 When Hideo Kojima designed the original Metal Gear, its stealth gameplay was borne out of constraints. The MSX2 could not handle more than a few sprites, and so creating an action game would lead to shallow gameplay. Instead, Kojima considered avoidance. Players would try to sneak past enemies instead of confronting them directly. This story exemplifies two things. One, Kojima's design philosophy of working around technological constraints. Two, the ingenuity required in both the design and play of stealth games. Metal Gear was not the first stealth game, of course. There were games like 005 that had you try to avoid the line of sight of enemies, as well as Castle Wolfenstein, where you could distract and deceive enemies as well. Perhaps the stranger progenitor to the stealth game is Pac-Man, which also involves avoiding enemies in maze-like levels. All these games have AI where enemies switch from one state to the other, but the difference between Pac-Man and stealth games is that the enemies go from being unaware to being aware of you. Metal Gear 2 perhaps consolidates the early strands of stealth game design. They could chase you from screen to screen, and players could hide with an assortment of abilities as well. But there is something else of interest here, in that because enemies start the game independent off you, they are unaware of your presence. Players must often interact with enemies indirectly. This makes stealth games inherently systemic. As Nelson, one of the designers of Mark of the Ninja argues, This is why systemic games like Deus Ex incorporate stealth pretty organically. It allows for planning and intentionality. This systemic aspect of stealth games came into full focus in the year 1998, a year many argued the stealth game shot into the mainstream, with three games of note, Metal Gear Solid, Tentu, and Thief. In Metal Gear Solid, you could lure guards with magazines and noises. In Tentu, you could manipulate them with rice and use the verticality of the environment, and Thief enabled you to hide bodies and play with both light and dark to navigate its first person levels. 3D design brought a lot of problems though, with regards to clear perception and awareness cues. Metal Gear addressed this with a 2D radar in the corner, and Thief and Tentu had meters that signaled how aware enemies were off you. What's interesting though is that information about gameplay had to be relegated to meters and screens outside the play space. After 1998, we got a whole host of different stealth games. The genre started to blossom. Splinter Cell, Hitman, the genre saw many iterations and refinements, all building on the core gameplay of avoiding enemies instead of confronting them. With the resurgence of the indie game space, we also saw a return to 2D design, and a game that many considered to be the best that stealth games have to offer. Mark of the Ninja. It showcased all the design elements of the past. Multiple enemy states, systemic design, intentionality, but also solved many problems too. It superimposed all the information relegated to interface elements onto the screen, we could see how far enemies could see, what they could hear, and there were clear cues whether we were in the light or dark. There were also a wide array of tools to play with and distract guards, manipulating the play space to your discretion, and a point system that incentivized stealth play. In a talk on designing stealth, Nells Anderson argues that stealth games need clear information, clear AI, low execution, and low consequences for failure, lessons that were learned over the history of stealth games, and then applied to exceptional effect in Mark of the Ninja. So we have a clear lineage in history, as well as an understanding of the mechanics and dynamics of stealth, but what of the genre's aesthetics? Most of these games have a fictional world that tries to justify stealth as a concept, whether it be as a ninja, a thief, or a special operative, but at a more foundational level, the emotional resonance of these games is very primal. Think of a game that we all play as children, hide and seek. This is a universal game that functions as a training ground for something even more primal, predator and prey. Both these roles require stealth, but the emotions are different. Predatory stealth is about planning and anticipation, where a stealth as someone being hunted is about pure abject fear. Hence there can be a different schism in stealth games between different emotions. In Batman, we employ some version of predatory stealth as we whisk around the room, striking fear into our victims. Where a stealth in a horror game is about being hunted, about disempowerment, about petrification at force is much stronger than you. So we see how stealth games were birthed by avoidance in Pac-Man, were clarified by the constraints of technology in MGS, blend with systemic elements as they did in Thief, merged into different genres because they allow for intentionality and can be differentiated even on emotional grounds. The puzzle of stealth game design though, is that it is a genre with a very robust integration between mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics, but also sits at the uneasy fuzziness between genres and design sensibilities. Stealth games have elements of puzzle solving as well, a fact Hideo Kojima understood about its design. Each room in his games functions like a puzzle of sorts, with the different interacting pieces you had to either use or navigate. The subtle distinction between puzzle and stealth may be hard to see, but there is a deeply underrated game that illustrates this. Stealth Inc is a stealth puzzle platformer. It breaks levels into distinct sections, but also has a stealth template. What's interesting here is that there is usually a dominant solution in each level. It is a puzzle game that asks you to find the revelation in order to proceed, but it also has stealth gameplay concepts. It has an awareness meter, light and dark gauges, and enemy states. However, it also has execution requirements in its platforming. It blends Super Meat Boy with Metal Gear with Braid. And so what this clarifies is the subtle distinction between different genres, games that live on the border, that revel in ambiguity, ironically, clarify the distinction between them. Puzzles are about dominant solutions, platformers have execution. In Greg Costa-Kan's book Uncertainty in Games, he calls this to divide between performative uncertainty and solver uncertainty. This is not a dichotomy, but two variables that can be invoked in different measure. Stealth games have information uncertainty too, which intrinsically overlaps with solver uncertainty, but this also overlaps with systemic games, which involve another term used by game designers, intentionality. The play with information is what unites stealth, systemic and puzzle games, but their distinction is also clarified because of this. Stealth Inc. requires you play with systems with intentionality to solve a dominant solution in a play space using stealth gameplay, all while executing difficult feats of platforming dexterity. Recursory look at Steam reviews reveal most think of this game as a puzzle game first. Mark of the Ninja also had clear information, but levels don't have dominant solutions. They are play spaces that allow for dynamic interaction between player and environment and enemies. Stealth games have as part of their structure, dynamicism, an interplay that allows a shift from planning to execution, from success to failure, and this creates a loop. In Metal Gear, dealing with guards in the alert phase requires you either hide or try and kill them all. Playing with information uncertainty can be done in a variety of different ways. The latest Splinter Cell games has a last known location mechanic, which shows where enemies think you are so you can work around this. Metal Gear Solid 3 has a camouflage system that allows you to blend with the environment, and Metal Gear Solid 4 automated this and wove it into your suit. Hitman allows you to switch costumes to trick and deceive, embedding the logic of each fictional world into the dynamics of play. Whether light or dark, noise, disguises or using verticality, stealth games revel in the space between certainty and uncertainty, which in turn invokes deeply ingrained evolutionary instincts around predator and prey. However, it is perhaps precisely because of their versatility that stealth games have never become as popular as other genres. Superficially, they are about non-direct confrontation in a world where direct action is perceived as more fun. It is because stealth games are systemic games, puzzle games, emotional games, and games about intentionality, execution and dynamic interaction that they, like the protagonists that feature in their games, have blended into the background. Almost all modern action games, whether uncharted or call of duty, have incorporated stealth to create better pacing or more systemic gameplay. Immersive sims and systemic games have appropriated stealth as well, because their inherently systemic nature allows for devices and gadgets. Dishonored is a stealth-systemic game, the same way Thief was back in 1998, both requiring planning and dynamic interaction. Perhaps in response to this appropriation, stealth games, in order to become popular again, need to do this in turn. This is what Metal Gear Solid did, right? It blended a core of stealth with action, set pieces, cinematic design and a compelling narrative. Metal Gear was popular in my estimation, because it was a stealth game in disguise. Games like Stealth Inc. and Mark of the Ninja, exemplify both the blended and pure aspects of stealth game design. But perhaps the genre needs to now conceal itself amidst the ambiguity of other genres, taking back what was taken from it, and strike from the shadows.