Patrick K Mills

One of my goals in my zone was to try and present the player with two different "greater goods". Essentially the old railroad ethics question, but with a twist. You are near the fork in a railroad. Aways from you there are five men working on track A, while one man works on track B, they all have ear protection on and can't hear the incoming train or your shouts. You look at the switch in the fork and realize that the train will soon arrive and take fork A, killing five men. You have the chance to divert the train to track B, but then you have taken responsibility for killing the one man. Is it justified to do so? Most people say yes, studies show that 90% of people polled are willing to pull the lever. But then there is a more complex take on the question. In this one, you are on an overpass looking down on a trainyard. Five men are working on a track, and up the way a train is heading towards them. There is no way for them to get out of the way in time and you are nowhere near a switch to divert the train. The conductor has spotted them and hit the brakes, but it's not going to be enough- the train is still going to hit the five men unless something heavy can be put on the tracks to slow it down. You look around- nothing. Nothing except a fellow onlooker who happens to be, ahem, very large. With a hefty push you could toss him down to the track below, saving the five men. Do you do it? Polls show that only 10% of respondents say yes, even though it's the same math.

I don't know if that's really the tone of the game, it's certainly not that dour. I mean, fundamentally it's a game about shooting people in the face and stealing bombs and making deals with murderers. Virtually all games we play are, dare I use the phrase, murder simulators. That doesn't mean that they need to be stupid or encourage violence, or can't use virtual violence in the service of a greater virtual good. But I'm getting off subject. Some of my inspirations for my section of the game, (which has, last I heard, gone to Brian Newland, who is a fantastic designer,) were the ignored warnings of Eisenhower and the teachings (or interpretations of the teachings) of Leo Strauss. You could say that my section of the game is ironically dedicated to William Kristol. I don't know if that will be conveyed by the final product or not, but I hope so. At the very least I think the game is going to be a lot of fun to play.

Yeah it's a good gig. <boom>

A couple of my major inspirations while working on my section of the game (which may or may not change substantially now that I'm no longer there, but I think they will turn out well.) http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9743.htm http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=the+...l=en&emb=0# http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9219858826421983682 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0365737/ OK, so the last three aren't reading, but damn are they good. Plus The Power of Nightmares uses music from Brian Eno and the theme from Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion.

Emphasis fixed.

Even being a rogue spy, it's not like bullets are hard to come by. It's not a survival horror game, the stores are still open for business.

Thanks! I hope you like Alpha Protocol. It's not, as they say, "a spiritual successor" or anything like that, but playing it does tend to remind me of AQ2 in some ways, particularly in weapon design and the cinematic* feel we're aiming for with our firefights. *For those of you who know how much I hate applying this word to video-games, I just want to remind you that I'm invoking Action Quake 2, the original "cinematic**" shooter, so I'm allowed to make an exception. **Tied with Goldeneye by one month.

this is the deafening silence of information control

I was a designer and member of the core team on Action Quake 2, not AHL. I did some of the initial design for AHL, but was on my way to university and didn't have time for much modding anymore.

Babelfish, apparently. The devil is more trustworthy than automated translators.

The American dollar may be low but it hasn't affected the price of consumer goods as far as I've noticed. Zimbabwe-eque or not I still get all my games at $40-50. Bread may be $10,000 a loaf, but that's only because I shop at Whole Foods.

Are those Zimbabwean dollars? I've never paid for a computer or console game that was more than $65 unless it was a special edition.

Sooo... it's a space station?

It's a space station?

That is, in fact, the desk of a sociopath.