Splinter Cell: Conviction (Xbox 360) and Narrative Within Moments

Emergent gameplay was once a bullet point you could slap on the back of a box. It isn’t really that way anymore, since people got kind of worn out on the buzzword, but it represented something really interesting about the way developers thought we wanted to play our games.

 A few years on from when it was a buzzword, we can see it for what it was: a desire to have our gameplay experience be different than, say, Doom III’s monster closets. Emergent gameplay was shorthand for the intricate and sometimes strange ways games respond to our actions; for a game to truly have it, it needed to be largely composed of moments in which the game seemed to respond believably to our actions – believably and unpredictably.

 Think back to Grand Theft Auto IV, specifically. In a lot of the missions, it simply gave you problems and said “deal with this.” Really early in the game, for example, you have to chase someone down on a motorbike and kill him. Within a few moments, I shot his bike’s rear tire out, causing him to launch forward; gunning the engine, I ramped my bike off his skull, causing blood to shoot out with a “pop” sound. Mission complete.

 I thought I’d hit him, maybe, and have to turn around to get him again. I didn’t really figure he’d react the way he did to the bike stopping, or that the collision detection on my bike was powerful enough to specifically take out the dude’s head. Yet those things, entirely independent of Rockstar’s structure of the mission, were what I did. I didn’t just stop the mission short, I did it on my terms, and in what felt like a particularly badass way.

 But outside of that particularly powerful memory, there were all kinds of unexpected moments that are a little blurrier in my mind – shooting a dude in the head and, courtesy of Euphoria, watching him tumble down the stairs into one of his compatriots; blowing up a truck and watching a dude catch fire and roll on the ground to put it out, only to watch him roll into another car, set its wheels on fire, and then blow that car up; blasting a dude off of a ledge and watching him fall onto a car, denting its roof. Really neat stuff that happened not because it was supposed to, but because the game set up a few simple systems that allowed these things to happen, and allowed me to – and this is important – dictate their happening. I wasn’t in control of the plot, except for one choice that gave me one of two different endings; I was, however, in total control of how the game actually played out. In short, the game gave me a chance to make my experience matter, to make it not only fun but personal and unique.

 Splinter Cell: Conviction is kind of what that gaming looks like in 2010 – a game with a tightly constructed plot that your actions don’t change, but with cleverly paced and laid-out gameplay that allows your experience to differentiate from your friends’ in significant ways. You don’t make an impact on the story, but you make an impact on your own immediate experience, and you do this through the negotiation of simple rules and signifiers present within the game itself.

 I’ll provide you with an example after laying out a few of these rules and signifiers. If you’re in the shadows, you can’t be seen, except up close, which causes everything that is not manipulable in the environment to remain in full colour while everything else goes into a stylish high-contrast greyscale. When an enemy is close, you can do a hand-to-hand kill on them, which is totally silent, and causes their body to slump down right where you do the kill. When an enemy hears noise or sees something briefly out of the corner of his vision, he’ll come to investigate it. If he is alerted too much, either to your location or to the direct presence of danger, he’ll prepare himself to attack (or, more likely, defend). Cars have alarms, and if something hits them by accident, like a bullet from a silenced pistol, the alarm will go off.

Got those? Okay.

One mission has you sneaking around a parking garage. If any evidence of your presence is discovered, you have to start the mission. This just means staying out of sight and staying in the shadows as much as possible, and being aware of your surroundings so that you won’t get spotted running through a lighted area. It’s a fairly obvious way for the developers to force the pace of the game to slow down a little, but not an inelegant one; it forces you to behave more stealthily and thoughtfully. There’s a lot of observing, waiting, and tense, brief moments of action.

 I got sick of observing and waiting, and decided from my vantage point inside an air vent to take out a guard and give myself a clear path to the exit. When he went past the vent, I jumped out and snapped his neck, causing him to slump against the passenger door of the car parked perpendicular to the vent and set off its alarm. The directional “WARNING” symbol appeared onscreen, pointing in the general offscreen direction of a guard saying, “Huh? What was that?”

 Dammit.

I crouched back into the vent and waited with gritted teeth as the guard began to approach the car from the driver’s side. His footsteps drew near, bringing him to a stop on the other side of the car. From my hiding place in the shadows, I watched him peer at the car, look in its windows, check its side for damage. The body remained slumped in the shadows, just out of his line of sight. Perplexed, the guard shrugged and returned to his position.

I sprinted to the exit.

I’ve played through the game twice, that happened once, and the story was the same both times. There’s nothing I can do that will affect all the stuff about the EMP bomb being worked on secretly within Washington’s Michigan Avenue reservoir, nor is there any way for me to change the arc of Sam Fisher’s search for his daughter. There’s certainly no way for me to affect what went on with Fisher’s unit in Iraq during the first Gulf War, which the game visits briefly for a single, tense chapter.

But my experience was tangibly enjoyable each time, and the gameplay taking me from plot point to plot point is solid enough that the overall experience doesn’t suffer for it. In his fascinating Final Fantasy XIII review, Simon Ferrari asks of that game’s detractors, “how would you, without words, convey the feeling of living one’s entire life on a string?” This, maybe, is it, in a satisfactory way – the sensation that while the outcome is immutable, the path between the points on its overall arc is a path that I can travel on my own terms. In this way, really, emergent gameplay can deliver the best of both worlds – the tightly constructed linear experience of the narrative, with broad enough corridors and arenas that the gameplay itself becomes tremendously non-linear.

I don’t have a problem with that. Ubisoft Montreal wants me to have a fun time killing dudes, and the gameplay makes that more than possible. Ubisoft also wants to tell me a specific story with specific characters, or more accurately really one character: Sam Fisher. Almost everyone else in the story is kind of a caricature, for better or for worse, although that’s admittedly because Sam never has much contact with anyone except Anna “Grim” Grimsdottir and veteran buddy Vic.

That’s because the game is really about getting inside Sam’s head, at least in part for the sake of the story, which is less about the political espionage stuff and less even about the search for answers regarding the death of Sam’s daughter than it is about Sam’s involvement, specifically, in both; when they eventually dovetail with one another, the game’s stylish means of presenting objectives by projecting them in words made of light on visible surfaces reveals itself through a bunch of nouns and adjectives as the way the world looks inside Sam’s brain, and a subsequent sequence that ties the game’s quick-kill function into his emotional state and slaps a unique visual filter on the whole thing cements the interconnection of style, narrative and gameplay.

And there is really Ubisoft’s motivation for the storytelling – it’s just a way to get you hooked into Sam Fisher, a dude with a background and an inner life, a dude who’s basically stuck in machinations well beyond his control (like Just Cause 2’s Rico, but with a much straighter face). It’s a way to get you thinking like him and behaving like him, experimenting with and devising strategies for taking out your enemies the way he would. Sam’s a character whose background is full of stuff we’re familiar with, verging on the cliché when not leaning right against it, but you inhabit him anyways, and it not only makes the story easier to swallow but it makes the game more fun and more engaging. It gives you a character whose wider narrative actions are unselectable and unalterable, lets you dictate what and how he's thinking when he actually has to deal with what he’s been trained to deal with, and then manifests that onscreen. There’s something to be admired in that.