Can't you tell I like stealth games?
- Arthur Audren de Kerdrel
- 15 avr. 2023
- 12 min de lecture
Dernière mise à jour : 19 nov. 2023
Essay Research for the 'Understanding Gaming Experience'.
You can find the full essay here:
Editor's note: Also using this as games design research!
I have a certain attachement to stealth games, from Metal Gear Solid 3, to Dishonored 2, much of my time in games has either been playing some overly complex roleplaying game like Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pillars of Eternity or skulking around elaborately put levels, assassinating and thieving my way through metric tons of content. In fact, most games I have finished happen to be of the stealth genre.
It would appear natural, therefore, for me to eventually do or write something around the stealth genre as a whole. So, I knew my question was going to revolve around something I found particularly interesting was how the stealth genre conveys its atmosphere and information to the player. At first the question wasn’t necessarily obvious to me, but I had a habit of watching documentaries and making of videos of games like Mark of the Ninja, and Dishonored. Most notably, this one:
Funnily enough I had never been interested in Mark of the Ninja prior to watching this video, most of my stealth experiences had been along the lines of Hitman, Assassin’s Creed or Dishonored. I thought it would be interesting to discuss how this game and another (which I had no yet decided) would convey the sensation of being a stealthy assassin and rogue.
The problem was that Mark of the Ninja was a topic that many people had already dissected and examined to the point I would be hard pressed to find anything new to say about the game. It is largely recognised as the model 2D stealth game, and has since then proved to be crucial for any other stealth game since.
Feeling like I needed to use a game that provided a similarly niche level of detail and reputation, I discovered Thief: The Dark Project. I had heard of it before, of course, but never truly taken a proper look at it. Again, my main method of research for these games was video essays, documentaries and reviews.
With both games identified, I’ll give a quick once over of each game, some history behind the developers, and why I chose them.
Thief: The Dark Project

Garret, Thief’s protagonist, overlooks the City.
Thief was published in 1998, and developed by Looking Glass Games for Microsoft Windows. Its influence can be felt across the stealth genre to this day having inspired, most notably, the Dishonored series. Despite its age, I believe it remains a viable experience to this day, and likely presents a far more unique experience than some of the stealth games nowadays.
Some have called Thief an immersive sim, where the objective is to become the epitome of a thieving rogue: Garrett. I tend to agree towards this statement, more on this later. Our avatar and protagonist of the game is a master thief who works independently. He’s a loner, trained by the Keepers, but has long since abandoned them to pursue his own interests.
The most attractive thing about the protagonist is his simplicity. Garrett steals valuables to pay rent, nothing more and nothing less. Nevertheless, he becomes a magnet for trouble due to his special skill set; the story goes from a grounded heist for a jewelled scepter, to supernatural cults looking to dominate Garrett’s home city without ever losing sight of its key core fantasy.
An essential part of Thief with regards to our purposes, is the immersive sim facet of the game. The game doesn’t try to be anything else but what’s on the tin. As a player, your job is to sneak through various locales, looking to pilfer from them a key artifact as well as amassing as much gold as possible to pay for your tools in the next job.
In this respect, these tools are limited, costly, and usually help you getting out of sticky situations, sneak around guards, or trap enemies rather than actively fight them face to face. Garrett is not a skilled swordsman, neither is he a resilient fellow, its best advised to run away rather than confront enemies head on as he will die rather quickly.
The difficulty of the game, and its brilliance, resides in its capacity to create an immersive experience. As a player, your best ally are shadows to hide in, and your worse enemy are tiled flooring and bright lights. Every movement and interaction with game objects has the potential creates noise. Walking on soft carpets will make no noise, whilst walking on tiling will attract attention. Drawing a sword, even in darkness, while close to guards will turn them hostile immediately.
Thief’s soundscape and lighting design are what makes the game particularly unique and an integral part of gameplay as well. You can hear the guards approaching, or leaving. You can almost map out their movements as you listen closely and in return they can hear your motions. In context of its time period, Thief was revolutionary when compared to contemporary first person action-adventure games, like Doom, System Shock and Half-Life.
