Time Extend: System Shock 2
Playing the puppet in the game that gave the immersive sim a voice
Beginnings can be difficult to trace, but you can find one haunting the claustrophobic gangways, crew billets and engine rooms of the Von Braun. “Look at you, hacker,” it says. “A pathetic creature of meat and bone. Panting and sweating as you run through my corridors.” SHODAN had, of course, taunted and goaded players before. This malevolent AI was birthed on the space station Citadel in the first System Shock. But in that game she was the clear antagonist. In System Shock 2
SHODAN becomes something else. She’s more than just the final boss. She exists in the liminal space between design and story, game and player, setting up a tense central relationship which the immersive sim would go on to explore for years to come.
Of course, not even System Shock, which was released five years before its sequel, could claim to be the first immersive sim. The ur-text was 1992’s Ultima Underworld, which blended dungeon delving with firstperson immediacy, plus a dose of physics and magic systems to play with. Months before Doom was released, Underworld presented a world to explore which felt real, and realtime action that you could think your way around. System Shock, which was made by many of the same principal developers, translated Underworld’s fantasy setting to a science-fiction one and exchanged magic for technology, castles for spaceships. Your quest was to escape Citadel, where SHODAN had gone rogue, converting its crew to murderous cyborgs and hellbent on shooting the station’s mining laser at Earth. What System Shock introduced was a storyline and missions set by email and audio logs, detailing the locations you needed to go to and the keycodes that would get you there. But System Shock was an essentially lonely experience: everyone was dead or transformed and no one truly accompanied you on your journey. In the sequel, though, you have a constant flow of emails telling you what to do.
First, Janice Polito guides you through the MedSci, Engineering and Hydroponics decks of the Von Braun, a science ship which has been equipped with the first faster-than-light drive. Polito is the creator of XERXES 8933A/A, an AI designed to manage the vessel. But with the Von Braun having made its jump and arrived at Tau Ceti, XERXES seems distinctly unwell, and almost everyone’s been turned into zombies again. Fortunately, Polito isn’t among the brainless shamblers, and her first directives are authoritative, as befitting a genius scientist. Her orders allow you to fight back against XERXES, and she rewards your successful efforts with cyber modules, which you can use to augment your powers.
Yet there’s something up with her tone. At first it’s harsh, leading you to wonder what kind of person you’re helping. Then she starts issuing reprimands. “Why do you go so slowly?” she rebukes you. “Do you think this is some kind of game? It is only through luck and my continued forbearance that you’re even alive! Now move!” Polito provides a rising uncertainty, as you begin to question the nature of the actions she’s asking you perform.
And then the game reveals that Polito has been dead the whole time. Her voice has, in fact, been SHODAN’s, who survived the events of the first game and has been masquerading as Polito so you’ll do her bidding. SHODAN is being assaulted by the same bioorganism which has corrupted XERXES and the rest of the ship, and she wants you to help her. It’s to your mutual benefit, and besides, SHODAN has faultlessly kept you alive against XERXES’ horrors. So you’ve no choice but to team up.
Yes, no choice, because System Shock 2’ s story is entirely linear. And it’s in this non-choice that System Shock 2 found a voice for the immersive sim. As quest-giver and instigator, SHODAN is the voice in your ear, your master and commander. She sets your challenges and – spoilers – she winds up as your ultimate antagonist. There’s a powerful tension between your need to obey her in order to progress, and your awareness that she’s making you work to her nefarious ends. It’s a tension which lies in all games. To progress in a videogame is to consciously take another step along a preordained path on which a Big Bad rises and which ends with you taking it down.
This tension was also in the first System Shock, though never so sharply focused. There, even in the opening cutscene, you
see yourself hacking open SHODAN’s failsafes so a greedy corporate exec can steal a bio-engineered virus to sell as a biological weapon ( System Shock is very much a postAlien game), and so the storyline is predicated on your action having caused her to run rampant. But there’s no give and take between you and its antagonists. They’re simply against you.
