It was recently established that the 2013 gamer is perplexed by some parts of 1994's Super Metroid. The 2013 gamer is having some issues with 1990's Super Mario World, too.

We can see these struggles on the Nintendo Wii U's Miiverse, a community accessible primarily through Nintendo's new console. The Miiverse enables gamers to take screenshots of what they're playing on the Wii U and then ask other system owners for help.

Here are some of the requests for help we saw posted to the Miiverse by people who have played the re-released Super Mario World. In some cases, I'd say their confusion is justified:

Here's the Miiverse's now-infamous requests for Super Metroid assistance. And here's our own take on Super Mario World, a game we finally got around to reviewing.

To contact the author of this post, write to stephentotilo@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @stephentotilo

You may love Gran Turismo. I don't play them. Just not my thing. But when I see Gran Turismo 6 running in the corner of a Sony PlayStation event in Santa Monica, I ask the only GT-related questions I can think of.

• Are you guys rendering the bottoms of cars in greater detail? I ask this of the GT6 producer there, apologizing if that's the rudest question ever. Look, all I know is that, as amazing as the tops of cars look in GT games, the underside of some cars in GT5 were not so fancy. Answer: The gentlemanly producer at this event tells me that the GT dev team at Polyphony Digital has been getting their cameras under cars more than ever for this game. He says they don't like making stuff up. They don't want to guess what a car looks like underneath. They want to get it right. Cool! (And, yes, readers, I know, that what the bottoms of cars look like in GT6 is possibly the least-relevant thing to making a Gran Turismo awesome. I'm sure the producer was thinking that too but was too classy to point that out.)

The demo version of the game is the one shown in Europe earlier this week. Just one track. Silverstone. Here's a photo from that event:

• And here's the most casual-fan GT6 question I could have asked: What are you doing with car damage in this one? (You know, because Gran Turismo used to not have it, whereas you can smash cars up in rival series.) Answer: The rather pleasant producer tells me that it'll be similar to GT5. Polyphony isn't about smashing cars up. They like when people see the beauty of beautiful cars. They'd added some car damage effects in the previous game because people asked.

The gap between Gran Turismo 4 and 5 was infamously wide. 2004/5-2010. The gap between 5 and 6, which is coming out at the end of this year, is narrower.

• Why is the gap between GT games narrower this time? Did Polyphony change their process? Answer: The kind producer tells me... yes. Polyphony will release a good game, but they'll also now add a lot more to it post-release instead of adding and adding before release which used to result in delaying and delaying.

Sound good Gran Turismo, fans?

To contact the author of this post, write to stephentotilo@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @stephentotilo

So within an encounter there is variety.

But the encounter always started the same way. The guys always approached from behind a bus. That's norma, right? And that's in this game. When you go into certain buildings, certain enemies are waiting in there for you every time. How it plays from there is where the variety comes in.

That said, I'm marveling at this game's graphics and acting, two things that I normally don't think matter much to gameplay. Here, they at least make this experience feel interesting and special. The character performances are really good, and I already care more about these two than I did the folks in the love triangle in the Uncharteds. These characters and their situation is more gripping. There's a strong chance that these performances are good throughout and that the game will be able to tell a memorable tale. Whether that makes for a consistently fun game, let alone one that's worth playing again (if such a metric even matters) is something you and I can't say. And to that extent, I'd say you skepticism is healthy and justified.

... was a year ago, but it was brief, just to prove that it was a real game so I could vote for it for a pre-release E3 game critic's award...

The second time I played the game was last night. And, as you can see above and below, it really does look that damn good.

If you don't know, this is the next game from Naughty Dog, creators of Crash Bandicoot, Jak & Daxter and Uncharted. This game is survival-action, so to speak. Ellie, the girl above, and Joel, the guy throwing the brick here...

Joel and Elli are a desperate odd couple. He seems a little shady but confident in his ability to survive. A little weary of all this and soft-spoken. It's been 20 years since things got bad. Ellie doesn't know a different world. She's used to this. She's not exactly plucky, but she seems mature beyond her years and a bit foul-mouthed. However they met, these two are trying their best to survive in a world where humans have been infected and turned into monsters of sorts. Cities have been all but abandoned and hope is fleeting.

The game plays a little bit like a classic Resident Evil with ammo and resources perpetually scarce. I played two 10-minute chunks of the game and never had more than six bullets, except in this crazy sequence—the Last of Us's turning of a classic shooter turret sequence on its head...

The thing is, this is no dark, spooky horror game. This is sadness and survival in the most bright and beautiful places, which I think helps make the violence all the uglier.

In The Last of Us' case, that ugliness of violence is a virtue. In the parts of the game I played, in Lincoln and Pittsburgh, even the violence is scarce. I controlled Joel. Ellie is controlled by the computer. Most of the time, we were just walking, sneaking or trying to find supplies. When other humans or the infected show up, it's usually better to hide than to hit them with a quickly-splintering 2x4. You don't really want to fight the infected people or your fellow desperate humans. None of you can survive many encounters, so avoiding combat is the wiser move.

