On the Architecture of the Enemy in Videogame Worlds

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Written by BuckGB on May 21st, 2009

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Where the lair is itself the enemy, games are able to excel.

This is the case in both System Shock and System Shock 2, the finest of SF horror games. Both are set aboard spacecraft, but these spacecraft are also the "bodies" of the enemy: SHODAN, a malevolent Artificial Intelligence that controls each vessel.

In a provocative climax of virtuality-within-virtuality, the final act of System Shock 2 is to enter into the cyberspace realm of the AI and defeat SHODAN inside the graphical representation of her own programming. The evil lair is within the mind of the enemy a motif repeated even more literally in Psychonauts, a game about exploring the physically manifested psyches of various bizarre characters.

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