Mark of the Ninja

The Ninja stands unnoticed above an idle guard.
Mark of the Ninja was published in 2012, and developed by Klei Entertainment for Microsoft Windows. Unlike other entries in the stealth genre, its perspective is that of a 2D action platformer, which already anchors it as a novelty in the genre, and in its design. Neils Anderson, the game’s lead designer, wished to convey the core player fantasy of playing a realistic Ninja. Aside from the Tenchu series, very little games had, according to him, properly conveyed the ninja archetype in a satisfactory manner.
In addition to this, the 2D nature of the game provided the player with a semi-omniscience with trivialised the game’s stealth elements, as they could see what was on the other side of a door, or through a vent. Thus, it was decided that the player’s field of view would be limited to only what was directly visible from the player’s avatar: the Ninja. In return, this created a lack of information that made playtesters and designers feel cheated. Due to the lack of vision, many interactions with guards felt cheap, playtesters did not know when they were safe, or for what reason they had alerted the enemy, which led to the key component of Mark of the Ninja: clarity.
Every interaction in Mark of the Ninja is clarified, as well as as many systems the game can afford the player to know without regressing back into that sense of omniscience. Vision cones are clearly delineated. Lighting cones are clearly shown by bright yellow cones. Sound waves are represented by ripples that carry and may interact with guards and enemies. Guard states are shown above their heads (idle -> searching -> alerted -> and on specific occassions: terrified) The trajectory of bullets are shown as well, the player’s last position after being spotted, as well as the guards’ center of interest when searching are all depicted just as clearly.
This approach to design created a particular shift in the player’s actions towards much of gameplay, and exactly what Anderson wanted out of the game itself. As a ninja, the player is a master of stealth and a silent assassin, which lead to the player interacting with enemies and environment proactively rather than reactively. Combined with the staple amount of tools and items found in many stealth games this reinforced the facsimile of playing a silent assassin, with complete mastery over their environment and adversary.
Following a presentation with tutors, I came up with two questions that would possibly be useful for this unit:
How does « Mark of the Ninja » and « Thief: the Dark Project » make use of audio and visual feedback to improve the player’s immersion?
How has player agency and freedom of gameplay influenced the development and evolution of stealth games from 1998?
As a result of discussing with my tutors, I chose the former (option 1), seeing as I had a better understanding of both games rather than the second. It was also more specific than the latter, which was encouraged.
So, following this I was given some feedback on how to make the question more concise as well as where to start from in terms of research.
Defining ‘stealth’ in a more concise manner would help narrow the question down. Did I mean a genre, a section of gameplay, or a specific mechanic? Defining ‘visual and audio’ feedback was also important. Did I mean a hud, or player mechanics? Finally defining immersion in a comprehensive manner was also crucial, seeing as its what my question banked on.
With this in mind, I set off to find some primary and secondary sources, many of which I was already familiar with before trying to detail my research question.
Fanciful Titles and Greater Understanding
After more source hunting I eventually honed the question down to the following, with a fancy title on top: “Stealth Games: Shadows and Sounds, or ‘How do stealth games make use of audio and visual cues/feedback to improve the player’s immersion'”.
The sources I found discussed at length the composition of stealth games, their general attributes as well as common systems that are found in most games. For example, many games give guards simulated ‘eyes’ and ‘ears’.
The former will make use of vision cones to spot the player within line of sight. However a single vision cone makes the AI easily exploitable, which renders them useless. As such, when dealing with vision cones many games make use of multiple cones in addition to the direct vision. For example in Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, guards have a primary sightlight, then a much wider cone to simulate peripheral vision, and finally vision cones at the back to simulate the ‘sixth-sense’ of having someone over your shoulder.
For cover scenarios, games might use raycasts instead to determine whether or not the guard can see the player. Once again, depending on the complexity of the game, guards might raycast to various body parts instead. Depending on the amount of bodyparts properly connected by the raycast, the player will be spotted.

