What is a Manhack?
“Station 8, do you copy? Station 8, are you there? We have confirmed reports of manhacks. Repeat: they’re filling the underground with manhacks.”
Step One: Give it a menacing name, and tell your players about it. But don’t let them see it - just let their imaginations play with it for about 10 minutes of game time.
A little later, after the player has been forced underground by the brutal firepower of a helicopter: “Get in here, hurry! Civil protection is onto us. We’re tearing up the railroad and covering our tracks. Looks like you’ll be the last one through.”
“They’re flooding the areas up ahead with manhacks. You’d better get going before they sweep through here.” Step Two: Give it a scary sound, and let your players hear it before they see it. Make their hairs stand on end. Oh and let them see how someone else reacts to it - tell them how they should react to it.
“Oh shit, too late!” Step Three: Let your players see what it does, in a relatively safe environment. In this case, the manhacks seem to think that this guy’s flesh is a lot more in need of laceration than the player’s, giving the player plenty of time to see what they do.
Step Four: Here comes that sound again …
… and like a jack-in-the-box, they rip through the obstacles in their way. (‘Hey player, all that lovely physics you’ve been playing with for the past few hours? These guys can play with it too!’) Except the door is in the way, so the player is still quite safe, even if they don’t totally feel that way, giving them plenty more time to see what a manhack is. Step Five: A similar corridor as before, but as well as being full of boxes, this one is full of explosive barrels too. ‘Hey player, all those lovely explosive barrels you’ve been playing with for the past few hours? These guys can play with them too!’ Unfortunately, the silly manhacks blow themselves up. How quaint!
Step Six: A pretty similar wire-door set-up as before. This should be just like before, nice and easy, thinks the player …
… except wait, this time the manhacks find their way over the gate! By building up player’s expectations and then suddenly switching things around, Valve’s level designers keep a tight grip on the player’s comfort level and keep things fresh and exciting. (See also Gordon’s return to City 17 with the gravity gun, where the player’s methods of dealing with manhacks are turned on their heads.)
Step Seven: But as well as defying your player’s expectations, be sure to extend them into the depths of what they dread might happen. ‘Hey player, these manhacks that were so good at blowing themselves up? The ones you thought were quaint? Um, well now they’re gonna take you with them. Nice knowing ya!’ - So, aside from fawning over the skill of Valve’s crack team of level designers, why is this interesting? Well compare and contrast it to, for instance, how id software chose to introduce the Imp in Doom 3. The logistics of posting a video (or rather, the desire to spend the time and bandwidth) is a little beyond me at the moment, but in essence, things are a bit too quiet as you step through a particular doorway. Suddenly a cutscene starts, the player’s character is shown turning in horror towards a dark corner and a beautifully animated Imp crawls from the pipework, all framed with suitably disconcerting, skillful camerawork. It drops to the ground and the game cuts back to, well, the game just as the Imp throws its first fireball at you. I’m not about to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of cutscenes here - that’s a whole essay/post in and of itself - but the point to be made here is that the languages used to introduce these new enemies, the Manhack and the Imp, are hugely different from each other. Doom 3’s example is calling upon the language of cinema - something that’s been studied for a hundred years now and is very well understood. By contrast, Half-Life 2’s example uses a language that, while owing a little bit to theatre, isn’t shared with any other medium - it’s unique to games. And by contrast with the language of cinema, it’s a language which game developers have only just (7 years as opposed to 107) started to get to grips with.
