Bow Street Runner

Preliminary Game Analysis

Bow Street Runner is a game produced by a small indepdendent company as a commission for Channel 4, a British television station, to promote their historical fiction series City Of Vice. The game (and series) focus on mid-1700s London, and center around the creation of the Bow Street Runners, the first government-funded police-like force.

The game has the player walk through solving a series of murder cases as a Runner, with an interface generally somewhat similar to Myst (click-exploring), but with a more restrictive set of choices, plus smaller tasks which vary but whose interface frequently bears resemblance to Trauma Center (one of the mini-tasks is in fact suturing the stab wounds of a potential murder victim).

One facet of this game which strikes a bizarre contrast with other games we have studied this semester is the balance between winning and failing. The game consists of five 'episodes,' each of which is one case (though they intertwine quite a bit). Each episode plays a short introduction, then places the player at one scene. There are a certain number of tasks to be performed at each site, some of which are optional and not ultimately useful. The others are considered required (gathering specific evidence or listening to witnesses), and the game does not permit you to leave one scene until all required tasks there are complete. The game does not allow you to shoot yourself in the foot and completely miss a piece of information you will need later. In addition to this, the game itself provides very clear hints of what needs to be done at each scene; clicking the question mark box at any time presents a box giving a number of hints about tasks to do. At the end of each episode, after following the trail and gathering evidence, you must present your case to a magistrate to acquire a warrant for an arrest. You are asked a series of questions, and asked to place pieces of paper representing people and evidence into an evidence box to answer or support an answer to each question. You may answer incorrectly 4 times before you have "failed" and are scolded by your superior. However, if you fail to get a warrant, street justice takes its toll, or the criminal simply disappears, and you progress to the next episode regardless. Even the minigames cannot truly be failed. One example is the several instances where the player is expected to pickpocket evidence or keys from unaware suspects. Failed attempts either have the character say "Hey!" and then turn back around, or get up and help you in the door you wanted to get through to begin with.

We have discussed things such as rhetoric of failure, where the impossibility of winning, or the inability to progress in any meaningful way are the author's method of making a point. However, you cannot lose this game except by inaction. In fact there is only one episode (the last, produced some time after the first four) in which you can die, in a brief gun fight. And even this death is not meaningful, as after a couple deaths one has essentially memorized the locations of enemies, and can simply shoot them in the order they appear. There is no limit to the number of times one can die and restart right at that shootout. There is no meaningful penalty for dying. So even the one place where you can die doesn't actually contribute to any sort of loss.

This has interesting tie-ins with the narration of the game. As one might expect of a commissioned game about the first police force, the game casts the player as a rising hero. The dialog in the game makes frequent praise of law enforcement. The final line of the game when you "win" is that "the future of the Bow Street Runners was assured, and with it, the fate of London," implying that London had no future without law enforcement. This and other lines, along with the inability to fail, carry a heavy "inevitable triumph of justice" message.

Another interesting aspect of the highly restricted game play is the moral implications. When talking to uncooperative subjects, you are often given the choice of taking some agreeable demeanor (sympathetic, charming, etc.), or being harsh. But being polite frequently fails (perhaps a smaller scale rhetoric of failure), and the game disables that option, leaving only harsh conversation. Frequently this also fails, and the only remaining choice of action becomes either 'slap' or 'punch.' At one point, while interrogating an arson suspect, there's a good 5 minutes where the only action you can take is to punch the suspect in the face. Eventually he gives up information, but only after you've punched him in the face about a dozen times while he's shackled in a chair. This is considered the correct course of action.

This game is intended to be relatively true to the time period, so much of this the authors would likely attribute to that. However the extent to which these things are drawn out suggest the authors had other influences as well. This of course does not even begin to tackle some of the other non-gameplay aspects of the game, as the games female cast contains exactly one grieving widow, and all other women in the game are prostitutes (the first episode uses the word 'harlot' more times in an hour of play than I think I've ever heard used in any context before).