It's better to crouch and listen for the bad guys. Better to stay away.

But you just sometimes can't avoid it. It finds you.

The camera is often really close to the action. The sounds of struggle, of pipes hitting bones, of bullets cracking, of punches to the gut, all resonate as discomfiting smashes and smacks and cracks.

You can get better at fighting. You can craft a molotov cocktail or scavenge some gear to upgrade a gun. Or make a health pack. Probably best to do that...

The thing I can't shake from my memory, though, is just how beautiful the scenery in the game is and just how interesting the two leads are. I champion the interactive elements of games. I don't value voice-acting that much, but the performances in the game are powerful. As I play—as you will play—Joel and Elli converse. Their relationship builds through small talk and through meaningful exchanges.

I was reminded of the ongoing conversations between the Prince of Persia and Farah in the magnificent Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.

Except, this game isn't a romance. Far from it. It is, however, lovely.

The Last of Us, which has made a better pre-release impression than most other games I've seen this generation, will be out for PlayStation 3 on June 14.

By the way, it also has multiplayer. They're not saying what that's about. And, yes, the game is less than a month away.

This preview included a hands-on session with the game. We played about 30 minutes' worth from two parts of the game. To contact the author of this post, write to stephentotilo@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @stephentotilo

The downloadable demos would be nice, too, of course.

Nintendo will make several of their unreleased Wii U games playable at more than 100 Best Buy locations during the week of E3, according to Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime.

Details are scarce, but it appears to mean that, instead of squeezing into the Los Angeles Convention Center during the week of June 10 to wait on lines to play the next big Wii U games five months before they're released, you can go to a Best Buy in the U.S. or Canada to do the same.

What's better is that all you don't need to be a reporter, a games industry professional or the editor-in-chief of the brand-new, just-happened-to-launch-it-in-time-for-June NintendoIsTheBest.Net in order to get access to a Best Buy. You can just walk in the door. (Note: you probably have to be wearing a shirt.)

This is a pretty cool announcement for regular gamers.

For all of E3's history, gamers have had to depend on reporters and industry folks to tell them whether games shown at E3 were any good. E3 has never let the public in. In recent years, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, EA and Ubisoft have started to livestream their E3 press conferences, so that gamers could at least see E3's biggest, most exciting games when everyone at the show first did. Nintendo's Best Buy move lets you, the gamer, play the biggest games, at least from Nintendo—and as long as they're putting the A-list content there. Hopefully!

Nintendo's Wii U E3 line-up is set to include the next big 3D Mario game, the next Mario Kart and the next Smash Bros.

No word yet on exactly which games will be at Best Buy, which Best Buy locations are participating and when the kiosks will show up that week. Nintendo will be announcing its line-up on June 11, so this Best Buy expansion of Nintendo's E3 booth will probably start then or shortly thereafter.

Note: In the GIF up top, Fils-Aime is actually merely saying: "But we're excited..." We all know what he's getting at. E3 everywhere, people!

Sonic Lost World

UPDATE: A Sega press release indicates that this is a three-game deal:

“Sonic the Hedgehog has proven incredibly successful on Nintendo platforms and we are pleased to continue our long-standing relationship with Nintendo,” said John Cheng, President & COO, SEGA of America. “As we initiate this new exclusive partnership with the next three titles we believe that Wii U™ and Nintendo 3DS™ are ideal platforms to showcase the evolution of the Sonic brand.”

UPDATE 2: A rep for Sega says that the newly-announced Mario and Sonic Olympics game and Lost World account for two of the three games in this deal. Nintendo's third exclusive Sonic game has not yet been announced.

The PlayStation Vita is a good, powerful handheld machine that's run some piss-poor first-person shooters. After rushed, clunky Resistance and Call of Duty shooters, the system will get a Killzone in September. It merely needs to be mediocre to improve Vita FPSing dramatically.

After having played the Vita's Killzone: Mercenary last night at a Sony PlayStation preview event near the beach in Santa Monica, I think it's safe to say the game is at least non-awful. Yay! Put that on the back of the box.

Resistance's problem was bad, boring level design and moronic artificial intelligence.

Call of Duty had barely any content.

Neither looked particularly good.

Taking the last point first, Mercenary's got the looks. See the trailer above for proof. It also controls nicely, allowing for twin-stick and button-based controls but also allowing for taps on the screen as an alternate means for activating some special weapons. Enemies in the game seemed less stupid than the Vita Resistance ones, but I'd need to play for more than five minutes each of competitive deathmatch and single-player to be sure.

