SpyParty

Race the Sniper Daily Challenge Mode, and Fixes & Features!The big stuff, details are below:. Sniper Daily Challenge BugsSome small bug fixes, and one huge exploit bug fix that was reported privately by Legorve Genine/steam before anybody else noticed, thanks so much!.

Overview SpyParty: An espprotonage competitive game on the human performance, behavior and perceptproton. Most of the Spy games have you running with guns or gives you an experience of great action gameplay.

Once a week Race the Sniper Daily Challenge ModeThe normal Daily Challenge consists of all Spy wins or timeouts, so when you play Sniper, you get a 'normal' game against the Spy. I added a new mode that activates once a week on Sunday afternoons in the US, or 00:00 GMT Monday morning to be precise, where the replays choosen from the database are all games where the original sniper shoots the Spy, and you have to shoot first to win. Sniper Daily Challenge and New Curated Replay Sets! LookIf you hadEight shotsOr eight opportunitiesTo seize everything you ever wantedIn one momentWould you capture itOr just let it slip?The big stuff, details are below:.

Sniper Daily ChallengeEverybody loves daily challenges in games, and the new Sniper Daily Challenge in SpyParty is pretty special. Every day (rolling over at 00:00 GMT, which is 4pm US Pacific), the server generates a new set of eight games for everybody to snipe against. There are different skill levels based on your number of wins, so you'll always get a set of daily games that are challenging but fair.

Everone at a given skill level plays the same set, and the results are posted to a channel on the SpyParty Discord (These games actually come from the giant replays database that you all have been creating just by playing the game. At the time of this writing there are 2.3 million replays being randomized and filtered to create the daily sets. This is a fun way to stay in practice, compare your scores and times with your friends, and you can even play the other skill level dailies with a simple chat command in the lobby. New Curated Replay SetsThanks to the amazing SpyParty community, we have an entire new batch of curated replay sets in the lobby.

The previous curated replays were almost all the old art, and were not a great introduction to the game. Players would log into the lobby, click that button, and then all of a sudden be in an old art hellscape and wonder what happened. The games were high quality, but the visuals left something to be desired. We even got bug reports about the graphics being buggy when players went into the lobby. Now, thanks to player mintyrug and others, there's a whole new group of curated replays, so check them out!. Lobby Invitations While SpectatingFinally, when you're waiting in the lobby to play a match, you can now spectate another match or play a curated replay set, but still appear as available to play and get invites. New Redwoods Venue!

The big stuff, details are below:. the new Redwoods venue, with extra bonus trees for your occluding pleasure. no more marking books, should make for much less frustrating high and lowlighting. sadly, the birthday party is over, meaning no more hats or cupcakes for youEnjoy, and let me know if there are bugs!Chrisv0.1.6873.0:.

code. remove book marking, yay - this cleans up a lot of fiddly accidental mouse clicking by the sniper, and is maybe a slight Spy buff, except it'll make high/lowlighting faster for Sniper so maybe it's a slight Sniper buff? Who knows.

don't draw update ui if ui is toggled off, just noticed during testing that the spectators list doesn't toggle off, always more bugs. re-hide microfilm in book has lower priority than inspect. more events for inspect cancels (player bails) and interrupts (guest picks up). content. some small fixes to General's rig and walk anim. Redwoods venue!. changes since pax for Redwoods.

make chair a little less orange sari. color coded book ends. moarr treez.

Birthday Bugfix BuildThis build took way too long to get out, sorry the crash bugs lingered so long! There's the final venue right around the corner, and matchmaking coming after that! It's hard to see the Spy doing missions with a Great White Shark in the way!The big stuff, details are below:. Brand new Aquarium venue, complete with a bulletproof shark named Kiel that really likes to hog the limelight.

Tons of work getting ready for Matchmaking, including automatic Handicapping and the all new Recommended QuickPlay Group that will dynamically adjust the game settings based on the skill levels of the players. Venues and missions now unlock as you play so new players aren't snowed under with options where they're learning.

AquariumThe new Aquarium venue is the second in a collection of three venues focused on 'occlusion', the first being Teien, discussed here: Teien, the occlusion was the shoji screens showing only silhouettes of the action behind them, but in the case of Aquarium, there's a giant shark that is constantly swimming back and forth in front of the Sniper's view. Spies need to learn the shark's patterns and do missions while in shark-shadow, because otherwise the Sniper has a commanding view of the entire floorplan.Speaking of floorplans, the in-game Dossier now has floor plans for every venue. As you can see from this one, in addition to the shark, Aquarium has a slight asymmetry to it in the statue layout:The shark follows a set pattern that occludes the back, middle, and front mission sites and then repeats going the other direction, so timing your missions is essential.

