The Art of Revenge: Dishonored and Creative Game Design

Video games are an interesting medium, one that is so new that it's constantly reinventing itself with new genres, new gimmicks, and new conventions.  Without the established history and distinction that film has, games have the ability to push boundaries in function, in technology, in graphics, and in story where other mediums are trapped by convention.

In 2012, Dishonored was released by Arkane Studios.  It was their first game since 2006's Might and Magic and their first game published through Bethesda Softworks.  An original IP that took place in a fictional, 1800s London-inspired steampunk world, Dishonored was a one in a million in an era where the games industry was pumping out sequels left and right.  A stealth game with magic, a first-person shooter where you didn't have to fire a single shot, a game about an assassin where not killing anyone is an option.  A game about revenge where the best ending requires you to show as much mercy as possible.

Harvey Smith and Raphael Colantonio, co-creative directors of Arkane, came up with the idea for Dishonored in their self-described "ninja pitch", a style of analogy where each person builds on the last person's idea. From a Polygon article:

"It was basically: 'first-person ninja assassin with magic powers, like ninjas have,'" said Smith. "And so we were: 'We like that idea, but what if...'"
"'What if it was all weird?'" Colantonio finished the thought.
"'All super weird,'" Smith picked up the thread. "'What if it was in London? What if it wasn't a ninja?'
"And then it slowly ... organically gravitated toward this sort of pseudo-Victorian alternate reality."
This is how the "ninja pitch" becomes Dishonored, and how Colantonio and Smith become a creative team.

The two men, when they came up with the idea, had no way of knowing that their game would go on to be nominated for E3 2012's Best of Show award, two nominations for BAFTA Game Awards (Game Design, Best Story) and one win (Best Game), and various other awards and nominations.  They had no idea this game would make Arkane Studios a heavy-hitter within both Bethesda and the greater first-person narrative genre as a whole.  All they set out to do was create a well-designed, well-made, beautiful and interesting game.





Part of what made Dishonored so successful and so unique was how it was designed from both a gameplay and a visual perspective.  Gameplay-wise, Dishonored is a first-person, linear stealth game (AKA it is played from the first-person perspective, following a linear story, focusing on stealth elements).  Dishonored also is a first-person open world shooter (AKA allowing players to do whatever they want, including shooting anyone they want), or a quest-based RPG (AKA having players complete quests for rewards), depending how you play.

Echoing other stealth games before it, like the establishment that is the Hitman franchise, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of ways to complete a level in Dishonored. Unlike Hitman or any other stealth game before, however, Dishonored doesn't require you to be stealthy. Also unlike Hitman or any other assassin game before, Dishonored doesn't require you to kill anyone. That's what makes the choices in Dishonored unique from a game design perspective.  As said by the two creative directors in a Forbes article, "One of our relevant values here is to reward the player for accomplishing a goal (i.e. getting inside the room somehow), rather than rewarding for how he accomplished the goal (i.e. picking the lock)."  Arkane focused on an "emergent, player-driven narrative" for the bulk of the gameplay and only resorting to "embedded, designer-proscribed narrative" as a narrative wrapper to the story.
 
Visually, Dishonored didn't opt for the photorealistic ideal that so many games strive for (see: the bulk of the Sony exclusives for the past few years).  And while photorealistic isn't a bad goal, and in fact is a gorgeous visual style for plenty of realistic games, Dishonored is not a realistic game and instead needed a style that matched the atmosphere.  The game is so distinct stylistically that it could not be mistaken for anything else but itself.  The designers used collection heavily: they studied the way light filtered in London, looked at depictions of 1600s London in all manner of mediums to pull a distinct style, and captured the historical fascination with whale hunting and industrial design, building up a plague-ridden, pseudo-London city running off whale oil and steam power.  They studied anatomy, particularly features distinctive to Anglo-Saxon faces, to create stylistic models of people with, fittingly, video-gamey proportions, in a way that emphasizes style while also projecting a gameplay aspect to it--large men are fighters, small men are aristocrats or civilians, coding each character model in a visual style that reads easily to a player without being obvious.



Dishonored isn't the greatest game in the world, but it sets out to be unique and entertaining and that's exactly what it is.  It's an interesting case study in ways video games are a highly creative medium in both how they are made and how they are played--there's a reason let's players are some of the most famous people on YouTube.  Two people could play Dishonored and have completely different experiences in almost every way, from what powers they use to what door they go through to how they deal with their targets.  Players are encouraged to adapt and improvise, learn from their failures or just roll with them, and try new things to get the results they want.

Arkane Studios continues to create compelling narrative games, with the release of Dishonored 2 in 2016 and Dishonored: Death of the Outsider and Prey in 2017.  They only continue to develop creative ways to build games and creative ways to play them, and I, for one, am always looking forward to the next game they put out.