of them function explicitly and always have a predictable outcome. Arkane Studios's Dishonored, however, crafts a more interesting gaming experience with magic. It is a first-person action game that casts you as an assassin driven by revenge in a retrofuture world. Similar to the three titles mentioned above, the protagonist in Dishonored is also blessed with multiple supernatural abilities, say teleportation and possession. But because it is also an immersive sim, with the mechanics that set this genre apart, magic in Dishonored can apply to various situations and sometimes unexpected moments emergent from the way you use it. In return, it spices up the gameplay and the title ends up above sales expectations (Sterling, “Dishonored”). This paper analyzes three specific powers in Dishonored: Blink, Bend Time, and Possession and how they give you a high level of agency, making the game a powerful immersive sim.

Defining Immersive Sim and Player Agency

Before an in-depth look at Dishonored, let us take a moment to define the concept of immersive sim. Mark Brown, host of the YouTube series Game Maker’s Toolkit, isolated a few key aspects of what makes a game an immersive sim in a 2016's episode, including player agency, systemic elements, emergent gameplay, consistent simulation, and game reaction to player choice (Brown, “The Comeback of the Immersive Sim”). In that video he also explained agency as the freedom to select different tactics, routes to achieve the goals, as well as gameplay style. However, I consider agency as something more. The discussion surrounding agency and videogame play can be traced back to Janet Murray in 1997, when she defined videogame agency as “the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices” and pointed out that players desire this subjective experience of power and control (126). In a more recent GDC talk, Meg Jayanth qualified the word “meaningful” as making significant changes to the game world (Jayanth, “Forget Protagonists”). Based on their arguments, I define player agency by three criteria:

  1. You have control over your character's decisions and actions.
  2. The decisions and actions have consequences or result in a significant change within the game world.
  3. You have information to anticipate the consequences before making them.

          Although player agency is the focus in this paper, in the following discussion we will also see how other features of immersive sim pave the way for it.

Blink

Blink is the first magic power that unlocks in Dishonored. It allows you to teleport to a new place within the given range. Teleportation is also feasible in Vampry but it is not systemic. You can only use it to reach predetermined safe spots. While in Dishonored, where you can land is much less limited. What usually perform as props or blocking walls in other games become useful tools to achieve goals in this game. You can blink to the top of a streetlamp, the bars around a balcony, the surface of long and tortuous sanitation pipes, cold river, even the inside of a trash can. In that way, you have agency when it comes to obstacles. For example, when facing a building with a locked front door, you have more choices than finding the key. You can blink to a nearby streetlamp searching for an open window on the second floor. This choice reduces the chance of you being detected by guards on the street, hence you cause less chaos to the world. Blink gives you control over the space, encouraging you to think about the composition of buildings, the height difference between your character and other objects, and the structure of each level — all of which are valuable information to facilitate your next move.

Bend Time

As the name suggests, Bend Time allows you to play a trick on time. The first level slows time for a while, and if you upgrade this power you can even stop time. Bend Time makes a huge difference in dealing with hostile enemies, in a way that many other games do not have. Imagine you are fighting with attackers in Quantum Break. You have a time power called Stop Time, but it only affects a single enemy for seconds, hence it is impossible to get away from your enemies without killing. In Dishonored, Bend Time affects the world globally, meaning everything around you will halt once you use this skill, and it lasts long enough for you to do things. Besides running away and hiding, you can take every bullet floating in the air, steal enemies' pouches, or choke one enemy into unconsciousness. You have the choice of not taking away a soul even in such a dangerous condition. With Bend Time, you have the agency to turn a passive situation to your advantage and play actively.

Possession

Possessing somebody else sounds extremely powerful, but not in Murdered: Soul Suspect. In that game, when you possess a random person you hide inside their body, but you do not control their movement. In Dishonored Possession works differently though. Because of the consistency of the game, the simulation of a human continues under your possession. You become the one you possess; therefore, you can look, walk, and move freely. If you possess an armed enemy, you can either bypass a security system or draw out the weapon to kill their unsuspecting allies. With this power sometimes you can even deny a cutscene. During my walkthrough, I possessed Piero, a friendly NPC, when he was spying another NPC Callista bathing. The possession happened before Piero sensed me, so it did not trigger his cutscene. This ability grants you more methods of experimenting with NPCs, even their narratives.

Conclusion

Blink, Bend Time, and Possession are three well-designed magic powers in Dishonored that provide you a good sense of player agency in terms of space, time, and the relationship with others. They give you enough room to make personal decisions and let you take full responsibility for your actions. Without systemic elements and consistency, magic powers in Vampyr, Quantum Break, and Murdered: Soul Suspect have more restrictions on targets, narrow one's gameplay style, or result in little change to the game world. Dishonored has shown us that a wonderful immersive sim comes out of the perfect collaborations of every game system.

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Murray, Janet. Hamlet on the holodeck: The future of narrative in cyberspace. The Free Press, 1997.

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