The unintentional hidden brilliance of System Shock’s interface
Have you tried playing a PC game from the nineties recently? I won’t blame you if you haven’t, since a lot of them were written in ancient primitive tongues for machines that struggled to count to sixteen, but even when Good Old Games work their magic and make ageing games palatable to your fussy modern operating system, there are more than a couple of barriers to entry. Your game could be locked to a resolution in completely the wrong aspect ratio, or could have an archaic numpad-focussed control scheme ostensibly designed for somebody with an extra arm, or could be packed with agonisingly awful FMVs full of the developers’ family members wearing whatever they could find in the bargain bin at the costume shop. The one common feature I hear complained about the most, though—and totally sympathise with, I mean—is interfaces. Yes, interfaces; hideous, over-designed, clunky mouse-driven monstrosities that have about as much respect for screen real-estate as a colony of ants does for an abandoned raspberry tart. Anything with complex functionality tended to follow this trend, with RPGs and strategy games as the worst offenders, and no game was quite as emblematic of this problem as the original System Shock: a cluttered dogpile of multi-functional panels and cryptic buttons that felt less like an FPS and more like a very squishy mech simulator. Nevertheless, System Shock is a special case; one where the interface actually elevates the experience, rather than detracting from it.
Let’s be honest with ourselves here for a moment: for all its groundbreaking brilliance in the field of immersive sims, System Shock is still about as generic nineties cyberpunk as it gets. All the boxes are ticked: artificial intelligence, shadowy megacorporations, transhumanism, nauseating low-poly wireframe cyberspace, and of course, reclusive young men typing at ludicrous speeds into parser terminals. It is Neuromancer with text logs and crap CGI, and there’s nothing wrong with that either, but with that kind of thematic background comes a very particular view of technology, borne out of extrapolating the computing systems of the time a decade or so into the future. Snow Crash envisioned the Gargoyles; a subculture of people near-perpetually jacked into cyberspace with the help of heavy, unwieldy full-body wearables, and while the present is notably devoid of quad-core hyperthreaded fanny packs, we do have other kinds of monstrosities, like Google Glass. It was Neuromancer that pinned down the concept of cyberspace decks, and let’s not forget, this was the era when people were desperately pushing VR despite the ideas being at least two decades ahead of the blurry, rubberised, cable-ridden reality. The point is that System Shock shared much of its vision of the future with works like these; a vision where computers have grown only marginally less bulky and impractical, but have nevertheless been made absurdly ubiquitous.
This is where we come up against System Shock’s opening sequence. You are a nameless hacker—a real hacker, I mean, not a teenager who goes on sketchy forums and asks how to DDOS their big cousin’s Minecraft server—who’s been caught trying to access TriOptimum’s files and has made a deal with one of the company’s major execs, granting them backdoor access to SHODAN in exchange for a military-grade neural implant. The exact specifications of this implant are left up to the player’s imagination, but our hacker is prepared to get his hands incredibly dirty and then sleep in a tube for six months to get it plugged into his brain, so it is presumably some pretty phenomenal shit. Then you get into the game proper, and are greeted with… this shit.
To a modern player like you or I, accustomed to professionally crafted interfaces designed to translate our abstract intentions to in-game actions as smoothly and painlessly as possible, this is like heading out to work in the morning only to discover that your car’s dashboard has been replaced with half a UNIVAC console. Why are all these panels on-screen at once? What are these tabs for? What do these buttons on the side do? Should I toggle that thing? Why does clicking on that also change that? You mean I have to unhook my mouse from the movement controls every time I want to change anything? Even in fullscreen mode, which at least lets you play the game without a letterbox jammed on your head, it still feels as if you’re communicating with the game via a system that was designed on the same principles as Office 97. Everything from inventory management to reloading to opening your map is needlessly fiddly, and you’re going to die at least a couple of times because you clicked on the wrong thing and threw your weapon on the ground instead of snapping a new magazine into it. Obviously most people are going to interpret this as a bad thing, but that’s predicated on two big assumptions: first, that the interface is something external to the game’s context, and second, that interfaces are only there to efficiently facilitate what we want to do.
Let’s tackle the first. This is one of those crucial questions that crops up a lot when people start discussing immersion: is our view of the world identical to that of the player character? In the case of, say, Metroid Prime, the answer is ‘yes’, because everything in the in-game interface—the HUD, the map, menus—is a function of Samus’s power suit, while in the case of something like Ultima Underworld, the answer is ‘probably not’. System Shock, interestingly, is something of an ambiguous case, but I’d like to propose that the answer is also ‘yes’. Suppose that the overdesigned, clunky, user-unfriendly display you see isn’t just a graphic designer not knowing when to stop, but is actually part of the neural implant; the specky piece of coveted hardware that got soldered to the inside of your character’s skull six months ago. When System Shock’s interface is viewed as an in-universe feature, rather than an abstract device, a lot of things start to make more sense. Why does it feel like you’re wrestling with a piece of horribly-designed software with no concept of a good user experience? Simply put, because that’s exactly what it is: a tool made for the utilitarian rigours of the military, barely tested, and about as user-friendly as a bear-trap trampoline. More importantly, this is utilitarian software as envisioned by System Shock’s cyberpunk world: something that takes all the technology trends of the time and imagines a future where they go off the goddamn rails. All the bad design decisions of early nineties software have been bundled up into something that’s futuristic and alien, but at the same time, heavily reminiscent of panel-based MS-DOS utilities and early window managers. System Shock’s interface is clumsy and impractical because that’s what the sci-fi lens through which it is viewed dictates. “This is what it’s like to have the raddest piece of decker tech in the cyberverse grafted to your wetware” says the game with an air of unshakeable coolness, as you poke cluelessly at your inventory tabs. “Deal with it, script kiddie.”