By contrast, in having you work for SHODAN in System Shock 2 the game establishes a relationship, a to-and-fro which strikes up a conversation between choice and destiny. If you search the corpse of Marie Delacroix, the inventor of the Von Braun’s faster-than-light drive, you’ll find ten valuable cyber modules, and when you exit the area, SHODAN isn’t pleased. “I hope you enjoyed your little rebellion, irritant,” she says. “But remember; what
SHODAN gives, she is more than able to take away.” And she removes ten cyber modules from your inventory. In this moment, the game punishes you for performing an action that never seemed to be in question. It’s always good to search bodies, right? Not this time. Your situation is underscored: you’re being watched, there are right and wrong things that you can do, and some of the rules aren’t even explained.
That situation is true for any game. All games have a testy relationship with their players, making sure you’re looking the right way so you understand where to go next, and you know what to do when you get there. SHODAN represents its designers’ stewardship of you, as they cajole you along a rollercoaster delineated by the Van Braun’s layout of locked doors, blocked lift shafts and powerouts. After all, SHODAN has to pace your progression, teach you what to do, and lead you with incentives, while always ensuring you don’t get too powerful. SHODAN is the game’s designer.
And not a particularly great one. Her means to progression can sometimes seem rote – find the door code on the body all the way over there; find three jars of toxins and insert them into three environmental
YOU’RE BEING WATCHED, THERE ARE RIGHT AND WRONG THINGS THAT YOU CAN DO, AND RULES AREN’T EXPLAINED
regulators; destroy 15 black eggs. But System Shock 2 isn’t only SHODAN’s directives. Your experience is mitigated by many other forces which exist outside her influence and provide you with your own objectives to think about. Because while System Shock 2 is a linear, story-driven game, it’s also still an RPG, with all the openness that implies.
There are your specialisms: do you want to be good at repairing the broken weapons enemies drop? Or do you want to be better at maintaining the ones you have? What about modifying them to make them more effective? Would you like to hack crates open to get extra goodies? And what about earning long-term bonuses by researching the weird artefacts you find? Your choices result in the same core thing – becoming good at killing stuff – but they interlock elegantly, especially in the way they force
agonising decisions over managing your restricted inventory. When you find your first assault rifle, do you spend your cyber modules on raising your gun skills so you can use it, at the expense of hampering other skills? Do you make space for it by ditching the shotgun you upgraded and maintained to perfection, and for which you just found rare anti-personnel shells?
Then there are other systems which provide organic reasons to schlep around the station. Power armour and stat-boosting implants drain energy reserves when equipped, driving you to find Recharge Stations. There’s the scarcity of the medical stations, and the different consoles which upgrade your stats and skills. There are the Matter Replicators – shops – which offer varying menus of items, and the chemical storerooms, where you’ll find stocks of the elements which are essential to researching artefacts and gaining permanent stat boosts. And there are the informal ways you use the Von Braun’s space: the piles of resources you leave by the central elevator so you can come back to them later.
But it’s all still in service of a boss in whom your trust ebbs and flows, a relationship which became the hallmark of the Shock series. BioShock worked it much more powerfully into its storytelling, of course, with a masterful reveal – you’ve been conditioned to act for your enemies from the outset – which was designed to make you question everything you’d experienced and done. BioShock Infinite teased the concept of the unreliable task-giving companion to its logical extreme – you’ve been the bad guy all along. But they did the same thing: engage the player in a conversation about what choice means in a game, in a genre which was notionally founded in player choice. And then there are the taskmasters and antagonists from other games – the narrator from The Stanley Parable and Colonel John Konrad in Spec Ops: The Line.
SHODAN’s message didn’t have quite the revelatory power that came in her successors, which were born of greater developer experience. Then again, they also increasingly laboured under the growing realisation that it’s a little cheap to pose the question, ‘What is player agency?’ in games which wilfully withhold player agency in order to ask it. But SHODAN in System Shock 2 did it first. “Thank you for running my errands, puppet.”