SPYPARTY GAME SERIES

(You could, if you wanted, opt-out of invasions.) There's even something a bit off-putting about it: it feels like a tiny invasion of privacy. You weren't invited and in a lot of ways, it feels like you shouldn't be there at all. It's not like watching someone stream a game on Twitch for an audience, but viewing someone completely oblivious to your presence. In addition to being able to casually walk around or slowly drive like an NPC, there's also a bit of voyeurism, I suppose. 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. 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. 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. When you invade, you first need to get close enough to the other player to hack them. Which means you get to act like an NPC while no one is even targeting you. Until you actually begin hacking them, they still think they're playing a singleplayer game. 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.

I 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).

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. Or maybe you're not being watched-the sniper may train their sight in one spot while looking in another direction. 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. 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 a lot of tension when the sniper's laser centers on your forehead while you're engaged in a fake conversation with bots. I honestly sometimes wish there was no sniper and no clock, so I could just spend an hour mingling with NPCs 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).

SPYPARTY GAME SERIES

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. It's a 1v1 multiplayer game in which you and another player take turns playing two different roles. SpyParty (opens in new tab), in development for nearly a decade, arrived in Steam Early Access (opens in new tab) this past week. 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. I'm not entirely sure why I find it so enthralling to pretend to be an NPC.

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