Rules of engagement.

This year's football world cup in Brazil was, in some respects, a fantastic advertisement for the most popular sport in the world. There was a tremendous amount of skill displayed, and it was routinely shown with flair, style, and panache, which was fittingly exemplified in Mario Götze's winning goal in the final. In most respects, though, the world cup was a damning indictment of the sport or, rather, those who are paid to play the game at the highest levels. The sheer amount of cheating on display was frankly depressing, and that it largely went unpunished sends the wrong message to the global audience. Although the wilful cheating came in the form of diving (or 'simulation' as it has been called, a term which only serves to further sanitise and condone the behaviour) for the most part, it makes a mockery of the whole competition, turns the spectacle into a circus. If you can only win by breaking the rules, why abide by any of the rules at all? Why not ignore certain rules, or remove them? Why not wrestle the goalkeeper out of the way while your team mate takes a shot? Why not move all of your chess pieces as though they are the queen? Why not declare yourself hide and seek champion, ignoring the cries of those who could clearly see your feet sticking out from behind the sofa?

When creating a videogame, developers have the opportunity to create a whole set of rules of their own, but tend to stick with various conventions. Some are just common sense, such as pushing left or right make a character move left or right, but very quickly we move into cultural conventions that shift with time. Once upon a time, accelerating vehicles was largely achieved by pushing forwards on a joystick, or up on a d-pad. Accelerate and brake later shifted to face buttons, and the trend in recent years has been to assign them to shoulder triggers. Within the games, beyond the controls, rulesets shift over time.  Halo revolutionised health systems, a step which was more inevitable than it seemed at the time. As long as an eight by eight board is a sufficiently abstract representation of a battlefield, we hardly question the notion of a pawn powering up as the resurrection of a fallen comrade once it has broken clean through enemy lines. However, as videogames begin to look more like what they are intended to signify, so players require the apparently arbitrary rules to more accurately imitate real life. These concessions are cosmetic improvements at best, often serving more to highlight the arbitrary nature of the action. And so it is that, in The Last of Us, a bandage 'realistically' takes time to be administered, ignoring the fact that all ails are universally cured by the wrapping of such a bandage around the left forearm.

CounterSpy doesn't take itself remotely seriously and, from the offset, it's clear that it would rather you didn't either. There is good reason to abide by its wishes. Set during an alternative version of the Cold War, the Imperialist States of the west and Socialist Republic of the east are in a race to launch a nuclear strike on the moon. You play an agent of C.O.U.N.T.E.R, charged with infiltrating various bases belonging to either of the factions, and steal information which will allow C.O.U.N.T.E.R. to disrupt the plans and ensure world peace. The bases are made up of randomly assigned building blocks meaning that, while various areas become familiar, and players are able to develop strategies to move through each area, exploring every corner, the number of those areas or the order in which they appear will differ with each run-through.

The game abides by many of the conventions of stealth games: cameras sweep areas in a set pattern, but target the player when he fails to evade their view; guards patrol in patterns, straying from those patterns individually when suspicious, attacking the player as a group when alerted to his presence; running makes a noise, creeping is quiet, and weapons similarly have levels of stealthiness. It sticks to these rules strictly, and this combines with the comic tone and stylised look which supports the notion that this, as stealth games should really be, is an exciting puzzle. It is a set of well balanced (but nevertheless arbitrary) rules and tools, dressed in camp 50s espionage clothing.

It would be easy to forget this and criticise the game for perceived faults. It's 2.5D presentation allows for the visuals to occasionally come into conflict with the rules. At times, players are able to mêlée enemies beyond their reach, because they have lined up on the z-axis. Quietly grabbing and knocking out two enemies in a row from the same hiding spot results in the two bodies occupying the same space, clipping in and out of each other. It is possible to sneak up on enemies who should rightly be able to see you in their peripheral vision. To take these criticisms seriously, however, is to condemn the underlying game for its abstracted representation, to say that a car drives badly because it was painted the wrong colour.

Players will no doubt find that they begin to favour certain sets of weapons and perks to take into each mission, finding a balance of covertness, power, and sufficiency of ammunition. It is a shame that one of the four weapon slots is always given to the default pistol, but them's the rules. Although it shouldn't take long to complete the story on all of the difficulty settings, there is still plenty fun to be had in trying different weapons load-outs, finding out how to develop your now well-versed tactics. The game sets a few challenges of its own in the form of trophies, although the value of each is a little skewed. It maybe sounds odd, but completing the game on all difficulties, or without using a continue, is significantly easier than completing a single mission without being seen, or taking out five enemies in a single explosion. This feat, in particular, is amazingly elusive given how rarely there are five enemies whose patrol patterns take them even remotely close enough to each other to consider attempting it.

Games like CounterSpy (or Hitman Go on iOS) are terrific reminders that, while both technology and developers' constant improvement allow for increasingly realistic games, there is a tremendous amount of fun to be had from embracing the fact that you are playing a game bound by rules. Opening a medicine cabinet and watching your health bar refill does not have to be a realistic depiction of first aid. It can just a fun way of representing a subset of rules; if you make it this far, you can reset the penalties you have accumulated so far. Sometimes, by not trying to make an 'experience', you give your players a much better experience.