Awareness meter in Dishonored 2
A final common factor to stealth games is an awareness meter, that makes it so players aren’t immediately spotted when they are seen by guards. Depending on the conditions in which the player finds themselves, such as being in the distance, in dim light, immobile or crouched, the enemy’s awareness meter will fill up to eventually detect the player. When this happens, guards will become alert and start searching for them, or attacking them if within direct line of sight.
Guards can also be made aware of interesting objects that tell of the player’s passing: open doors, mines, dropped objects, etc. In return, this might place the guards and enemies in a searching state until they inevitably track the player down should the latter not change position or move.
In Thief, guards can exchange information depending on what they’ve discovered. In one of my playthroughs, I had left a door openleft a door open and ignored a guard, only to find out that the NPC had communicated my actions to other patrols which led them all to remain in a curious state, swords drawn and making my playthrough a tad more difficult.

Youssef Khatib’s hearing sense diagram.
Simulating hearing becomes more difficult, however put simply: all sound in stealth games have a distance depending on the volume of said sound. Tossing a stone is going to create sound that travels less than firing a gun. Guards have a predetermined range of hearing, and should the sound waves reach that range, then they are made aware of it. Thief thrives off of its soundscape, allowing both player and guards to closely monitor each other’s movements through listening to the sounds they produce. Mark of the Ninja makes all of these typical systems clear to the player due to the 2D limitations of the medium, in an effort to reduce ambiguity and increase the clarity of how systems work.

For Thief its clearly delineated shadows and the light gem at the bottom of the screen, as well as the audio cues that are emitted by enemy NPCs and guards. Thief does keep a certain amount of ambiguity, however, which creates an air of tension and an immersive sense for the player to judge whether or not their actions will be safe. Tom Leonard, Lead Programmer, puts this as: “Its about getting the player’s heart pounding by holding them on the cusp [of being found].”

A guard is alerted to the sound of a gong behind him in Mark of the Ninja.
For Mark of the Ninja its the player’s sprite turning into its darker form when hidden in shadows, and the way systems are displayed make for a more binary perception system. If you’re in the enemy’s vision cone, you’re visible. If you’re in light, you’re visible. If you make noise, guards will be attracted to said noise. This grants the player more control over their environment, which emphasises the mastery your character is supposed to have over lowly thugs and basic guards.
Even then, handicapping awareness and detection systems is essential in order to give the player an enjoyable playthrough. Players will feel cheated if they’re noticed by a guard from the other side of the game map, even if their character is in an open field. In a sense, many stealth games push for a semi-realism that borderlines on immersive simulators more than video games.
The Tricky Thing that is Immersion
Immersion has numerous definitions depending on the context in which it is placed. Commonly known as physically immersing someone or something in a liquid (“thou hath been immers’d in oil!”). The video games industry and other entertainment industries have used this term as an analogy for being lost in an activity, like reading or writing, or in our case playing video games. So, that’s it? We’ve figured out what it means, everybody pack up and go home? Well not exactly.
A Theory of Spacial Presence, by Wirth et al. is explained in Jamie Madigan’s explanation around immersion in games through a psychological lense on Gamasutra. ‘Presence’ is just another name for ‘immersion’ albeit from a psychological point of view, and psychologists have identified multiple kinds. It is largely accepted that spatial presence is the typical version of presence that applies to video games.
Wirth’s theory explained that spatial presence happened in three steps:
* Players form a representation in their mind of the space or world with which the game is presenting them.
* Players begin to favor the media-based space (I.e., the game world) as their point of reference for where they “are”.
* Player becomes immersed in the game, sacrificing spatial awareness for their investiment into the game’s world.
The magic circle of the game becomes pervasive through various cues (sound, visual, movements, etc) and player assumptions about the game they’ve begun to play through. I’ve defined this as the (core player fantasy). When you play an adventuring game, you expect adventure. When you play a first person shooter, you expect using guns. So on and so forth.