Some players are already saying Aquarium is the most strategic venue due to the timing predictability of our fishy friend. Handicapping, Unlocks, and Recommended ModeThe shark is cool, but what really took the most development time in this update was the completely new handicapping system and the Recommended QuickPlay Group. It's always been possible to handicap games in SpyParty to compensate for a skill gap between players, but now it's automated if you're set to the Recommended group, which is important for the upcoming matchmaking system. Now, if an experienced player is in a match with a new player, the game will automatically adjust the number of missions, guests, and duration to try to make a balanced game mode. So far it's working pretty well according to the data, but it needs more testing, so please try it out.

It's easy to try, just go into a match with a player with different number of wins than you (either more or fewer) and see how it feels.You can still access the other groups but Recommended is, uh, recommended now. I'm very interested in feedback on how these handicapped modes feel to play.they could be balanced but be no fun, which would be a problem, so please let me know what you think here in the forums or in the discord (linked below). Unlocks for Missions and VenuesSpyParty is a pretty difficult game to learn. I'm very proud of the tutorial with its full voice narration and interactive teaching puzzles, but it only tutorializes less than half of the game, and so we used to just dump players directly into the thick of things and hope they could swim. This wasn't going to work very well in the long run, so now we have an unlock system that opens up the game a bit more slowly, and gives you a chance to learn the new stuff as you go along.

Missions and venues unlock slightly differently: missions unlock only if both players in a match have unlocked them to avoid surprising a player with a mission they've never seen before; venues unlock when either player in a match has unlocked them, to give players access to venues faster, and it seems like learning to play on a new venue is not as hard as learning a new mission.As part of the unlocks system, I've increased the amount of information in the in-game Dossier and updated it. Now anytime you see a (?) icon anywhere, you can get contextualized information to learn more.You can play with the handicapping and unlocks in Practice Mode, it's just a bit odd. In the Gameplay settings, you can set your Practice Mode number of simulated wins (meaning how experienced you are), and the handicapping level of the opponent, and see what changes about the setups. I need to figure out a slightly more clear way to do this, but it lets you experiment for now.

You need to set the QuickPlay mode to Recommended to see this, and remember you can hit escape and get to the settings on the game setup screen so you can see the changes easily.Oh, and if you're hard core and don't want any handicapping, you can go into the Gameplay settings and restrict the amount of 'up handicapping' you get. This controls how much the game will try to help you out if your opponent has more experience. I'm teasing the next venue, hopefully landing this coming week.

I've been posting to twitter, facebook facebook.com, and the discord discord.gg, but I'll update this post too, and then post the update patch notes when it's live, obviously.The recent Teien venue, this new one, and the next one are all exploring the theme of 'occlusion' in different ways. With Teien, it was the shoji screens with their silhouettes. With this new one, it'll be obvious how it's about occlusion when it's released, but I want it to be a surprise.For this update I have improved the in-game Dossier feature to have more details about missions and venues, and one thing we added was super cool top-down map views.here is the upcoming venue.but how is it about occlusion?I'm shooting for mid-week, but I'm terrible at hitting dates.Chris. Teien Teien is set in a beautiful Japanese garden in the early evening, and was inspired by my visit to the Ginkakuji temple in Kyoto. Sliding shoji screens provide cover, and randomize between 8 different layouts on game start, but beware, your silhouette can give away a lot of information to the Sniper!You can manually set the shoji layout in practice games so you can, well, practice.

High- and low-lights don't show on the silhouettes, but if you target a guest you can see if they are lit. Of course, the Sniper can shoot through the shoji. Please ignore the huge and glaring bug that the guests are wearing shoes in the temple; the fix for that bug will have to wait for the outfits feature.Teien is actually the first in a series of three venues exploring the theme of 'occlusion', each in a radically different way. GamepadsI'm going to have to write more details about this later in addition to what's below in the release notes, but almost any gamepad should work well with SpyParty now on Windows standalone, Steam, and MacOS. Update: The first day’s streaming is done! But you can still watch us kissing the ground hard in Human Fall Flat in the video below.That rumbling sound you hear is half of Brighton packing its bags as Gamer Network decamps to Birmingham for EGX 2018.

