Hi, I’m Hamish Black and welcome to Writing on Games. When I’ve talked about certain
games not working in any other form before, the games in question tend to be these lofty
deconstructions of the medium that have you reflecting on your actions or whatever. Which
is why it’s perhaps odd that, upon hearing word that a film adaptation of 2012’s Sleeping
Dogs was in the works, I was sceptical in the way I would be had you told me that Hellblade
was being turned into a movie, for example. In a way, it’s a similar problem I foresee
the upcoming Uncharted film having; namely that you make that movie, don’t be surprised
when you end up with a pale imitation of Indiana Jones. But I feel that the potential issues
with Sleeping Dogs go deeper than that. There isn’t that disconnect you have with Uncharted
where you’ve taken a certain franchise and turned it into a stop-and-pop shooter. To
hear the developers talk about it, Sleeping Dogs’ identity is far more intrinsically
tied to the Hong Kong action films that inspired it, but the beauty lies in what it does with
this influence; using its mechanics and systems to fully place you at the centre of an undercover
cop martial arts thriller. You can see this vision in the game’s use
of the Batman Arkham combat system, for example; rewarding simple inputs and recognition of
visual cues with intense animations. Fluidity becomes the priority as you treat each encounter
as if it were a rhythm game more than a brawler, reflecting the way a director like John Woo
views his own action scenes, for example. You can also see it in the game’s world
design. Over the many hours of your playtime, you get used to navigating the winding, neon-draped
streets of Hong Kong to the extent that the city becomes a character in itself; leading
to moments between missions where you aren’t necessarily focused on the plot, but the detail
of the open world is consistently establishing a sense of place nonetheless. That’s something
you don’t get with a bunch of expedited establishing shots in a movie, no matter how
good they might look. But in revisiting it, perhaps the most impressive
part of Sleeping Dogs’ vision is that it doesn’t just stop at the game’s combat.
Arguably the main reason Sleeping Dogs can only work as a game, is that it manages to
gamify the complicated morality of being an undercover cop at the core of so many of its
cinematic influences. Again, it might seem weird to say this, considering
that the story of Sleeping Dogs isn’t particularly complicated in any way. Stop me if you’ve
heard this before: undercover cop gets in too deep and begins to question his loyalties;
having to convince his higher ups that he’s different from the criminals he’s been sent
in to bring down. It’s Infernal Affairs, Hard Boiled, Police Story; it’s an effective
“one of those,” but at the end of the day it’s still just “one of those.”
But that’s where Sleeping Dogs’ morality system comes in; managing to avoid the pitfalls
of the many similar systems found in games around that time; the ones that would treat
morality as a simple good and bad binary. Protagonist Wei Shen’s struggle is more
complicated than that; he’s neither morally righteous in his duties as a cop nor a totally
unhinged maniac as a triad footsoldier. He’s trapped in and trying to make sense of a strange
and dangerous situation; trodden on by law enforcement but given status by his gang.
Now how does the game make you feel this moral ambiguity, you might ask? By making being
an objectively good cop really goddamn hard. See, in Sleeping Dogs you have two scoring
systems during missions – triad and cop points. Triad points are associated with fighting
enemies, while cop points line up with, you guessed it, obeying the law. As you gain more
points in each, Wei gains more abilities along two separate skill trees, meaning you’re
incentivised to keep both as high as possible. Where this contributes to the story is the
way you’re scored on each. Your triad score is a blank slate; starting at zero and filling
up as you dispatch your foes using whatever grisly method takes your fancy. Your cop meter
on the other hand, starts full and gradually declines as you mess up; from things as extreme
as running over civilians to being clumsy with a parkour prompt.
Put simply, your triad score is a reward for creativity; your cop score is punitive towards
stepping out of line and crucially, both are active at the same time. It is possible to
fulfil both your requirement to the gritty world of the triad and maintain your reputation
as a police officer, but it’s a remarkably difficult tightrope to walk.
To be a good cop, you have to go against the urges countless open world crime games have
hammered into your head. The world is no longer your oyster; you could cut that corner to
more effectively pursue your target, but you’d be endangering lives. How about that enticing
sick jump over there? Well, make sure you don’t land on a fence; heaven forfend you
do some damage to property. After a while, it becomes easier and easier to forego the
niceties of being a police officer, in favour of a more bombastic approach; mirroring Wei's
decline. And what’s great about all of this is that,
at the end of the day, it falls on you to police yourself. In other games of this ilk,
the police act as a means of resetting the balance of the world; as you do more and more
daft video game shit, the game pushes back against you with increasing severity to stop
you feeling indestructible. In Sleeping Dogs, it’s difficult to get any kind of wanted
level outside of scripted moments, meaning that the constant decline of that meter – its
attachment to the development of your character - is the only thing stopping you from going
completely off the rails. It’s all in service of asking the question
– in a world where we’re told that crime doesn’t pay, what if it did? You experience
the triad lifestyle as enticing; it encourages you to do whatever the hell you want, costs
be damned. The cops, by comparison, are framed as the leash around your neck. By having to
balance both loyalties at the same time, you feel the struggle Wei does; trying and failing
to maintain distance from the triad he is now a part of.
And just think about that for a minute; we get all this from a slight rejigging of the
way in which morality is given a score during missions. It seems so simple, but speaks to
the larger issue that even with what feel like the least complicated games, it’s not
just the words that tell the story; it’s how the words are sold to you through your
interactions, the world design, etc. Every little element of a game that simply won’t
be there in a two hour, uninteractive film. And look, I’m sure Donnie Yen would be more
than competent, I’m sure the action scenes would be flashy and I’m sure you could write
some serviceable dialogue to move that action along. What you would be missing out on, however,
is the fact that Sleeping Dogs is a simple story well told; and without the means of
telling that story well, what you're left with will undoubtedly feel shallow by comparison.
So I hope you enjoyed my piece revisiting Sleeping Dogs. If you did, maybe consider
hitting subscribe as well as the little bell thingy, and check out the podcast in the description.
If you feel like going the extra mile however, you can always check out the Patreon like
these wonderful folks currently on screen. I am forever thankful for your continued support.
In particular I’d like to thank Mark B. Writing, Michael Wolf, Artjom Vitsjuk,
Spike Jones, Vasili Hrebinka, Chris Wright, Dr. Motorcycle, Harry Fuertes, Ham Migas, Travis Bennett,
Zach Casserly, Samuel Pickens, Tom Nash, Shardfire, Filip Lange, Rob, Rusty Shackleford, Ana
Pimentel, Jessie Rine, Brandon Robinson, Iago Foxo Bouza, Justins Holderness, Biggy Smith, Peter, Christian Konemann, Cameltraffic,
Nico Bleackley, Nicolas Ross and Charlie Yang. And with that I’m Hamish Black and
this has been Writing on Games. Thank you very much for watching and I’ll see you
next time.