Foreword

Video game design is a topic that I have wanted to touch on for a very long time. In fact, this blog was once upon a time meant to be titled "Ludograph", a portmanteau of ludus, Latin for "game", and graphein, Greek for "write, paint". Just like cinematography designates the art of motion pictures, the word ludography, in my mind, designates the art of games, and in particular, video games.

Even though it is nowadays mostly accepted that video games are a form of art, I feel like I see very little discourse around the theory and practice of this art. So it was my intention through this blog to talk about my experience of video game design as a player, and further my understanding of the theory of video game-making as an art form.

However, I never got around to making that blog and I fell back on the good ol' programming stuff I feel more comfortable with. And you know, even this is not going so great, if you judge by the frequency of my write-ups here. But today, I want to take the plunge and write my first post about video games. If you look at the subtitle of this blog, "Gamer" is still in there, and video games still take a very special and important place in my life.

One aspect of filmmaking theory (and more broadly art theory) that I always found incredibly powerful and interesting is the concept of medium specificity. For some reason, it keeps coming back in a lot of discussions I have around movies and books. Basically, the idea behind medium specificity is that every form of art has a set of qualities and techniques that are intrinsically specific to that art. For instance, only in music do you have stuff like notes, chords, bars and whatnot. Only in poetry can you find rhymes, rhythms, stanzas... Only filmmaking has shots, cuts, pans, zooms.

If we are going to consider video games as a form of art, then I believe it is important to clearly identify what specificities this medium holds, and to explore their usage in video games, current and past.

In my writing about video games, one of the first things I would like to dive into is the analysis of medium specificities applied to video game design. And, because I want to be as practical as possible, I want to explore these specificities through interesting examples; games that use the medium's specificities in a novel or exemplary way to further their story-telling.

So, hopefully, this article will one day turn into a series of articles, a portfolio of unique games with interesting design choices with regards to the idea of medium specificity. But hey, no promises.

Introduction

Warning
This blog post contains minor spoilers for Cruelty Squad, a fantastic game that I believe is best experienced blind. If you are even remotely interested, go play it and come back later. You won't regret it, and that's a promise.

Cruelty Squad is an indie video game that was released in 2021, developed by Ville Kallio through his studio Consumer Softproducts. I would describe it as a cyberpunk first-person im-sim in which the player takes on the role of an augmented hitman working for the titular Cruelty Squad, in a hellishly dystopian future ruled by mega corporations and where cybernetic augmentations have basically destroyed the value of life itself.

I don't necessarily want to talk about the game at length here because this is not a full-on review for Cruelty Squad, but merely an analysis of what I believe to be its most unique trait. I guess the opening cutscene tells you most of what you need to know in the context of this article.

Alienation is the keyword

Everything in Cruelty Squad feels wrong. The music is discordant and arrhythmic, outlandish textures are plastered all over the walls, every sound effect is bizarre, and even the voice over for the Handler is a nightmarish, distorted version of Animal Crossing vocalizations. The first time you boot up the game, all of these elements jump at you like a million needles in your eyes and ears. I had to stop playing after 15 minutes or so because my head started to hurt.

Obviously, this would all sound like Cruelty Squad is terrible game, and it would be the case, were it not for the intentionality behind it all. To the player, it soon becomes very apparent that all these elements are not mistakes made by a bad developer, but choices made by an eccentric mind. Soon enough, it's easy to be drawn back to this bizarre world and trudge through its painful and difficult levels and unravel the mysteries of the world underneath.

And boy, is it a grim world. I am not very well-versed in transhumanism, so I don't know how original of an idea it is, but in Cruelty Squad's vision of the future, cybernetics have ruined the very nature of humanity. In particular, the ability to infinitely rework and reconstruct your body after death caused the value of everyone's lives to drop to basically zero. In turn, this causes people to struggle in finding any sort of meaning in their existence, and therefore turning to cynicism and hypercapitalism to cope.

It becomes clear that the inhabitants of Cruelty Squad's dystopia have become detached from their world, alienated.

The secret behind Cruelty Squad's design

That already makes for a good video game premise in and of itself, if you ask me. But Cruelty Squad isn't a good video; it's a great video game. It goes above and beyond so that the players themselves feel the same alienation as the character they incarnate. As soon as you start looking at the design choices under this light, it all falls into place. Everything in Cruelty Squad is designed in order to disturb the player and make them lose their bearings.

I don't want to dive too deep down this rabbit hole because it is close to bottomless, but it is the founding stone for my main point, so I kinda have to. When I say that everything is designed this way, I truly mean that the developer used every single tool in the game maker's toolkit to make the player ill at ease.

The art direction

Earlier in the article, I jokingly captioned a screenshot "WTF am I looking at". Now, it is crystal clear that this feeling is the response that Ville Kallio expects and wants from the player. Even though you are moving through seemingly mundane localities like residential areas, office buildings or ski resorts, making insane architecture and using textures that can only have come out from a schizophrenic mind during the worst psychotic crisis forces the player to do double takes on everything. It creates a sentiment of being lost all the time, never knowing what awaits you behind every corner.

The audio design works in a similar manner. Guns make sounds you've never heard before, your character lets out outlandish grunts with every hit and every jump.