And the Rock, Paper, Shotgun Video Department will be at the show, too. We ve decided to try our hand at livestreaming, which is basically video without safety nets. I ve heard it s quite popular these days and that someone called Ninja makes a billion pounds a minute from it. So even if we make fools of ourselves, we ll at least be able to retire on all that delicious green. I can t believe we didn t get on this sooner.

Anyway, read on for information on what we re doing and when.(more). Chris Hecker laughs as he recalls an early conversation he had with the founders of Supergiant, back when that studio was beginning production on an action-RPG called Bastion. Hecker was starting work on his game SpyParty at the time, and wasn't sure where to take it, if anywhere.

'They've now lapped me three times!' He exclaims, noting they not only released Bastion, but followed it up with Transistor and Pyre while SpyParty remained in its prenatal state.I first heard about SpyParty in 2009, on a podcast hosted by the editors of 1Up.com. Back then, it was seen as one of the foundational pieces of the indie renaissance—alongside Limbo, Braid, and Super Meat Boy—redefining the nature and economy of game development.It's been nearly a decade since that moment. 1Up no longer exists, the indie scene has disemboweled and reincarnated itself dozens of times, Phil Fish finished Fez, announced Fez 2, and blew up his studio, and finally, finally, SpyParty is available on Steam. Yes, it is still in Early Access, and yes, 47-year-old Chris Hecker still clutches a list of planned improvements close to his chest.' It's not relief yet, but there is a certain element of pride that I actually did it,' he says.

'I pushed the button.' If you're unaware, SpyParty is essentially a game of cat and mouse. One person plays a spy, in the cologne-splashed, Roger Moore sense of the word. They're assigned a number of missions they try to accomplish while blending in at a a glitzy cocktail party.

Another player takes control of a sniper with a bird's eye view of the event. They win by putting a bullet through the spy's brain.That dynamic encourages a metagame where the person playing the spy wants to disguise themselves as a brainless NPC, laughing, dancing, drinking, all pantomimed within the confines of basic AI routines. The sniper, on the other hand, is looking for anyone at the party who looks too smart to be computer-controlled. It's a fascinating multiplayer conundrum that requires an understanding of psychology, rather than marksmanship, speed, or superior talent-tree builds.Hecker is just as in love with the design today as he was 10 years ago. 'For whatever reason I had infinite endurance to work on SpyParty,' he tells me.

'I want to keep working on it until it's perfect. I don't get bored with things. My job is different every five minutes. You're working on a 3D competitive online game with 30 animated characters. There's a lot of stuff to do.

I can be a networking programmer, I can be a designer, I can be a marketer, I can do PR I'm just lucky.' To be clear, SpyParty has been available in some form over the course of its protracted development. First as a closed-beta shipped out to hungry email accounts, then as a for-profit open-beta available from the website. Over the course of those nine years, Hecker has never been afraid of people beating him to the punch. Sure, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood took a crack at the concept with its tacked-on but surprisingly fun multiplayer mode (in which assassins attempt to stab each other on cobblestone Italian streets full of innocent bystanders dressed just like them). There was also The Ship, originally a Half-Life 2 mod, and Murderous Pursuits by the same team. However, Hecker was always secure in the knowledge that SpyParty was a difficult game to make—a delicately poached egg of an idea that takes a little bit of madness to get right.

No major publisher would rip him off; they simply wouldn't want to take the risk.I can program a computer in the Bay Area, I'm not gonna starve to death. Like, 'Oh, I have to suffer and go make hundreds of thousands of dollars at Facebook.' Chris HeckerSo how did Hecker manage to stay afloat for the past decade?

How could he afford to take a Duke Nukem Forever amount of time to create his cloak-and-dagger masterpiece? The last project he worked on before SpyParty was Spore. His career at Microsoft started in the '90s, and ended after 2008 when Will Wright's ultra-hyped, ultimately flawed universe simulator hit store shelves. Once he left the company, Hecker tells me he had a couple hundred thousand dollars in his savings account, as well as a low-mortgage house in the Bay Area that he describes as the 'perfect indie situation.' It was more than enough to subsist on through SpyParty's development, though Hecker tells me at the tail end, he did borrow some money from his mother to push through the final thresholds.'