Gordon Calleja identifies two types of immersion in his book “In-Game”: immersion through absorption and immersion through transportation. The former (absorption) is identified a the commonmost form of immersion in the video games industry, and the one Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman pointed out as ‘the immersive fallacy’ in 2003.
At the time, more performant software/hardware allowed developers to pursue photorealistic audio and graphics, which spearheaded an obsession for pushing towards such realism in games. As a counter argument to this sudden movement, Salen and Zimmerman point out that anybody can be immersed in anything without necessarily it having to be as close to realism as possible. For instance, anybody can be immersed in Tetris, which is in no way as close to realism as possible. Instead they advocated for more engaging gameplay mechanics instead.
Calleja proposes another type of immersion, which is amade available through the evolution of “virtual environements within both the humanities and presence theory.” Essentially, video games may “absorb” our attention through a specific task, but many nowadays “transport” us to a fictional game world instead.
“A player who assimilates this game world into their gameplay as a metaphorically habitable environment can be thought of as being transported to that world. This experience is made possible by the anchoring of the player to a specific location in the game world via their avatar, which the game world and its inhabitants, including other players, react to.” G. Calleja, In-Game pg 27, 2011
Basically, game worlds that do a good job at transporting their player into their fictional reality will see said players immersed into the game. But how is this done? Lazaros Michailidis, Emili Balaguer-Ballester, and Xun He in their examination of immersion, Flow and Immersion in Video games, associate immersion with the Flow state theory, claiming certain criteriae ought to be met to reach it:
merging of action and awareness;
clear goals;
immediate and unambiguous feedback;
concentration on the task;
perceived control over the activity;
loss of self-reflection;
distorted perception of time;
intrinsic motivation toward an activity
This however, is closer to immersion through absorbption than transportation. What Jamie Madigan puts forward is far more in line with what we’re attempting to define. Madigan explains there ought to be a certain richness in the feedback and information:
Multiple channels of sensory information (sight, hearing, detail, movement, etc);
Completeness of sensory information (the less the player has to fill up the better), i.e: Assassin’s Creed where city streets are full of people going about their daily lives;
Cognitively demanding environments (requires focus from the players which will emphasise their mental faculties and allocate brain power to navigating the world);
A strong and interesting narrative, plot, or story (books are capable of immersing their readers with text alone, a strong story or plot will immerse the player regardless of medium);
There are immersion breaking moments that would ruin the facsimile of player immersion: uncalled for tonal shifts in the narrative, difference in setting such as ur sci-fi elements in a heroic fantasy world, repeated reminders that the player is in a game, such as achievement pop ups, tutorial pop ups, etc.
SOURCES:
Mark of the Ninja (Klei Entertainment, 2012)
Thief: The Dark Project (Looking Glass Studios, 1998
School of Stealth, Game Maker’s Toolkit: https://youtu.be/Ay-5g36oFfc
Essential Building Blocks of Stealth Play
Flow and Immersion in Video Games: Frontiers | Flow and Immersion in Video Games: The Aftermath of a Conceptual Challenge | Psychology (frontiersin.org)
Analysis: The Psychology of Immersion in Video Games: Gamasutra – Analysis: The Psychology of Immersion in Video Games
Gordon Calleja, “In-Game: From Immersion to Incorporation”. 1st ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
How Thief’s Stealth System Almost Didn’t Work (2018) Youtube video, added by Ars Technica [Online]. Available at <https://youtu.be/qzD9ldLoc3c> [Accessed: 26th of April, 2021].
Mark of the Ninja Developer Interview with Nels Anderson of Klei Entertainment (2012) Youtube video, added by VGS – Video [Online]. Available at <https://youtu.be/tFx3sKnBaf8> [Accessed: 26th of April, 2021].
The School of Stealth (2020) Youtube video, added by Game Maker’s Toolkit [Online] Available at <https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLc38fcMFcV_s8CEnf_j1ZOu-UCTEXRAfl> [Accessed: 12th of April, 2021]
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