I'm not sure how seriously to take the story, which puts the player in the boots of a mercenary who will take jobs from both sides, ISA and Helghast, during the brutal war that has occurred across the PlayStation 3's Killzone 2 and Killzone 3. A developer for the game told me that the game looks at the subjectivity of right and wrong during war-time, what with the player being able to work for either side. I didn't get a sense that this is a game with deep messages. You are, after all, shooting bad guys to earn money to upgrade weapons and, oh, see that bit in the trailer where we stab a guy in the crotch?

In terms of content, there looks to be a lot. Nine missions, estimated to take an hour or so to play through each. Eight-player multiplayer. The virtual money earned in solo or multi-play can be used across both modes for upgrades and unlocks.

If you're into the Killzone lore, here's the official plot summary:

Arran Danner, an ex-UCA soldier turned mercenary, helped deliver a crucial blow to the Helghast in the liberation of Vekta and is hired once again to spearhead the ISA counter-attack against Helghan. A seemingly routine mission to evacuate the Vektan Ambassador and his family from Pyrrhus goes awry, leaving Danner in the middle of a deadly power struggle for the life of the Ambassador’s young son. As the invasion unfolds, it becomes clear that the boy’s fate could change the course of the war and both sides will do whatever it takes to get hold of him, forcing Danner to question whether the price of victory can sometimes be too high, no matter how big the paycheck.

I like a good first-person shooter campaign, but after being burned by Resistance, and appalled by Call of Duty on Vita, I can't help but be heavily skeptical. The developers might deserve more mercy than I'm giving them. This is a different studio: Guerilla Cambridge, formerly Sony Cambridge, dev team behind LittleBigPlanet Vita PSP. For me, it's hard to shake the memory of being done wrong by the genre on a platform that has, increasingly, become a device for playing delightful indie games. Obviously, the machine can specialize in more than one thing. Technically it should be able to get the FPS genre right. Third big try's the charm?

This preview included a hands-on preview of the game. We played about 10 minutes' worth; could have played more if time permitted. To contact the author of this post, write to stephentotilo@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @stephentotilo

Less than two years after vowing to deliver on an "unprecedented partnership" with Nintendo, gaming giant EA is quiet on the Wii U front.

"We have no games in development for the Wii U currently," company spokesperson Jeff Brown told Kotaku yesterday. He did not rule out the chances of EA developing for the Wii U again. EA publishes many of gaming's biggest franchises, including Madden, The Sims, and Battlefield.

In June 2011, at the biggest gaming event of the year—E3—Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata closed his presentation of his company's biggest games and then-forthcoming Wii U console by welcoming then-CEO of EA John Riccitiello to the stage. "What Nintendo's new console delivers speaks directly to the players of EA Sports and EA Games. Nintendo's new console will produce brilliant high-definition graphics and new gameplay opportunities. We look forward to seeing great EA content on this new platform." Riccitiello was also enthused about Nintendo's embrace of online gaming.

EA delivered for Wii U early, releasing Wii U versions of Mass Effect 3, Need For Speed Most Wanted, Madden and FIFA for the new console. Each of those games had been released months earlier on rival Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 platforms. While they ran well, they were, ultimately, late ports. EA's biggest console game of early 2013, Dead Space 3, skipped the Wii U.

Brown told Kotaku that that early run of EA games on Wii U represented EA delivering on its E3 2011 partnership.

EA supported Nintendo's previous console, the Wii, throughout the machine's lifespan, even launching some Wii-only/Wii-first games such as Steven Spielberg's Boom Blox and the MySims games. But the company, like many other major third-party companies, struggled to find a blockbuster hit for Wii. Rival Ubisoft succeeded with Just Dance, but that was an exception. On Nintendo consoles, traditionally the main company that has thrived is Nintendo as system owners flock to support the likes of the Wii Sports, Super Mario and Zelda games from Nintendo.

The full absence of Wii U games from Nintendo's pipeline seemed increasingly likely as the Wii U remained conspicuously absent from announcements regarding major 2013 EA games such as Battlefield 4 and the new Madden and FIFA. A lack of EA support will prevent Wii U gamers from having access to an NFL game, for which EA holds the exclusive license.

EA's refusal to put its sports games on Sega's Dreamcast system in 1999 is seen as one of the signs of Sega's decline in as a console maker. The Dreamcast was Sega's last box. On the other hand, EA may not be the kingmaker it once was, and it could be argued that Nintendo's own Wii Sports is the most successful and broadly-appealing sports game of the last generation.

While EA has clearly cooled on Wii U, it is ramping up support for many other devices, including the next PlayStation and Xbox, the latter of which will be officially revealed on May 21. "I’ve been with the company long time and we have never been better positioned for the launch of new technology, either mobile or console," Brown said. He said EA has invested deeply in preparing games for the next generation of consoles and expects to launch strong as it did at the start of the PS2 and Xbox era than it did with a weaker game slate at the beginning of the Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii generation. Much of that planning can be credited to Riccitiello, who departed from EA earlier this year.