I spent my daughter's college fund and all my life's savings, the last couple years was kinda like 'Woah, what am I doing here,' like, 'All right I guess I'm burning all of this down,' there was a lot of anxiety which is distracting from actual development,' he says.Hecker has absolutely no delusions about his privilege. He knows that most indie developers don't have swollen coffers from a senior position at a legacy company like Microsoft, nor do they have family members willing to throw money down the rabbit hole.

SpyParty is currently paying him back, of course, but even if it didn't, Hecker would've been fine. 'I can program a computer in the Bay Area, I'm not gonna starve to death,' he laughs.

You are the god here, and those things are not worth your divine attention! The gist of Godville is that it is a parody on everything from 'typical' MMO games with their tedious level ups to internet memes and ordinary day to day things appealing to a wide audience. Whack your teacher unblocked games. Leave all the dirty work to your pawn and enjoy the only thing that matters in any game - fun.Godville is a massively-multiplayer zero-player game (ZPG).

'Like, 'Oh, I have to suffer and go make hundreds of thousands of dollars at Facebook.' I'm not mining coal at that point.

There's a backup plan of just, 'Get a job,' but it's looking like I won't have to.' It's awesome that SpyParty is finally on Steam, and it's awesome that Hecker finally gets to reap the rewards of a decade's worth of hard work. SpyParty is his dream project. He's not sick of it in the slightest, nor does he yearn to escape into the next idea.

It's an obsession that's paid off, and it makes you wish other creatives were afforded 10 solid years to perfect something they love.' I had this idea for this thing, this concept, of a multiplayer game about subtle human behavior,' says Hecker. 'For whatever reason, someone upstairs wanted it to work incredibly well. My top players have 20,000 games played, and they're playing the game I made, it's not like at that high-level they're playing a different game, it's still this highly asymmetric game about subtle human behavior.

It's awesome, it's great to see people do that, and they're so much better than me it's not even funny.' This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, SpyParty official site.If Chris Hecker was going to make a mistake with SpyParty, he wanted it to be the opposite mistake to the one Spore made. The way Hecker sees it, Spore s problem was that it was all accessibility and no depth. And he d know because he was a lead engineer and designer on Spore. So when he began to make his own game, SpyParty, which after eight years of development has finally hit Steam Early Access, he said to himself, I m going to go really hard on the depth.And so Hecker did, putting enough depth in this asymmetric two-player competitive game to satisfy 1000 hours of matches from its most dedicated players.

But it s not enough. He wants to push SpyParty to becoming 5000-hour game, and the way he plans to do it is by building his characters. To say I bounced off SpyParty after a morning might make it sound like I did not enjoy myself, or that the game's many pleasures failed to have much effect on me. In truth, I found those pleasures astonishingly effective. SpyParty, for me, is the sweetest torture imaginable. I played a morning's worth of matches if that, even so, I felt myself teetering on the very edge of terrifying depths, and so I fled.I have never played a game quite like this, and yet it is so simple.

SpyParty requires just two players, one of whom plays the spy while the other plays a distant sniper trying to kill the spy. The spy must mingle with a crowd of AI characters and pull off a series of simple missions within a set amount of time. The sniper must scan the faces, the wash of moving bodies and fluttering hands, and work out which of the people they can see is controlled by the first human player and must therefore be killed.Each role offers a handful of complications.

There are the missions that the spy must carry out, for example, each of which affords them ample opportunity to betray themselves. They might be spotted switching over a statue, for example, or bugging the ambassador, which involves getting close to the clearly signposted character in question and doing a certain hand gesture. But beyond those tasks and others, they might just give themselves away by not behaving like an AI character.

They might stop in the wrong place. They might walk without the right kind of purpose. Or they might find themselves low on time and check their watch to add a few seconds to the clock - and get plugged while they're at it.Read more. Premature Evaluation is the weekly column in which we explore the wilds of early access. This week, Fraser’s pretending to be an NPC, badly, in the asymmetric game of spies and snipers, SpyParty. How do you get blood out of a tux?Nerves already shot, I extract myself from the conversation I m using as cover and head towards the golden statue, my prize.

This plush apartment houses more than a few pieces of art I can pinch, but this one is out of the way, somewhere I m pretty sure nobody will be looking. I empty my brain and follow the path I ve settled on in my head. I m following a script with the single-mindedness of a machine. Or, more accurately, a SpyParty NPC.I m almost at my destination when a spanner is flung into the works in the form of a booze-swigging ambassador, sauntering over to the shiny eagle I intend to make away with.

