No one ever bought "BioShock" just to do plumbing.

No one bought "Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic" to play cards.

And as great as it was to make a big catch, did anyone really play "The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time" just to fish?

Let us stop and praise the mini-game, the little diversions tucked within the epic adventures we love to play. Who makes these things? The guy on the development team who isn't trusted to contribute to the larger experience? How is it decided if and where the mini-game fits? Why are these things even necessary? Who makes sure they aren't annoying (or fails to figure that out)?

This post is the first of a series of interviews with the people behind the mini-games that were tucked into some gaming greats.

First up: "BioShock" Hacking. I got the details about this one last week during a 15-minute phone interview with 2K Boston designer Dorian Hart, one of the designers on the current best-reviewed game of the year.

Hart and I discussed the inspiration for the game, the mixed fan response, what Hart and team would have done differently had they had the time and the new twist that employees of 2K Boston have put on the hacking game when they play it in the office.

An excerpt:

...we knew going in that some people would think it was great and want to do it over and over again -- and that some people would enjoy it at first and gradually come to think of it as a chore -- and some people would hate it right from the start.

Read on for the full interview.

Multiplayer: Who came up with the idea for the hacking mini-game?

Dorian Hart, designer, 2K Boston: There was a team working on it. If it was anyone's personal project that was Paul Hellquist who was the lead designer on "BioShock." And hacking was kind of his bailiwick specifically. As with all things to do with the design it was subject to team review and testing and opinions. It changed some in the implementation but I was involved mostly from a "how does it affect the balance of the game?" side of things.

Multiplayer: Can you tell me what the basic idea was? Was it a call-out to the team by somebody saying, "There's going to be hacking in the game. We need to come up with a mini-game. Everybody pitch an idea"? How does this kind of thing begin?

Hart: In this case, back when the "BioShock" design document was just a fledgling thing and we were just in the early stages figuring what kind of features would go into it and just what the general design was going to be like -- at that point we were occasionally using "System Shock 2," one of our previous games, almost like a template, as a starting off point, for thinking about the design. And hacking had been a big part of that design. And so it was a natural thing to put on the first list of features to consider for "BioShock."

As the project went on and things changed around it, we kept going back to it. It survived passes of other things being cut. We liked how it was fitting in. It did serve a very similar function -- right up until the end -- as hacking did in "System Shock 2," which was just a kind of a window into a lot of other game systems: a way that a player could change a lot of systems to his own benefit, just through a different means than somebody shooting things.

Multiplayer: Tell me about the specific implementation of the idea as a timed puzzle game, affecting the flow of fluids. How did those design elements come together?

Hart: From a gameplay point of view... I don't know if you're familiar with the hacking system of "System Shock 2"…

Multiplayer: No, I'm not.

Hart: In "System Shock 2" it was little more than an interactive coin flip. There wasn't a lot to it. It was a thing you could get better at from a meta standpoint by increasing your skills through the character sheets. But the game itself was very uninvolved. You just clicked on a few things and found out if you won or not. From the beginning -- Paul and the team agreed -- we wanted the hacking in "BioShock" to be more of an actual game, something the player could acquire skill and get better at and just be a little more interesting.

We talked about a number of ideas. Paul came in one day with a stack of index cards that he had made and he basically developed this idea -- a variant, as I'm sure you've read already, of an old game called "Pipe Dream" -- where he actually had made the game on paper. We sat around in a conference room, and he laid it out on a table and just kind of walked through what it would be like to play, setting up the board and experimenting with different mechanics of how tiles got flipped or switched and how many you had at a time. It started out fairly similar to what we ended up shipping with.

Multiplayer: When did this happen?

Hart: <After checking with his colleagues> Someone with a keener mind than mine says at least two years ago. It was quite early in the process.

