A Techno-thriller From The Case Files Of Max Remington

March 25, 2017 10:12 PM

What’s The Matter With Covert Action? - The Digital Antiquarian takes a look at The game which Sid Meier considers his most disappointing, and the tension between procedural generation and narrative.
posted by Artw (16 comments total)

My favorite part of Covert Action is how each plot's timeline plays out depending on who you catch and when. I've wanted to figure out how to implement something like that for a long time.
posted by lumensimus at 10:22 PM on March 25, 2017

"Covert Action for the nonce had ceased."

I suspect that reads differently in US/UK English. If not, there's a bunch of stuff wrong with the game!
posted by stanf at 1:41 AM on March 26, 2017 [3 favorites]

"Covert Action, while not a great or even a terribly good game, wasn’t an awful game either."
Them's fightin' words! Anyway, I will now read the rest of the article - thanks for pointing it out.
posted by Glow Bucket at 5:00 AM on March 26, 2017

"Although even Crawford acknowledges that “data endows a game with useful color and texture,” he fails to account for the appeal of games where that very color and texture — we might instead say the fictional context — is the most important part of the experience. He and many of his ludologist colleagues are like most ideologues in failing to admit the possibility that different people may simply want different things, in games as in any other realm."

This is perhaps being excessively ungenerous to Crawford. Let's look at my favourite games of all time, LucasArts adventures (Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, that kind of thing). Big on data intensity and static assets. Now they're wonderful - I absolutely adore them - but I don't feel like Crawford is saying they are without merit, more that their merit is not as games, which is, to an extent, fair. Monkey Island is a fantastic (interactive) carob story. But in a pure sense, it isn't much of a game, more of a linear story with a few game elements tacked to it. (Why we consider it a game for having a few game elements rather than a cartoon story for having shedloads of cartoon story elements, I don't actually know, that might be an interesting question to explore).

It's not that Crawford thinks it's worthless necessarily, just that it isn't much of a game precisely because it is much of something else (which can be good or bad or whatever, but that's orthogonal to whether or not it's good as a game).
posted by Dysk at 5:15 AM on March 26, 2017 [4 favorites]

Kind of wonder, in play action, how the "work is fun" motif CA had played out against, say, Spycraft: The Great Game (not counting the "better" graphics and FMV and such). I had and beat the second one, never had a chance to play the first one.
posted by Samizdata at 6:26 AM on March 26, 2017

This is fascinating. COVERT ACTION is one of my all-time favorite games, and I've been hoping it would get some kind up revamp or update for ages. It's a great example, IMHO, of how procedural generation can be used well.
posted by UltraMorgnus at 11:26 AM on March 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

And for the record, I think Sid Meier's explanation as to what went wrong is the correct one. I had no problem with the randomly generated missions, but I frequently recall leaving a long B&E session unable to remember what the hell my mission was in the first place.
posted by UltraMorgnus at 11:35 AM on March 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

What would you make of the counterpoint, that X-COM does the exact same thing without ill effect?
posted by Artw at 11:47 AM on March 26, 2017

MetaFilter: for the nonce had ceased.
posted by Splunge at 12:02 PM on March 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

I guess we have the answer for this question.
posted by Artw at 12:06 PM on March 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

Artw, I never really got into X-Com, so I'm not sure I can answer that other than to say I suspect part of the difference was the requirement of what you're do do with the larger-scale information you end up with. The large-scale strategy of COVERT ACTION was very complicated and required the player to remember a lot of smaller pieces on info and how they fit together. My sense of X-COM is that the larger strategy was a lot more straight-forward.

I will agree that within the randomly generated missions, seeing groups like MOSSAD used alongside terrorist groups or the mafia was jarring, but it never really bugged me as a kid. Probably because my real-world knowledge of these groups was pretty limited.
posted by UltraMorgnus at 12:25 PM on March 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

I think X-COM had the same flaw, but the tactical battles were so good it made up for it. Plus, you were trying to acquire new tech and weapons you could use in future battles. The "intercepting alien spacecraft" minigames before the battles were bloody tedious, though.

Also reading today's headlines I think CA's randomly generated alliances were just ahead of their time.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 12:52 PM on March 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

Xcom, at least the newer ones, make it very easy to catch back up with what you were doing before this mission. There are countdowns in the corner of the screen- 3 days until research on laser rifles is completed, 8 days until the foundry project is completed, 9 days until construction on the next base addition is completed, 26 days until the next council report. This almost cookie-clicker simple overall game takes a half second glance to summarize and only needs periodic inputs, which seems more straightforward than Covert Action. Sometimes in Xcom I'd come out of a mission, hit fast forward, and be back into combat a minute later (plus loading time) without any decisions made.
posted by fomhar at 3:07 PM on March 26, 2017

OMG I love this game so much.
posted by danhon at 3:19 PM on March 26, 2017

I had this game back when it came out; IIRC the easter bunny brought for me. I just reinstalled it and am playing it, and it's fun like I remember.

Sid Meier's theory that the break in minigame is so absorbing as to disrupt the larger strategic arc is off a little, I think. The problem for me isn't so much that it's too absorbing, so much as it's disconnected. You take a photo of a safe, and there's a picture of a guy, but I can never remember if it's a face I've seen before or someone new, and there's no way to check or indicate that this is a confirming bit of evidence.

What breaks the illusion of reality are the smallest procedural details. The first clue I got in the first game was that they had located a flat at ObensGrabbe 30 in Nassau, Bahamas. The first thing is this is a meaningless clue on its face - I could locate hundreds of apartments in any city in the world, and they wouldn't be relevant to a spy case. But it's also a dumb reality break that there's supposed to be a German style street in anglo Nassau. (I later also arrested someone at Webley Court 52, in Medellin.) Even in 1990, a morning at the public library and an hour of coding after lunch could have produced a set of street names that aren't so jarringly out of context.

The same thing goes for the encrypted messages - not only as the article points out are they stilted and inappropriate, but they make the decrypting minigame much easier, since everybody uses the same text. (What I do like is that it's an actual decryption - it's not some button mashing that prints out a "decrypted" message at the end, it's a ciphertext and a frequency chart and you get to decrypt it.)
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 5:11 PM on March 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

I loved covert action!
posted by heathkit at 11:17 PM on March 27, 2017