For a split second my brain fires up again. I m not a machine; I m a startled person who has to briefly recalculate, and that s all it takes for the laser sight to swing over to me. My spy career is over.(more). Call it a reverse Turing test: rather than AI trying to appear indistinguishable from a human, it's a human trying to act like an AI. Trying to fool someone into thinking you're a computer-controlled character isn't a feature of very many games, and that's a damn shame—it can be anything from nail-bitingly tense to downright hilarious, and I love it so much I wish there were more games to do it in.I'm not entirely sure why I find it so enthralling to pretend to be an NPC. Maybe I've spent so much time around NPCs in games that mimicking their behavior and movements becomes a creative exercise, or maybe it's the act of restraining myself from running at top speed, driving like a lunatic, or bunny-hopping all over the place like players usually do in games. Or maybe the roots go deeper than that.SpyParty, in development for nearly a decade, arrived in Steam Early Access this past week.

It's a 1v1 multiplayer game in which you and another player take turns playing two different roles. During a round, one player is a sniper observing a noisy cocktail party populated by NPCs, and the other is a spy mingling with those NPCs while trying to complete a series of tasks. The sniper wins if they correctly identify the other player and shoot the spy (or if the spy doesn't complete their tasks), and the spy wins if they complete their tasks before the clock runs out without being shot (or if the sniper shoots an innocent NPC).

Then the players switch roles.Playing the sniper in SpyParty is fine, don't get me wrong. But when I'm sniper, all I'm really doing is waiting for my turn to be the spy so I can walk around acting like a computer.Mr. RobotoPlaying as spy, blending in with AI characters for four minutes while the sniper's laser sight sweeps through the room is nerve-wracking.

Did I wait long enough before moving to a new position? Did I wait too long? I just bumped into about four people and changed directions and missed my mark: did the sniper see all that? Do other characters bump into things?

Do they stutter-step the way I just did? Should I stutter-step less, or not at all? My god, are my movements so artificial that it's glaringly obvious that I'm not artificial?I honestly sometimes wish there was no sniper and no clock, so I could just spend an hour mingling with NPCsThere's a lot of tension when the sniper's laser centers on your forehead while you're engaged in a fake conversation with bots. The only thing stronger than the urge to immediately move is the urge to remain perfectly still until the sniper looks elsewhere, and neither of those are wise since you need to act like you don't care that there's a rifle pointed at your head, since none of the other NPCs do.There's even more intense excitement when you perform one of your tasks like seducing an NPC or contacting an operative while you're being closely watched. Or maybe you're not being watched—the sniper may train their sight in one spot while looking in another direction. You can't really tell when you're being examined, so you have to keep your NPC performance going at all times, and that means acting naturally—technically, acting unnaturally since you're supposed to be an NPC—even when a laser sight is between your eyes.And there's more than just relief when the sniper's beam swings elsewhere after a long moment of scrutiny.

Winning a round as a spy feels amazing: not only is it fun roaming around a fake party filled with fake people, pretending to be fake (I honestly sometimes wish there was no sniper and no clock, so I could just spend an hour mingling with NPCs) but it's a weird and wonderful joy knowing another human being was looking directly at you, maybe a dozen times in the past few minutes, but didn't see you for what you were. You were hiding from a hunter, but hiding in plain sight, a needle in a stack of needles.The pleasure of acting like an NPC in SpyParty is immense because the other player knows you're there, somewhere.

They're deliberately looking for you. But there's another game in which you can pretend to be an NPC and your opponent isn't looking for you: they don't even know they're in a multiplayer game.

Dog watchingI don't play a lot of online games, but when Watch Dogs arrived in 2014 I fell into a headlong obsession with its multiplayer mode Hacking Invasion (a similar mode is in Watch Dogs 2). The objective is to enter another player's game and hack their data (basically, push a button and wait for a timer to run out while avoiding being killed by them) but what's most interesting about it is that when you arrive in this stranger's game, they aren't notified of it. Until you actually begin hacking them, they still think they're playing a singleplayer game.

Which means you get to act like an NPC while no one is even targeting you.When you invade, you first need to get close enough to the other player to hack them. This can sometimes be a challenge if the other player is driving at top speed when you arrive, so you need to catch up to them by also driving like a maniac, then slow down and try to resemble an NPC when the player is close enough to see you. It feels like being Dean Ed Rooney in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, racing down the hall but stopping to walk normally when passing classrooms.Nothing is happening here, students.

