Trope-A-Dope
Our latest Inventory tackled the subject of the silly explanations games have given for the x-ray vision modes that have been popping up in everything from the new Tomb Raider to Assassin’s Creed. Skipskatte offered up a reason for why this has become so common:
Developers have pretty much figured out after years of trying that using other senses besides sight for something vital in video games is a lost cause. Unless you have a perfectly calibrated surround-sound system, you’re not going to be able to use sound the way you do in the real world. We feel vibrations. We have close to a 180-degree field of vision. If the game requires that you do any more than run around gunning people down, you need a way to “sense” through walls and around corners.
Caspiancomic agreed about the origin of this design element but thinks it might have gone too far:
I think this trope was definitely born under these conditions, but like a lot of modern conventions, it has become a crutch for developers. I feel like a lot of the more “coddling” elements in modern games began life as an attempt to give the player a leg-up in otherwise insurmountable situations, but they have since become codified ideas in their own right and inserted into games whether or not they really belong there. Not to mention the fact that “cheats” like x-ray specs are, while frequently legitimate solutions to in-game problems, occasionally just shortcuts to cover up bad design. See also: quick time events, always-on invasive hint systems, automatically recovering health, etc.
One of the entries on our list was the Dark Vision in Dishonored, a power gifted to the main character by a mysterious deity known as The Outsider. As the entry noted, activation of this power is accompanied by an unintelligible incantation. Billy Madison shared one interpretation of these strange words:
I loved Dishonored so much that I played it twice, and I never figured out what that Dark Vision noise is. I decided that it sounded like “huge thighs,” and that The Outsider is a fat-shamer.
Elsewhere in the comments, posters discussed the peculiarity that is the third-person perspective, where your viewpoint hovers at or above the character’s shoulders. GaryX brought up the explanation that Super Mario 64 gave for this view: “a floating Lakitu reporter.” Fyodor Douchetoevsky expanded on that idea a bit:
Oh man, I never thought of him as a reporter. I guess he’s like a war correspondent documenting all the crimes Mario is committing against the glorious Koopa Kingdom. Dark.
And with that, GaryX was inspired to create this behemoth of a post: