The Stack

OK, we’ve had another lull where my attention is on things other than blogging. Before I get back into Deus Ex, there’s one thing I’d like to note. Back in the first mission, just outside the entrance to UNATCO HQ, there’s a small armory, with a keypad-locked door. Once you’ve completed the mission, you can go inside the HQ building and obtain the code for the keypad. I didn’t need to. I knew the code already. It’s 0451.

Using 451 or 0451 as a keycode is something of an in-joke that goes back to the original System Shock, where it was the code for the first locked door you encountered, leading to a small closet full of goodies to give the player a little boost in the early part of the game, much like the UNATCO armory. (The developers sometimes referred to this as “the batcave”. At one point during development, there was even a poster-sized Batman logo on its back wall.) In tribute to this, the devs went on to use the code in other games, and eventually fans picked up on it and, when they went on to become game developers themselves, continued the tradition. There’s grown to be a notion of “0451 games” as a genre — games in the System Shock lineage, which use the 0451 code as a wink to those in the know — although apparently there are a lot of people who think of it as a Deus Ex thing rather than a System Shock thing, simply because a lot more people have played Deus Ex than System Shock.

And yet, at this point, 0451 as an in-joke has spread to games as disparate in content and gameplay as Firewatch, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, and Might & Magic X! ¹There are extensive lists at giantbomb and the main LookingGlass fan forum. If 0451 is meaningful as a genre rather than just a meme, then surely not all the games containing 0451 are 0451 games. What does it mean, then? Could a game be easily recognized as an 0451 game without using the 0451 as a keycode, and if so, what would it have to be?

Genres of course have fuzzy boundaries, and are created not by strict definitions but by “family resemblance” ²That’s Wittgenstein’s term, and he wasn’t talking about game genres, but rather, words in general. But it’s worth noting that his paradigmatic example of the idea was the word “game”.. There’s a core cadre of 0451 games that I think everyone would agree on, consisting of the Shock (both System and Bio-) and Deus Ex franchises, which every true 0451 game imitates to some degree. These are all “immersive sims”, another loosely-defined genre, the main attributes of which are (as far as I can tell) first-person perspective, an emphasis on exploration, deep detail, and a large skill upgrade tree that enables multiple viable approaches to overcoming obstacles (typically including both stealth and violence). Is “0451” just a synonym for “immersive sim”? Perhaps. But I think of the 0451 genre as a bit looser, more able to shed aspects while retaining its identity. Take Gone Home, a game that references 0451. It’s a first-person game with an emphasis on exploration and deep detail, but it doesn’t have any kind of skill tree and doesn’t have many valid alternate approaches. Is it an 0451 game? The idea wouldn’t have occurred to me if I didn’t see it on those lists of games that reference the code, but I’m willing to call it a borderline case. I don’t think anyone would call it an immersive sim, though. Ultimately, it’s not easily definable. It’s about how the game feels more than anything you can point at — and that applies to “immersive sim” just as much as to “0451”.