Everything is normal.Once the other player is within range, you can start hacking them, but I usually waited because a big part of the fun was the act of observing someone playing without them knowing you're there. In addition to being able to casually walk around or slowly drive like an NPC, there's also a bit of voyeurism, I suppose. It's not like watching someone stream a game on Twitch for an audience, but viewing someone completely oblivious to your presence. You weren't invited and in a lot of ways, it feels like you shouldn't be there at all. There's even something a bit off-putting about it: it feels like a tiny invasion of privacy. (You could, if you wanted, opt-out of invasions.)Once close to my mark, I liked to approach as carefully as I could, strolling along, just observing.

The hacking part of the game was fun, too, as they were notified you were in their game and tried to hunt you down, so a bit like SpyParty at that point. They know someone nearby is a real person—or a fake fake-person—and you couldn't really be hidden in the open for long as close scrutiny would give you away.But the moments before the hacking, when you can just wander around in someone's game, stroll past them, drive behind them, blend in with the rest of the NPCs, I could happily do that all day.

Hide and peekThe enjoyment of pretending you're an AI may stem from a much more basic concept than mimicking an NPC, something as simple as the act of hiding. Hide and Seek, aka PropHunt, is a mode for Garry's Mod where one team disguises themselves as objects on a map and the other team hunts for them. You're not pretending to be an NPC but a soda can, a plant, a lamp, or a sofa. Hide and Seek, in other words, its hide-and-seek like you played as a kid, but instead of hiding behind a couch, you are the couch.Am I acting enough like a box, or suspiciously too much like a box?It's silly, certainly, and there's no real challenge or art to acting like a cardboard box or a traffic cone, except perhaps in where you choose to place yourself. But there is that same sort of thrill you find in SpyParty and Watch Dogs, as a hunter runs close, smashing or shooting objects nearby, and you just wait, wondering if they'll hit you next. They look in your direction and stop in front of you, and you're gripped with that same tension. Have they made me?

Will they shoot me? Am I acting enough like a box, or suspiciously too much like a box?And when they run past, you experience the same feeling, not just of relief but also the joy of having having fooled them.

They looked at me, right at me, but they didn't see a human player. To them, I was just another part of the game. Call it a reverse Turing test: rather than AI trying to appear indistinguishable from a human, it's a human trying to act like an AI. Trying to fool someone into thinking you're a computer-controlled character isn't a feature of very many games, and that's a damn shame—it can be anything from nail-bitingly tense to downright hilarious, and I love it so much I wish there were more games to do it in.I'm not entirely sure why I find it so enthralling to pretend to be an NPC. Maybe I've spent so much time around NPCs in games that mimicking their behavior and movements becomes a creative exercise, or maybe it's the act of restraining myself from running at top speed, driving like a lunatic, or bunny-hopping all over the place like players usually do in games. Or maybe the roots go deeper than that.SpyParty, in development for nearly a decade, arrived in Steam Early Access this past week. It's a 1v1 multiplayer game in which you and another player take turns playing two different roles.

During a round, one player is a sniper observing a noisy cocktail party populated by NPCs, and the other is a spy mingling with those NPCs while trying to complete a series of tasks. The sniper wins if they correctly identify the other player and shoot the spy (or if the spy doesn't complete their tasks), and the spy wins if they complete their tasks before the clock runs out without being shot (or if the sniper shoots an innocent NPC). Then the players switch roles.Playing the sniper in SpyParty is fine, don't get me wrong. But when I'm sniper, all I'm really doing is waiting for my turn to be the spy so I can walk around acting like a computer.Mr. RobotoPlaying as spy, blending in with AI characters for four minutes while the sniper's laser sight sweeps through the room is nerve-wracking. Did I wait long enough before moving to a new position? Did I wait too long?

I just bumped into about four people and changed directions and missed my mark: did the sniper see all that? Do other characters bump into things? Do they stutter-step the way I just did? Should I stutter-step less, or not at all?

