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I thought I had Mindjack figured out. The Square Enix title, due out in January, bears all the hallmarks of a standard modern shooter: Cover-based action? Check. Some conceit to separate it from the pack (in this case, the ability to jump from person to person by hijacking their minds)? Check. Title succinctly explaining that conceit (see Fracture, TimeShift, Portal, etc.)? Check. Hybrid single-player/multiplayer experience that allows people to infiltrate your campaign and inhabit the minds of enemy soldiers? Che–
Wait, what?
That bullet point took me by surprise, and it was the element Mindjack's developers were most eager to show off during a recent demo.
In Mindjack's future, most people hook into a device that allows you to control basic actions with your mind, like turning on the TV. Quite handy for your average lazy American — except that these devices also allow shadowy corporations to secretly hack your head and take control of your body. Hey, that's the price for convenience.
As you shoot your way through the 8-10 hour campaign to uncover the global conspiracy, random online players — ostensibly corporate agents — can enter your game and pop into the heads of generic bad guys. Your campaign doesn't change at all; in effect, the impromptu "match" ends when you've eliminated all of the enemies in that area, the same as when playing offline. Once the area has been cleared, a results screen pops up showing kills, deaths, and how much XP each player earned. Then your campaign continues as normal.
That's it. There's no separate deathmatch mode.
So why jump into another person's game? To screw with them, mainly. The developers called it "sanctioned griefing" — a legit expression of the sophomoric (and often very funny) antics some players engage in online. (For a recent discussion of griefing at its best (or worst), see Mobcast 81).
I'm not sure if encouraging this sort of activity is genius or bat-shit insane. What I can say is that Mindjack sits with a vanguard of recent multiplayer experiences — including the global post-it notes of Demon's Souls and the reverse Turing tests in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood — that seek to radically redefine what the word "multiplayer" means on consoles. It will no longer only conjure up images of 16 heavily armed bodies dropped into an arena to see who can rack up the most kills. Online play will now have the breadth of meaning it's capable of.
Even if Mindjack fails completely, there's value in that.