EA isn't alone in not having new games for Wii U. There are no signs of major forthcoming Wii U games from Take Two, with Grand Theft Auto V only promised for PS3 and Xbox 360. The next Call of Duty is also not announced for Wii U (the last one did come out for it). On the other hand, Warner Brothers has the next Batman game and the console-exclusive Scribblenauts Unmasked for Wii U this year. Ubisoft is bringing major Rayman and Assassin's Creed games to Wii U this year along with its ambitious new open-world game Watch Dogs.

As I play an advance copy of the newest version of Nintendo's beloved Animal Crossing games, I've again been pondering the nature of Tom Nook, a character who could teach Bowser and Mother Brain a thing or two about tormenting a Nintendo gamer.

Tom Nook, if you don't know, is one of the recurring characters in this series of games that involve setting up and living in a cute little village. Typically, these games start out with you having to take a loan out from Nook, who is, by the way, a raccoon. You have to have a house in the game. You need the loan to pay for one. So the games start with you being put in debt by this guy. Nook then makes you work for him to pay off the loan and seems to be laughing at you all the way.

In the new game, June's Animal Crossing: New Leaf for Nintendo 3DS, you owe him a little bit of money in the beginning but are actually free of obligations from him quite quickly. Still, the memory of a more aggravating Nook still burns.

I'm not alone in seeing the evil in Tom Nook's soul.

In fact, when I was discussing the game recently with its top three Kyoto-based creators of Japan, we were talking about the idea of there being enemies in the unusually-friendly Animal Crossing series. The game's producer, Katsuya Eguchi, told me that he thinks the bees or scorpions that you occasionally agitate in the game count as enemies.

"Can we all agree that Tom Nook is kind of a bad guy as well?" I asked.

They all laughed.

"No matter how much you work, he just takes all the money from you," Eguchi replied, through a translator.

"I hate that guy," I said, provoking more laughter.

"We think he is very misunderstood," one of the game's two directors, Aya Kyogoku, said. "He’s just passionate about his business. He’s not like a loan shark. He doesn’t add a handling fee or anything like that. He can wait as long as it takes for you to pay back. He’s not as bad as other people might think he is."

That might be true, but Tom Nook will always be Animal Crossing's Ganon to me.

I'll have more from my conversation with the new Animal Crossing's creators in the coming days. Subsequent coverage will be a little more serious. It's just that this Tom Nook guy... he really gets to me.

To contact the author of this post, write to stephentotilo@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @stephentotilo

Imagine a video game that includes 33 Batmans (Batmen?), 130 Green Lanterns and even Aztek The Ultimate Man. Imagine a game that, its creators say, includes ever super-powered hero or villain in DC Comics’ nearly 80-year history. That game is real. It's scheduled for a fall release.

The game goes by the name Scribblenauts Unmasked: A DC Comics Adventure. It’s a PC, 3DS and Wii U adventure. It's a spin-off to the popular Scribblenauts series that invites you to write anything you can think of and have it appear in the game.

It’s funny. Back in 2009, when I first heard about the concept of the original Scribblenauts I had a hard time believing that players could write any noun that refers to an object into the game and it would show up. I tried to stump the game, but I never succeeded. It didn't know proper nouns; but it knew other words for a thing or type of person.

Now, for some reason, I’m having as tough a time believing that there can be a game with every DC Comics hero and villain ever. Surely they missed one?

“We have the DC Comics characters… all of them,” Caleb Arseneaux, producer at the game studio 5TH Cell said while introducing the game to the press this week in Los Angeles.

Yes, of course: they’ve got Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Aquaman, the Flash and Cyborg.

While Arseneaux presented the game to a group of reporters, he had the game idling behind him. On a large TV screen we could see hundreds of DC characters in the Scribblenauts art style.

I spotted Bulleteer. Ambush Bug. B’wana Beast. I saw Bloodwynd, for Granny Goodness’ sake! (I read a lot of DC Comics growing up).

At some point, someone asked for Mogo. The person driving the game while Arseneaux talked typed in “Mogo”. A planet-sized Green Lantern appeared on the screen and promptly beat up Forager. I couldn’t even believe I remembered who Forager was.

Scribblenauts games are about conjuring things to solve puzzles. In this game, you can conjure objects or DC characters and add adjectives (as introduced in Super Scribblenauts). For example, you can make a “zombie Batman.”

As before, anything that you conjure that is animate will have some brains and start to interact with others—so assume that any summoned hero or villain, including "zombie Batman," may immediately start a brawl. The DC characters also have powers, and all of this can be mixed up and customized in an editor that lets you concoct your own heroes or villains.

By the way, they confirmed that they have G’Nort, the dog Green Lantern. I do wish I asked if they had the Brotherhood of Dada, specifically, The Quiz, who has every super-power you haven’t thought of yet (Read Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol run, people!).

