It gives you everything you need to know and then challenges you to win. It's also an amazing competitive game, beautifully designed, but it's all messy and full of probabilities, whereas Go is this crystalline thing. It's one of those high-end competitive games, like Chess, and at the other end of the spectrum is something like hold 'em Poker. Hecker loves this game, even if it isn't necessarily the game he thought he was making when he began. And he certainly is interested – at several points during our conversation he sounds more like a fan describing a game that he's discovered and fallen in love with than a person who's spent years working on specific problems and recreating the game, visually and otherwise.
The Go/Poker analogy isn't perfect but it says a lot about Hecker's approach to design, and why SpyParty has remained interesting to him for so long. Two players, then, one trying to carry out espionage missions at a crowded party, while the other tries to identify them by looking for behaviours that mark them as a devious human rather than an AI character. If you don't know what SpyParty is, you would be wise to read this early hands-on preview but Pip also summed it up rather splendidly: " reverse Turing test of a game where you have to disappear into a party of AI characters, dodging suspicion as a fellow player armed with a single sniper bullet scans for tells". I realised part of the way through that SpyParty is more like Poker.” Embracing what the game is rather than what he originally wanted it to be has been key to the whole process. “I wanted to make Go, but then I realised I was making a different kind of game. Some developers want to move from one project to the next, an internal clock ticking down and reminding them how few ideas can be realised in a lifetime, while others are better suited to exploring one design from as many angles as possible, pushing every aspect to its limits. Chris Hecker has been working on SpyParty for almost a decade now and I get the impression he'd be happy perfecting it for the rest of his career.
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