Hacking has been portrayed through different ways in games. We have games that are hacking simulators like Uplink, which is the most famous and, in my opinion, the best, even if there are a ton of inaccuracies concerning actual hacking, and then we have RPGs, FPSs, and hybrids, that implement hacking as one of the various actions that you can do. I'll focus on these.


The Cyberdog was one of the enemies during System Shock's cyberspace sequences.

System Shock, the percursor to System Shock 2 and the recent BioShock, had a vibrant hacking system, where the player is immersed in cyberspace, similar in appearance to the movie Tron or Lawnmower Man. Various colored shapes roam about, Cyberguardians and Watchdogs attack, and functions are objects in this virtual world. So at the beginning of the game, the player needs to hack the medical suite's door open, and so he jacks into cyberspace, picking up hacking softs along the way that allow him to shoot at these Cyberguardians. In order to succeed at the hack, he must navigate through cyberspace until he reaches the shape that represents the door lock he wants to open. To leave cyberspace afterwards, he must find a portal, similar to the rings in Starfox, that will allow him to exit.

This system can be considered cumbersome and outdated nowadays, but in System Shock, you were the Hacker partially responsible for the AI's rise to power, therefore the elaborate hacking system made sense, and was an intriguing twist that went beyond being a mere minigame. Since then, developers have been finding different answers to hacking.


System Shock 2's elegant hacking minigame.

For System Shock 2, Ken Levine and the rest of the designers/developers of Irrational and Looking Glass implemented a system that worked the same way for 3 different skills: hacking, repairing and modifying weapons. Presented with a grid, representing the electronic innards of the object you were interacting with, the player had to connect three nodes. The chance that each node, when hacked (clicked on), would work or fail, depended on the skill being used and the Cyber-Affinity statistic. This statistic determined how many red nodes would appear on the grid. If hacking these red nodes failed, the system would respond differently depending on the skill: while hacking security stations, it would set off the alarm, while hacking locked boxes, it would destroy them, while repairing a weapon, it would damage it.



SS2's grid system was spiced up by describing an event within the object you were hacking every time you clicked on a dot. If the hack worked on that dot, it would display a line of text saying something like "Re-routed security system successfully.", and a contrary phrase in case of failure. This lines also referenced ICE, Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics, a term popularized by William Gibson in his cyberpunk masterpiece, Neuromancer.

The system required nanites to be used, and every time you tried to hack again you had to pay the nanite cost. Nanites were the currency of System Shock 2's world.

So while it was at its heart a minigame of connecting dots, there were at play several statistics, whose evolution was chosen by the player during the course of the game. It's definitely a simpler method than the first game in the series, but it's still pretty complex, and interesting.


Hacking in Deus Ex had a variety of actions and effects.

After System Shock 2, Deus Ex was released by Ion Storm. This game was much more of an FPS than the Shock series, but it borrowed the idea of skill levels for various possible actions, and with it, the hacking skill. This skill's progression was more linear than SS2's. Only one skill was used, and it determined how fast would the player hack, and how long would it take to be detected while interacting with a hacked terminal. One important thing to note is that the player had to spend the skill points to obtain the first level of Hacking if he wanted to hack at all, like System Shock 2, it wasn't given to the player from the start. Like SS2's system, Deus Ex's hacking also featured flavour text like System Shock 2, and also referenced the ICE concept, though the text was always the same and didn't depend on the player's input.

Hacking in Deus Ex allowed you to read emails of the accounts you hacked or change security settings, like altering the turret's affiliation, remotely controlling cameras or shutting them off. With higher levels invested, it was possible to discover the killswitches to two of the hero's nemesis, by checking email sent by their higherups.

It was a streamlined but immersive way to implement hacking, as you had access to several computers spread across the game and could interact with them. Logging on them, either by hacking or by finding out the password through datacubes (similar to the audio logs of System Shock 2, but not as intricate or colorful), allowed you to learn more about the story of the game, be it from the logo of the company that owned that computer, by the net address below that referenced Daedalus, a being that contacts you in the middle of the game, or by the emails themselves that not only enhanced the personality of the various characters in the game but also contained key data that could help you.

This was lost with the sequel, Deus Ex: Invisible War. While the datacubes remained, hacking computers became merely watching a purple loading bar reach the end, accompanied by sounds resembling a 14.4 modem, and you couldn't read any email, only the security settings remained. To perform a hack you required a biomod, which were basically the same as the first game's augmentations, and can be equated with BioShock's plasmids. Once you had the biomod, you could improve it two times, the first to control cameras and shut off turrets, and the second time to make the turrets attack your enemies.

Gone were all possibilites of finding out secrets, important information that could be used during cutscenes or to avoid a boss fight. It was a simplified system that removed all the flavour, and most of the fun, of hacking.


Vampire's terminal hacking was very intriguing, and unexpected.

Afterwards, Troika's last game, Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines implemented hacking in an interesting and immersive way. The player interacted directly through a command line with the computers. They all looked like old terminals, monochromatic and displaying only text. The hacking itself was performed by simply pressing Ctrl-C. Your hacking skill would determine whether it worked or not. After that, in order to access the various emails and functions of the computer, the player had to type in the commands by hand, which helped the illusion that you were actually accessing files on a computer.

While the hacking itself in Bloodlines wasn't very deep, the use of the command line was a nostalgic factor and helped ease the player into using computers without being too complicated.


Pipemania of the Year.

In 2007, BioShock brought back hacking, this time through a straight minigame, similar to PipeMania. It makes sense in the context of the game, computers would be controlled by valves and routing water from one place to another could change its functions. It's not very different from System Shock 2's hacking, but there isn't any flavour text, nor does the game have any skills that could be accounted to help you out. There were, however, gene tonics that changed the various variables in the game: alarm tiles, overload tiles, how long it took the water to pass through the tubes, etc, so the hacking was at least interesting in that it wasn't always the same, and your character would get better at it by using the tonics.

Pausing while hacking wasn't so immersive, and could lead one to think "here's a round of pipemania, all you splicers wait a bit while I finish this". A better system could be a smaller pipe grid that didn't occupy the whole screen, and that way allowed the action to continue (like SS2).

In the first two Fallout games it was possible to interact with computers (the interface was the same one used for dialog, only the dialog options would be actions made on the computer) and the Science skill was applied to determine what options you could perform and if you were successful.


Terminal Hangman

In Fallout 3, there's a table of words with randomized characters, and you get a number of attempts to select the word on the list that might be the password. Failing all of those attempts means you need a key, ALWAYS found somewhere in the area. Which doesn't sound so good. Again, a minigame.

It seems the status quo is to implement hacking as a minigame, which to me is unfortunate.

Hacking should have some form of flavouring, it doesn't have to be text and it doesn't have to reference something like ICE, but the player should feel like he is performing a felony, a crime, something forbidden, and also something technical. Characters should react to seeing the character hacking, and order him to stop or attack him. It should be viewed as stealing an NPC's items or going into restricted areas. It shouldn't be accessible to anyone, as it should require investment from the player, and it should get easier/harder with time. Different objects or functions could be hacked through different systems, and more secure systems should be significantly harder to hack.