Why Every Spy Game Should Force You to Fail (And Why They Don't)

007 First Light is right around the corner, and with any luck, it will be a revitalizing, seminal entry in the spy game space. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that spy games are a genre unto themselves; they are more like subsets of various genres, mainly action and stealth. But who knows, maybe 007 First Light will change that.

The stealth-action sandbox of First Light will be especially interesting to watch unfold. IO Interactive’s portfolio is primarily composed of Hitman games, which generally provide a very different sort of espionage experience: Agent 47 is, canonically at least, a tactical mastermind, able to orchestrate complex Rube-Goldberg-esque death traps when he needs to. James Bond, while often not a very complex character, features in more dynamic stories in which he doesn’t always have the upper hand. After all, what fun is a James Bond film without a 2nd act low point? For all his competence, Bond isn’t always on top, and this narrative back-and-forth is something missing from a lot of traditional spy-type video games.

Best Spy Espionage Games

Espionage has become one of the most popular and notable video game genres over the past few decades. Here are some of the best ones available.

The Importance of Failure, and How Spy Games Use Power Fantasies as a Narrative Crutch

Think of any James Bond movie–there’s probably a scene where the enemy gets the better of him, via capture, poison, injury, et cetera. For my money, at least two of the most iconic scenes from the Daniel Craig Bond films involve him being tied to a chair. There’s a fairly pedestrian reason why such scenes recur so often: presenting a hero with a new challenge, one greater than those that they’ve previously overcome with ease, creates tension, and entertainment value is a byproduct of that.

Rearrange the covers into the correct US release order.

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Analyzing this convention through the lens of spy video games reveals a common shortcoming of the video game medium. That is, video games tend to facilitate power fantasies, especially as a reward for mastering their mechanics. For instance, experienced Splinter Cell players can breeze through a level without ever alerting the enemy to their presence. Getting caught is considered a fail state, or at the very least, a sign of sub-optimal performance. It can be fun to improvise after getting spotted, certainly, but said improvisation is always done with the express intent of evading enemy capture. But what can spy games look like when they do make the player fail, and is it worth robbing them of agency for the sake of storytelling?

How Spy and Stealth Games Can Force the Player to Fail, in a Good Way

When I think of spy games that feature failure as more than a game-over state, my mind immediately jumps to the Metal Gear Solid franchise. Those games will often feature the player-character getting captured by the enemy, like when Naked Snake is captured near the midpoint of Metal Gear Solid 3, or how Solid Snake is captured and tortured in the first Metal Gear Solid. These instances serve as set pieces and can be mechanically interesting. However, they are still scripted and limited to specific story instances, rather than being organic parts of the gameplay.

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Maybe this is the best way to do it. After all, the main strength of “failure scenes” in movies like James Bond is how they serve as a low point in a typical three-act story, so an intentional, scripted capture or torture scene makes sense in a video game counterpart. But is this making full use of the interactive medium’s potential? Video games’ strength lies in their dynamic nature, so perhaps more spy games should strive for the unpredictable and multifaceted capture systems of, say, The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim. In this way, players could actually better exercise the elite espionage fantasy that spy games provide, as they would have to find their way out of seemingly impossible situations, just like a legendary spy would.