About the game… players control Scribblenauts hero Maxwell, who apparently is a big Batman fan. His sister Lilly joins him in this game. She digs Superman. Somehow they get pulled into the DC Comics universe and begin to travel to iconic DC locales such as the Batcave and the Green Lantern planet of Oa.

Heroes and villains will pop up in these places, as will Heroic Feats. The Feats are little quests/puzzles that are generated on the fly by the game, combining a bunch of variables crafted by the game’s developers. A Feat might involve having to remove smog from Gotham City (build a fan?), battle Sinestro on Oa (summon Red Lantern Guy Gardner?). We weren’t shown much of the feats, but that’s supposedly the bulk of the gameplay. There are also story missions. We’ll see more of that in the coming months.

Note: there are a lot of Flashes in this game.

Were you wondering, though, if the game includes Matter-Eater Lad? I was. Arseneaux wasn’t sure. A request was placed.

A day later, I was sent this art for the game. Here is one piece of it: Scribblenauts: Unmasked’s version of Matter-Eater Lad.

I also asked about Brother Power, The Geek. They obliged.

Arseneaux said that 5TH Cell mined the DC Comics Encyclopedia for characters. He thinks they've got them all and says they have some 2,000. Could that really be everyone? He did tell another reporter that there would be no Watchmen, since the focus is on DC’s main publishing universe.

But check out who they do have....

Microwave Mom. I did not expect that!

This preview was based in part by a live playthrough of about 10 minutes of the game by the developers. No hands-on time by Kotaku. To contact the author of this post, write to stephentotilo@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @stephentotilo

The creators of the huge new video game Watch Dogs reject the black and white choices video games often give you when they want to give you a moral dilemma and make you feel something.

They’re striving to go beyond that, to color their new game about hacking, driving, shooting and being an urban vigilante in a Chicago with a morality that is gray.

Lofty words.

I tested them last week and wound up having one of the most interesting and, at times, challenging conversations I’ve had with a game developer in a long time.

I’m going to take you through this one in order, so you can experience how Watch Dogs’ challenge to conventional video game good and evil was presented to me—so you can experience what was promised by the game’s senior producer Dominic Guay, what was shown and then what was said when I presented Guay my strong skepticism. All of this happened during a demonstration of the November 2013 console and PC game at a conference room in a PR firm in Manhattan. (If you want more info about what Watch Dogs is, I wrote a lengthy preview of it; but you’ll understand what follows just fine even if you skipped that.)

What They Promised

Early in a speech about Watch Dogs, I heard something that perked my ears up. “We’re not that interested in opposite, extreme moral behaviors,” the game’s senior producer Dominic Guay of Watch Dog’s development studio at Ubisoft Montreal said. “We’re fundamentally exploring the gray area.” He was saying this right after boasting about the game’s graphics engine and the game’s wind.

Who hypes ethical dilemmas and shades of gray? Game developers.

This is a thing that might strike non-gamers as a bit weird. I think outsiders see games as being about violence or play, about strategy or vicariously experiencing exotic thrills. I don’t know how much people appreciate how many times game designers have tried to give us hard ethical choices, if they’ve seen or appreciated the ability to veer toward the light or dark side of the force in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic or choose a benevolent or nasty approach to saving a city in Infamous while attaining certain super-powers because of those choices. I don’t know if they get what was going on with the Little Sister choice in BioShock or the Paragon/Renegade system in Mass Effect. All appeared to make us think and all rewarded some sort of perk or power or, at least, achievement for our decisions. None were games Guay mentioned, but I’m pretty sure he had some, if not all in mind when he was making Watch Dogs’ morality pitch.

I don’t know how much people appreciate how many times game designers have tried to give us hard ethical choices.

“If I look at the past 15 years, this is the context most games have put us on,” Guay said, unfurling a believable situation possibly plucked from some old classic. “In a very nuanced and subtle situation, we’re offered two kinds of responses. I’ll give you an example. You come up to an orphan boy and basically the game allows you to either give him all your money or kill him. Well, I’m not really interested in those extreme answers to a subtle situation. It’s not relevant and it’s not the thing I would do.

“What we’re really interested in exploring the gray area. So the player is going to be able to make those choices, but it is going to be reflected back to him [through] what [in-game characters] say on social media, what they say to each other and also by the formal media, which is going to start reporting about what Aiden Pearce does in the city and the consequences of those actions.”

The word “consequences” stuck with me. I felt like I was hearing a sales pitch that was missing something.

What They Showed

About 10 minutes after Guay talked about Watch Dogs' coolest-sounding features, he booted up a build of the game. His colleague, Colin, played it. They showed us Pearce’s Chicago, a modern metropolis full of security cameras, criminal organizations and citizens just trying to live normal lives.

The game is set in the fall. Our protagonist, Pearce, is a vigilante, a man, as Guay would later describe to me, “with a pretty shady past.” Bad things had happened to some of Pearce’s friends, leading Pearce to see vengeance of some sort.

