Building a Mystery: Gaming’s Crime Investigation Mechanics and the Beauty of Being Unsatisfied

Batman is often referred to as the world’s greatest detective, but at least in the Arkham games, this isn’t really the case. Instead, it’s more like Batman has used his tremendous financial resources to acquire amazing technology, and that technology is, collectively, the world’s greatest detective. All Batman has to do is point his deep tissue scanner at a body and hold a button down for a few seconds and voila! Instant detective work! As we go through the motions, a completion percentage fills up. When it’s full, Batman tells us what the technology has revealed. And thus, we know that we should feel satisfied.

The Witcher 3 (reviewed) handles crimes very similarly, with hero Geralt’s “witcher senses” filling the role that Batman’s gadgets do in Arkham Knight. We follow tracks, we select prompts to examine corpses, but we don’t ever have to figure anything out for ourselves, or take a guess at something and risk being wrong, and experiencing all the dissatisfaction that might entail. These games play it safe, and give us bits of positive reinforcement to make us feel good about ourselves when we haven’t even really done anything. I’m so tired of sections in games that feed me little pellets of content that require me to do nothing more than respond to contextual button prompts and then give me a little pat on the back and a bit of narrative as a reward. This process, to lift a line from Morrissey, says nothing to me about my life.

From my latest piece on VICE. Read the whole thing here.