And in a way, dealing with it is an integral part of the game. The thing about adversity is that we only expect it to come from outside, not from the systems that enable us to play the game in the first place. It’s much more acceptable for a game to be difficult because of its encounter design than, say, its controls, because we see controls as a basic service from the developer to us, and being obstructed by things external to the game’s fantasy world just strains the connection between us and the player character. You wouldn’t accept an enemy design that intentionally tanks the framerate whenever it’s on-screen, even though that could be a legitimately interesting challenge. This is why it’s crucial that System Shock’s interface is an in-universe representation of your hacker’s augmented view: because it means it no longer has the unwritten responsibility to make your user experience as smooth and painless as possible; it can be a genuine obstacle in itself. Awakening from the recovery coma fresh as a daisy, all geared up and ready to take on the hordes of mutants, cyborgs, and carnivorous vacuum cleaners? How pedestrian. Stumbling out of the medical unit with a head full of unfamiliar hardware you’ve lost the manual to and have no idea how to use? Now that’s an interesting setup. Getting familiar with the clunky heads-up display is a vital part of the learning experience, as much as feeling out the range of the lead pipe or working out what enemies are weak to bullets. You learn techniques, skills, shortcuts, and while the interface’s inherent design means that you’ll never reach the level of efficiency offered by, for example, a hotbar, you can certainly become a better neural implant operator. Countless games have you grow in skill by mastering combat mechanics, or movement physics; System Shock just throws a bit of grappling with a retro-futuristic operating system into its mix.
There’s more to the interface’s inherent limitations than just propping up the learning curve, though. What distinguishes a survival horror game from a game that’s merely horror-themed? Common sense would dictate that being forced to conserve resources—like ammo and health—would be fairly high on the list, but if stingy item placement was all there was then you could probably get such an experience just by cranking the difficulty up. Much more significant is the practice of making the player character feel vulnerable. While I’ve never really bought the idea that Silent Hill ‘needed’ crap controls to make the combat a clumsy panicked struggle for survival, there’s no denying that they helped solidify the feeling of being a hopeless nobody desperately swinging a big stick at twitching, twisted monstrosities from the Other Side. Amnesia might have jump-started an entire subgenre of one-dimensional spook-em-ups where your only means of dealing with enemies is to run and hide in a pantry for ten minutes, but the lack of reassuring heavy weaponry protruding from the bottom right hand corner of the screen definitely accentuated the crushing sense of defenselessness, at least for a little bit (@ForgetAmnesia on Twitter recently took a much more nuanced peek down this particular rabbit hole in his video, “Why Horror is Scarier With Weapons”). System Shock’s interface is just another approach to vulnerability: one that leaves you frequently hindered as you rummage through your possessions, slow to perform simple tasks like applying first aid, and often outright distracted because something started blinking at an inconvenient time. Your weakness is not due to tank controls, or weedy arms, but TriOptimum’s lousy QA testing.
Was any of this intentional, or merely a product of its time? Probably the latter; even the main creator of System Shock’s interface, a chap called Marc LeBlanc, later denounced it as too complicated, calling it “the Microsoft Word school of user interface”—which was probably a far sicker burn in nineteen ninety-something when observational statements like “Microsoft’s software isn’t very good, actually” still had a hint of freshness about them—although System Shock 2 retained the idea of needing to fiddle around with your cyber-rig’s mouse-driven panels to get anywhere, so the principle, at least, was deemed worth keeping.
With the passage of time and the ravages of late-2000s game design, though, I fear that people are too busy sneering at clumsy, overcomplicated interfaces as a mark of studios that can’t hire turtleneck-wearing UX managers to stop and wonder if maybe there’s value in this sort of approach. The remake’s Kickstarter is rocketing towards the millionaire barrier even as I write this, and yes, the demo is a lovely reinterpretation of the game in many ways, but in other ways it feels too clean, too refined. You get a nice little animation of the hacker plugging the little cyber-modules into their head and you just know that if you ever come across a mirror you’ll find a visage that’s more semiconductor than skin, yet everything from the HUD to the inventory to the log is the same muted, minimalist, translucent shapes out of some generic sci-fi shooter. Isn’t that a bit ill-fitting? Don’t give me the interface of a game, Nightdive Studios; game interfaces—in all but the worst-case scenarios—are slick and convenient and always striving to encircle the experience, rather than being an active part of it. Make the interface a hazard in its own right. Give me the interface of a crude, poorly thought-out software package, developed by a faceless megacorporation in a world where ethics mean nothing and technology is going down a dark and dangerous path.
If you need inspiration, might I suggest the Twitter client?
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