“That’s his initial angle, if you want, but then what happens is, as he starts investigating this and as the player grows Aiden’s obsession with surveillance, so to speak, he’s going to be hacking more and more things. He’s going to be aware of more crises and crimes, and he will almost lose himself in trying to intervene in those things and fight the corruption in the city that is linked to him.”

Guay avoided saying whether anyone in particular was the bad guy. He certainly didn’t say if Pearce was “good.” As Colin played, Pearce came upon a facility used to connect a portion of Chicago’s online infrastructure. For some reason, Pearce was going to hack it and take it over, something the heavily-armed guards didn’t want him to do. As Colin was surveying the scene, he moved the game’s camera across two of the guards. Little messages popped up identifying some of the guards’ pasts. Guay pointed these out. One had survived a car bomb explosion. One was acquitted of a weapons charge. “They have shady pasts,” Guay said. Soon, they would spot Pearce. Soon there was a gunfight. Soon, Colin was making sure these guards were dead.

And then, later, came the scene in the alley. This was the scene where we’d be able to see how the game handled its moral dilemmas.

Watch Dogs is an open-world game, like Grand Theft Auto or Assassin’s Creed. Players can roam through it and find side-missions. In this game they can also hack stuff, including people’s phones. Hack a phone and you can read its text messages. This is what Colin, who was still manning the game, did.

Pearce hacked the phone of a drug dealer. “This guy is telling one of his contacts where to find a dealer that he believes raped [the contact’s] wife,” Guay said. “So this is pretty serious stuff.” This was all optional, Guay pointed out. We could drive there and then decide whether to intervene. The man controlling the game grabbed a car and headed over. He came upon an alley. He spotted a homeless man and then the man searching for his wife’s supposed attacker. The man was approaching his target, who we’ll call “the other dealer.”

As players progress in the game, they attain the ability to see biographical information about any character Pearce sees. The mini-bios hover over the characters. The one that popped up over the other dealer indicated that he had faced sexual assault criminal record and was a loan shark. “I don’t know about you,” Guay said, “But I don’t really care what happens to a recidivist rapist.”

The man at the controls decided not to intervene. The angry husband confronted and killed the other dealer. Pearce just watched. The moral code you play by is your own, Guay said. “You have to live with the consequences.”

Again, the “consequences” thing. I was going to have to ask him about it. About an hour later, I did.

What We Talked About

Guay and I sat down at a circular table in a smaller room at the PR firm. We were joined by a PR woman from the game’s publisher Ubisoft. We talked about the game’s story, the game’s wind, and then we had the following exchange. We turned to this as I asked about the “consequences” and the “gray” morality. I told Guay I was skeptical. I was clear on what he and the Watch Dogs team didn’t want. I wasn’t clear on how what they were doing was so different.

Guay: When you think about morality or moral choices [in games], it should be in your head. It should be going through your own filter of morality. The problem is when you have the game do it for you.

Take the orphan example. If I go and say, ‘Kill him or give him all your money’ I’ve seen this so many times, I feel like [sighs in disgust]… I’ve seen this so many times and I wouldn’t actually do either of them. And, actually, games do this. You go and say, ‘Oh, I give them all my money, which will give me plus-five XP which will give me the next Angel skill. And plus-five bad will give me the new Nuclear Skill. I want the Nuclear skill! It’s got nothing to do with morality. I’ve just made an optimization of a skill-tree like I did when I was a kid playing Dungeons & Dragons.

"When you think about morality or moral choices [in games], it should be in your head. It should be going through your own filter of morality. The problem is when you have the game do it for you."

If we take the example we showed in the demo, there’s something going on here, I can go investigate. This guy is a recidivist rapist and this guy is an honest blue collar guy and he’s going to kill him, because he’s raped his wife. Or did he? Because he actually only sniffed that out in a text [message]. So maybe actually he didn’t. He’s guilty as suspected? That’s a moral question.

On this topic alone on the team, we’ve had arguments. One of the guys was saying it’s too obvious he’s guilty, that’s not fun anymore. I’m like, Why? Because the guy suspects him? He’s necessarily guilty? I don’t agree. And then our writer is like, ‘Even if he is, I would intervene.’ So now we have three different moral stances on an action.

Me: You said that, after that moment, the player would deal with the consequences, and I thought, what is he talking about? Consequences? The game is fake, it’s virtual. There’s no actual consequence. A person didn’t just kill another person.

Guay: Of course.

Me: So what in your mind are the consequences of letting that happen?

Guay: There’s a few layers to it. I was talking about how people will try to optimize based on results, and I think, as soon as we go there, we’re kind of losing things.

Me: Right. So the consequences shouldn’t be score.