The music is basically more of the same. It's interesting to note that it ended up growing on me, no matter how discordant it sounds. Honorable mentions for Rent Due and Controlled Depopulation that perfectly accompany their respective levels.

All this just goes hand in hand with the visual design, creating a perfect storm of sensory overload that is sure to leave the player breathless after minutes of playing.

The game's mechanisms

I'm pretty sure you have understood the pattern by now: take nothing for granted, because you can throw everything you think you know about games out the window. This also applies to the game's very rules. For instance, Cruelty Squad has a dynamic difficulty setting that is never explained to you, and that has pretty big implications since multiple levels are hidden behind this system, as well as two out of the three endings (including the "true" ending). Certain weapons and implants have weird perks and bonuses that are at best not explained, and sometimes completely misleading.

The control scheme

I want to write a separate article on the topic of control schemes as a medium specificity, because I have a game in mind that embodies this concept perfectly. However, Cruelty Squad also does something similar. In its pursuit to make the player lose their bearings of everything they know about the world, the game decides to throw them off even more by tampering with the controls.

It is hard to describe the feeling of confusion and panic that came over me when I found myself in my first gunfight only to realize that pressing R does not reload, only to get blasted to death a second later. Even worse was the feeling of trying every key and not being able to find how to reload.

It goes from simple things like looking at a wall of nightmarish faces and realizing that it was, in fact, a door, to finding yourself in a gunfight and realizing that pressing R does not reload.

The cherry on top

At last, I can now talk about the topic of this article, because on top of all that Cruelty Squad already does to further its narrative through gameplay, it goes even further than that.

It uses its user interface as a mean to tell its story.

I'm sure that it is not the first game ever to do something like this, but it is the first time that I've realized what it was doing and why it was doing it. The moment I had this epiphany, my feelings about the game instantly went from "awesome" to "exceptional". Let me explain.

User interfaces have one job: to let the person behind the computer use the program in from of them. In order to do this well, all developers throughout the history of computer science have learned to create user interfaces that are clear, simple, ergonomic and comfortable. Over the decades, these considerations have become the staple for designers; they spend hours and hours making sure that software is as easy to use as possible.

Conversely, it's easy to understand that a piece of software that fails to follow these principles is generally considered bad. My boy NakeyJakey has an 8-minute rant about crappy UI on YouTube, there is an entire subreddit dedicated to poorly-designed software, and so on and so on.

As you have probably guessed, Cruelty Squad deliberately chose to not follow the traditional path of slick UI, instead deciding to plaster all of its insane textures everywhere, and make every single menu as counter-intuitive and off-putting as humanly possible. Let's review some examples of Cruelty Squad's user interface design choices.

The HUD

The ammo counter nightmare face

In the lower left corner is what mostly looks like a normal ammo counter: left number represents the number of bullets in the current magazine, right number is the reserve ammo. In between, however, is a nightmarish neon green and red face that spins when you shoot. Again, no obvious functionality outside of looking weird and abhorrent.

The border

This silver and red border is not a decoration around the screenshot. It is always there during gameplay and it always take that much space. It may change occasionally to other textures without the player really knowing why. In reality, this border is tied to the difficulty system: its look changes based on the current difficulty. But of course, this is never properly explained. But still, I'm sure that anyone with two functional brain cells would be able to come up with a less distracting indicator for difficulty, right?

This border is both always present but also very forgettable when you get used to it. As soon as the action kicks up, your focus will be on a thousand other things. However, because it is still there, in your peripheral vision at all times, I like to think of it as a sort of "subliminal" message where the color scheme and the texture slowly but surely dig their way into your mind, acting as a way to build empathy and identify with the character you incarnate.

The life meter

The huge pulsating blob in the upper left corner is mostly for show, since your hit points are shown as a small number next to it. Its only flavor is that is pulsates faster when your HP get low, representing the poor state of your character's body.

It doesn't seem like much, but it does really take up a bunch of screen space for absolutely no reason, and it also happens to be one of the only elements of the entire game that looks genuinely... organic. It might be a bit of a stretch, but I like to think of this blob as the last speck of actual humanity left in the player's body and mind, and it definitely made me pretty sad to think about.

Interestingly enough, this little head-cannon also takes a whole new meaning when, later in the game, you can take a "death surgery" that permanently replaces the life meter by a pointy "death meter". It is such a tiny and insignificant change from a gameplay perspective (it's basically just a small speed boost and the ability to wall cling), but from a narrative standpoint, I felt this change as our character accepting to give away the last remnants of their humanity for the smallest, short-term advantages. Very moving.

Conclusion

I guess I could go on about more design choices, but I am sure you get my point. In short, Cruelty Squad is a fantastic game that masquerade as a horrendous acid trip. Experiencing it is a unique journey that starts with disgust and headaches, goes to unadulterated fun and concludes with an inevitable feeling of doom and hollowness.

This game made me realize things about game design that I have never thought about before, so just for that, I have to give credit and applaud. Be sure that I will be on the lookout for other applications of this concept of "UI as a specificity" in the wild; I might even write a follow-up post where I round up examples to further the idea and drive the point home.