Yeah, you heard me. X-COM, the game to end all games, is finally getting its long-rumoured remake/sequel. [Boom. Internet explodes.] Wahoo, basically. Yes, it is indeed a first-person shooter – it is extraordinarily sad to wave away X-COM’s traditional genre, but c’mon, did you really think a AAA title in 2010 (or 11, or whenever it ends up being released) was going to be a turn-based strategy game? Let’s wait and see where they take it, at least.

Contrary to ancient prophecy, this tantalising do-over isn’t being made by Ken Levine, but rather is pitched as a game from 2K Marin, the Bioshock 2 chaps. Though it also seems 2K Australia (née Irrational Australia) are heavily involved. Sparse announcement details and the first in-game screenshot are below…

2K Games announced today that XCOM®, the re-imagining of one of gaming’s most storied and beloved franchises, is currently in development at 2K Marin, the studio behind the multi-million unit selling BioShock® 2. Currently in development exclusively for the Xbox 360® video game and entertainment system from Microsoft and Windows PC, XCOM combines the strategic core of the groundbreaking franchise with a suspense-filled narrative and distills it into a tense and unique first-person shooter experience.

“With BioShock 2, the team at 2K Marin proved themselves as masters of first-person, suspenseful storytelling, and with XCOM they will re-imagine and expand the rich lore of this revered franchise,” said Christoph Hartmann, president of 2K. “Players will explore the world of XCOM from an immersive new perspective and experience firsthand the fear and tension of this gripping narrative ride.”

XCOM is the re-imagining of the classic tale of humanity’s struggle against an unknown enemy that puts players directly into the shoes of an FBI agent tasked with identifying and eliminating the growing threat. True to the roots of the franchise, players will be placed in charge of overcoming high-stake odds through risky strategic gambits coupled with heart-stopping combat experiences that pit human ingenuity – and frailty – against a foe beyond comprehension. By setting the game in a first-person perspective, players will be able to feel the tension and fear that comes with combating a faceless enemy that is violently probing and plotting its way into our world.

News reports frequently mention studies that indicate some benefit to playing video games, whether in cognition or critical thinking skills, or physical benefits like hand eye coordination or therapy. Gaynor incorporates some of those examples into his manifesto, which is that games must make the player think. It’s a bedrock design principle that will keep gamers from being an underserved constituency.

All media and genres of art have their schlock; Hollywood is a great example, so are commercialized works of fiction, paintings, you can come up with an example of high art and yard-sale garbage in all cases. But games seem to face a higher barrier to acceptance and legitimacy, both due to their origins and their nature. So it would seem to me that the obligations Gaynor describes for games are not only to gamers, but also to the medium as a whole.

An Obligtion [Fullbright, blog of Steve Gaynor, Jan. 23]

Video games by their nature rely on the input of the player to mean anything. The fact that you can fail at your entertainment is in some ways a barrier to entry for video games. But it’s also the medium’s defining characteristic, and our one inherent hook for engaging the player and making them important.

It’s our opportunity to make the player think. Not to encourage or invite players to in the way that challenging music, art or film might, but to absolutely require demonstrable logical reasoning from our audience. To immerse them in a world and motivate their progress through it with the promise of constantly evolving core interactions and intriguing fiction, then require them to engage their powers of visualization, abstract thinking and mental mapping to proceed. It’s good for the health of the player’s brain. I think of that as being meaningful and enriching entertainment.

This kind of on-the-fly problem solving is accomplished by activity in the player’s prefrontal cortex, employing fluid intelligence and working memory. One’s fluid intelligence decreases over their lifespan, making them less able to formulate new ways of thinking. However, some scientific and military studies have shown that engaging in interactive mental exercises that require us to make these kinds of connections can slow the decline of fluid intelligence, essentially keeping our brains younger and healthier as we age. They’re the kinds of mental challenges that video games can ably provide— creating and maintaining logical connections between new and abstract concepts and spaces to overcome obstacles— that might confer this benefit to players, along with their escapist fun.

Not all games work this way, certainly. As blockbuster, spectacle-focused rollercoaster games rise in popularity, we seem to see less of these sorts of challenge structures in gaming’s mainstream. When the game I’m playing doesn’t need me— when I can sleepwalk through it, when I can tune out and let it wash over me, when it doesn’t make me think— an opportunity has been wasted. Our work can be more than an empty waste of time for our players. We can entertain them while engaging their minds in ways beneficial to their cognitive wellbeing. I think that there is practically an obligation to do so, if we’re going to dedicate ourselves to creating interactive entertainment at all.

- Steve Gaynor

Weekend Reader is Kotaku’s look at the critical thinking in, and of video games. It appears Sundays at noon. Please take the time to read the full article cited before getting involved in the debate here.

Hoping to pile some extra coal into the hype train’s engine, 2K took up the whole first commercial block of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon with a 3-minute-15-second launch trailer. It’s a cool clip, but we get the uneasy feeling that the heavy reliance on non-gameplay, first-person action is just a touch misleading. That said, it’s just a couple of inches above this sentence, so you can judge for yourself.

Unlike the first lot, which showed the initial designs for the original Big Daddies, these show how 2K Marin – the developers working on the sequel – have gone about depicting the Little Sisters for the second game. And they look…well, pretty much identical. Which I guess was the point!

She doesn’t look mean. She just looks like she needs a nap.

These concept art shots appeared yesterday on The Cult of Rapture BioShock website, they were presented as a way to sort of get into the heads of the developers at 2K Marin, seeing what they kept and what they scrapped in coming up with the final design for the game’s protagonist.

Between the first BioShock and the sequel, you’ve seen a lot of concept art for Big Daddies. The logic behind this concept art went beyond different designs and suit combinations. The artists had to imagine what the very first Big Daddy would have on him — this Big Daddy had to feel like he was a rough draft or a work-in-progress, an amalgam of Big Daddies to come. The first Big Daddy was a test case, and in making the perfect prototype, 2K Marin drafted many, many prototypes themselves.

Okay, so this one is just a guy in a suit.

You can see the influence of this design a bit in the Big Sister.

Drill? Check. Slouching? Check.

Underwater Mutant Big Daddy Turtles

Almost perfect.