Guay: Yeah, exactly, but we have a layer… I’ve been challenged on that. ‘Yeah, but you give points for reputation. Isn’t that exactly the same thing?’ Not really. It’s not like we’re trying to get you to become either black or white. It’s mostly about giving you a reflection of what you did. It’s mostly about taking a mirror up and saying, ‘This is what you did, are you happy with what you did?’ And, yes. there will be an echo of what you did, but it’s not like, ‘Oh, cool, now I’m able to do triple jumps.’ It will mostly be done to give you a feedback loop. Now, what are the consequences? For us it should be what’s going through your head.

"It’s mostly about taking a mirror up and saying, ‘This is what you did, are you happy with what you did?’"

Honestly, the first time I played that little thing there I didn’t feel right when the guy got killed. And that’s me. Maybe another guy would be like, ‘Yahhh.’ That, for us, is the first win for us. We have the player reacting to what happened…

Me: The consequence is what you feel in your gut.

Guay: Yes, and I would counter-argument to your point, if you’re not engaged in the game, if you’re not immersed and don’t care, then why are you playing it? Gamers actually are engaged in what they do. We’re trying hard to make the game look good and be realistic, but, honestly, you could get engaged with something that is cartoonish.

Me: We’re engaged and we’re not. When [Colin was playing the game] I highly doubt he felt, when he was playing it—I don’t feel this way when I’m playing a shooter—like I’m killing those people or wondering if they deserved to be killed by me. In some ways, you’re trying to shift the degree to which I take the game seriously from the gunfight which I saw just a minute ago in the demo where you’re not asking me to think about consequences—I don’t think, not severely—and then having the moment with the recidivist rapist, you are hoping I’ll feel something in my gut.

Guay: It is true that there are moments in the game where when you want to engage in a gameplay activity, you don’t want to continuously try to judge what the hell is going on. There are certain areas where we are trying to focus more on this particular topic. I’ll agree with that. But just the way we treat police is somewhat similar. It feels wrong to kill police in Watch Dogs. Honestly, we were debating with that for a while, but when you do it, you feel, that’s wrong, because the guy doesn’t go bleep-bloop-bloop and out pops 5XP and so we did playtests and people don’t do it. They don’t shoot back at cops.

Me: Why do you think it is like that in Watch Dogs?

"It feels wrong to kill police in Watch Dogs. We did playtests and people don’t do it. They don’t shoot back at cops."

Guay: It’s a question of tone and the fantasy you are going for. Our fantasy is being a vigilante. From the get-go. We try within what we think is fun to have a relatively serious tone about how we treat things. This kind of creates a context for when I’m playing Heavy Rain I feel super-sad if a character dies. That’s me, personally. If I’m playing a cartoon game, that’s more about giggles I wouldn’t care. I think the tone has a huge impact…

Me: Right. I don’t feel bad for the Goombas in Mario when I step on them.

Guay: Yeah, exactly.

Me: What is it about the cops? You’re saying it’s because they don’t leave stuff behind?

Guay: No, that’s a simple way to illustrate it. Also, like, they hurt. We want you to realize…

Me: How do they hurt? Do they animate?

Guay: You’ll see that they’re in pain. They’ll ask for help. The other cops are going to say, ‘Cop down! Cop down!’ and you’ll feel the panic in their voice. And then you’ll see your heat going up and eventually you’ll see the feedback from the city itself. The media reports on it. They’ll say there’s a cop killer in the street. That’s you and we’re going to put a feedback loop in it. You saw how someone announced you to the cops because something happened.

There’s also a point where you start doing things as a more balanced vigilante that measures the collateral damage of his actions. And at some point if you run and you have your gun out and if someone sees it , [they’ll say] ‘My god, he has a weapon!’ And then he starts calling the cops and then says, ‘Oh, it’s him, I won’t call the cops. Go ahead, go ahead, I’ll cover for you.’ Because he has a good reputation. It’s not a game-changer, but it’s a little something. Yeah, now I’m cool, now they like me.

"There’s also a point where you start doing things as a more balanced vigilante that measures the collateral damage of his actions."

Me: When I was watching the E3 demo, I was Tweeting…

Guay: Everyone was [laughs]

Me: The person next to me was doing the work of liveblogging! The demo was long. We didn’t know what the game was when it started. It was intriguing and there was hacking and, I thought, this is great. I haven’t seen anything like this. And I said on Twitter that there were no guns in here…and people started responding really positively to that on Twitter. It was going on like that and then after he got out of the nightclub to the intersection he took out a gun. And there was sort of a groan on Twitter back to me when I said he had a gun.

The hacking stuff there looks totally fresh and innovative and all that. The gun stuff looks so much more conventional. I’m curious if you guys sense that divide internally. Did you consider doing the game with just hacking and no guns?

Guay: Yeah, so those discussions existed in the first months when we were crafting the vision and deciding how far we should go in terms of the various tools the players can use. Now, guns exist and they are a pretty efficient tool to deal with certain situations. If we don’t want to have guns, in a sense, it would almost be an effort in the sense that you can hack into anything, you can buy stuff, but you can’t use weapons, ok, sure. People shoot at you, you can’t shoot back.