My god, are my movements so artificial that it's glaringly obvious that I'm not artificial?I honestly sometimes wish there was no sniper and no clock, so I could just spend an hour mingling with NPCsThere's a lot of tension when the sniper's laser centers on your forehead while you're engaged in a fake conversation with bots. The only thing stronger than the urge to immediately move is the urge to remain perfectly still until the sniper looks elsewhere, and neither of those are wise since you need to act like you don't care that there's a rifle pointed at your head, since none of the other NPCs do.There's even more intense excitement when you perform one of your tasks like seducing an NPC or contacting an operative while you're being closely watched. Or maybe you're not being watched—the sniper may train their sight in one spot while looking in another direction. You can't really tell when you're being examined, so you have to keep your NPC performance going at all times, and that means acting naturally—technically, acting unnaturally since you're supposed to be an NPC—even when a laser sight is between your eyes.And there's more than just relief when the sniper's beam swings elsewhere after a long moment of scrutiny. Winning a round as a spy feels amazing: not only is it fun roaming around a fake party filled with fake people, pretending to be fake (I honestly sometimes wish there was no sniper and no clock, so I could just spend an hour mingling with NPCs) but it's a weird and wonderful joy knowing another human being was looking directly at you, maybe a dozen times in the past few minutes, but didn't see you for what you were. You were hiding from a hunter, but hiding in plain sight, a needle in a stack of needles.The pleasure of acting like an NPC in SpyParty is immense because the other player knows you're there, somewhere.

They're deliberately looking for you. But there's another game in which you can pretend to be an NPC and your opponent isn't looking for you: they don't even know they're in a multiplayer game. Dog watchingI don't play a lot of online games, but when Watch Dogs arrived in 2014 I fell into a headlong obsession with its multiplayer mode Hacking Invasion (a similar mode is in Watch Dogs 2). The objective is to enter another player's game and hack their data (basically, push a button and wait for a timer to run out while avoiding being killed by them) but what's most interesting about it is that when you arrive in this stranger's game, they aren't notified of it. Until you actually begin hacking them, they still think they're playing a singleplayer game. Which means you get to act like an NPC while no one is even targeting you.When you invade, you first need to get close enough to the other player to hack them.

This can sometimes be a challenge if the other player is driving at top speed when you arrive, so you need to catch up to them by also driving like a maniac, then slow down and try to resemble an NPC when the player is close enough to see you. It feels like being Dean Ed Rooney in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, racing down the hall but stopping to walk normally when passing classrooms.Nothing is happening here, students. Everything is normal.Once the other player is within range, you can start hacking them, but I usually waited because a big part of the fun was the act of observing someone playing without them knowing you're there. In addition to being able to casually walk around or slowly drive like an NPC, there's also a bit of voyeurism, I suppose. It's not like watching someone stream a game on Twitch for an audience, but viewing someone completely oblivious to your presence. You weren't invited and in a lot of ways, it feels like you shouldn't be there at all. There's even something a bit off-putting about it: it feels like a tiny invasion of privacy.

(You could, if you wanted, opt-out of invasions.)Once close to my mark, I liked to approach as carefully as I could, strolling along, just observing. The hacking part of the game was fun, too, as they were notified you were in their game and tried to hunt you down, so a bit like SpyParty at that point. They know someone nearby is a real person—or a fake fake-person—and you couldn't really be hidden in the open for long as close scrutiny would give you away.But the moments before the hacking, when you can just wander around in someone's game, stroll past them, drive behind them, blend in with the rest of the NPCs, I could happily do that all day. Hide and peekThe enjoyment of pretending you're an AI may stem from a much more basic concept than mimicking an NPC, something as simple as the act of hiding. Hide and Seek, aka PropHunt, is a mode for Garry's Mod where one team disguises themselves as objects on a map and the other team hunts for them. You're not pretending to be an NPC but a soda can, a plant, a lamp, or a sofa.

Hide and Seek, in other words, its hide-and-seek like you played as a kid, but instead of hiding behind a couch, you are the couch.Am I acting enough like a box, or suspiciously too much like a box?It's silly, certainly, and there's no real challenge or art to acting like a cardboard box or a traffic cone, except perhaps in where you choose to place yourself. But there is that same sort of thrill you find in SpyParty and Watch Dogs, as a hunter runs close, smashing or shooting objects nearby, and you just wait, wondering if they'll hit you next. They look in your direction and stop in front of you, and you're gripped with that same tension. Have they made me? Will they shoot me?

Am I acting enough like a box, or suspiciously too much like a box?And when they run past, you experience the same feeling, not just of relief but also the joy of having having fooled them. They looked at me, right at me, but they didn't see a human player. To them, I was just another part of the game.

SpyPartySpyParty is a competitive espionage game about subtle human behavior.