Me: That would feel artificial.

Guay: In a sense it is and we felt it. We could still do it, but in reality we said let’s support all the player’s styles instead. There are many players who want to use weapons obviously. They want to use guns.

Me: Yeah, of course.

Guay: So how can we do something special while still doing something that’s been more done, let’s say. One of the ways is that we always want to combine something that’s more of a known mechanic with hacking. It’s also true with driving. We’re not the only game with driving, but the fact that you can hack while driving…

Me: …that looked cool, the grates are going up as you’re driving…

Guay: Yes, it’s a new thing with driving and we’re doing the same thing with …[Guay pauses and realizes what he’s about to tell me wasn’t shown in the demo the developers had just done] ...when he goes to the roof there are air vents and he could have hacked the air vents and now he’s made cover for himself. You could just as well hack that vent for cover and use it to stealth your way through.

We did a playtest a while ago [of a hub area in the game], and it was a guy it was his first time with Watch Dogs with a controller in his hand and he did the whole thing without killing a single guy there. It was his first time, so I was pretty impressed. He knew he had weapons. We’d shown him in tutorials. He didn’t use guns. He sneaked his way in. He managed to get down to the console and then get out of there without being seen, didn’t shoot a single bullet. I think he didn’t even take a guy down. That’s great. I’ll be honest with you, there are points where the game will force gunfights. I don’t think it’ll be possible to go through a game without shooting a bullet, but if you want to play it that way, you’ll be able to do many, many of the challenges that way.

Me: You mentioned that you can have IEDs (roadside bombs). You’re in an American city. In the real world, Boston just happened. You’re trying to give players a fantasy. You’re giving them rules and making them know it’s a video game. But I’ve got to say that the last thing I want to do in a video game now is put an IED on the side of a city street, so…

You mentioned that you can have IEDs (roadside bombs). You’re in an American city. The last thing I want to do in a video game these days is put an IED on the side of a city street.

Guay: Don’t do it.

Me: Is that event affecting what you guys are putting in the game or how you’re presenting that aspect of the game? It feels more uncomfortable than it would have felt a couple of months ago.

Ubisoft PR woman: It’s a work of fiction. I’m going to step in here for that. And so we can give you just to let you know that it is a work of fiction, just like movies, books and other entertainment properties.

Me: I would ask a filmmaker and an author the same question…

PR: And our thoughts and prayers go out to the families who are affected. And that’s all we’re going to say about this at that time.

[Note from Stephen: Things got a bit awkward here. I understood why the PR person had stepped in. They didn’t want their game tied to a national tragedy, and, really, there’s not a real connection there. Games take years to make. The plans to craft this Aiden Pearce adventure were hatched years before the recent bombings in Boston. The new game doesn’t encourage you to kill civilians, and yet I’d like to think that creative people can discuss influences and anxieties. As you’ll see, Guay did answer my question. Was I off-base or out-of-line? I don’t think so. After my preview of the game was published, I saw comments on Kotaku and Facebook. One stated: “I don't know about you guys, but isn't it usually the bad guys that go around using IEDs to blow up police cars on a crowded street?” Back to Guay…]

Guay: OK. I’ll say this. I’ll say this. We’re making a game where you’re a vigilante. That’s the core of our intent, right? And that’s what we’re focused on. A vigilante is a guy who delivers his own brand of justice, right? That’s what we’re doing.

If I interpret your question, I wouldn’t want to play a guy who is out there to create chaos and hurt people, well, I agree. That’s not what we’re trying to do. I think there are other games out there that try to do that, but that’s not what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to make a game where you play a vigilante.

It’s always a fact that a player could interpret what’s in the game, but that’s in his head. What are his intents while doing that? Right now, Aiden is trying to impose justice on people and corruption in the city. That’s his intent, so we’re really talking about, if you want to make it simple, a super-hero is who you are playing.

I guess you could take any entertainment, say even Batman and say, he’s a bad guy, depending on how you spin it. I think that’s why [the Ubisoft PR rep is] nervous, also, because we all know how people want to do things like that, especially with video games. It’s the new heavy metal. I remember when I was a kid, Dungeons & Dragons was [supposedly] satanic. This is the same thing. But you know we live in this world as developers, as you do, where obviously we’re affected by things like that. Of course.

Well, that was all quite something, wasn’t it? It’s the kind of thing that makes me excited to play a game. I like hearing about games that have been designed to buck convention, and I like the idea of games that will acknowledge and indulge in the uncomfortable rather than rely on the coziness of power fantasy.

I’m not convinced that a game like Watch Dogs can deliver the weighty sense of ethical consequence that its creators are trying for, but I’ll be hoping it does. Of all things, I want Watch Dogs to make me uncomfortable. I want to play a game that makes me feel something in my gut.