Multiplayer: To develop the idea that early and yet to have stayed so close to what you had is pretty impressive. In the case of a mini-game like this, how did you guys go about assessing whether the game was going to be familiar enough each time that people were going to get better at it -- versus the possibility that the player would dread "Oh no, I have to do this exact same mini-game again, unlike the rest of the game which is constantly unfurling new content"?

Hart: On a basic level, we got all kinds of play-test and focus testing and getting outsiders' opinions on what they thought about it. I suppose it is fair to say that we knew going in that some people would think it was great and want to do it over and over again -- and that some people would enjoy it at first and gradually come to think of it as a chore -- and some people would hate it right from the start. Because with something like a mini-game in a first-person shooter, you're gonna get a lot of different kinds of people playing the game and having different opinions on it.

Multiplayer: Yeah, like, "Why do I have to do a puzzle game instead of shooting somebody?"

Hart: The way we decided to handle that: On a basic level we tried to make the game grow as the player grew. We start out with a very simple puzzle with a slow-moving flow and no complicating factors. By the end of the game every hacking board is a minefield of short-circuits and other negative tiles and the speed goes faster. For people that wanted to get the benefits of hacking but were not enjoying the game itself, we put in bypasses around it, which were still balanced in with the rest of the economy. There were auto-hack tools that could be found or crafted in the game.

Multiplayer: Right, or the take-pictures-of-all-the-drones-so-you-can-auto-hack them thing.

Hart: Exactly. And, also, every hack -- and we decided this early on -- would have a buy-out cost. So you could always spend money instead of time, because those are two currencies that the player will place a lot of value in. So depending on how hard the hack is, the player can spend a little to a lot of money and instantly win the hack simply by paying cash.

And the hacking track of tonics was a way you could adjust your tolerance level, so to speak. If you put a lot of hacking tonics into your character sheet, it would make the hacks easier and thus bring the price down. So, if you found the benefits worthwhile but didn't want to expend the time energy to play the game, that was an option. But if you loved playing the game, you actually got the best possible outcome, which was no extra expenditure of resources to get the full benefit.

Multiplayer: What's your view of a mini-game like this and the value it adds to a larger game like "BioShock"? Is it something where you feel that having mini-games within a larger game adds to the experience, because it gives the player extra modes of play? Do you find that it actually does something in terms of affecting the pacing of the game? Is it something that makes the game-world more believable? Somebody who knows nothing about "BioShock" and plays it might have wonder, why is this particular mini-game in here? Why would the designers think this is something worth having in at all? What's your feeling on what it gives the game?

Hart: I suppose it certainly gives the game an extra dimension: something else to do other than shoot. In a shooter, even a shooter that has small variance in how the game plays out, the number of verbs that you actually use in a given 10 minutes, half an hour, an hour of gameplay is pretty limited: You have a gun; you shoot it.

Having a mini-game just gives the player a different thing to do, a way to break the player out of a rut they may be in, in how they're thinking about what they're playing. It engages a different part of their brain. As long as it's not too onerous or forced upon the player too commonly. They say, "Variety is the spice of life," and I think that applies in this case. As long as you don't make it an essential, unavoidable, too-important part of the game, because people are expecting a shooter.

Multiplayer: What have you made of the feedback you guys have gotten regarding this mini-game?

Hart: I'm not too surprised by it. It's pretty much what we expected. We've gotten a lot of positive feedback from people who did it every chance they got and enjoyed doing it. And we've heard from people at the other end of the spectrum who bemoan the fact that here was this thing they had to do that wasn't shooting and didn't change enough from the beginning to the end.

I would admit that given even more development time than we had, one of the things we considered was different mini-games. But when you only have so many hours and so many dollars to throw at something, it wasn't as high a priority as other things.

Multiplayer: You don't mean different mini-games instead of that one?

Hart: There were a lot of different things to hack [in "BioShock"]. One could imagine that we'd have a different game other than "Pipe Dream" for hacking one thing over another thing. But we never went far down that road because we had higher priorities and because we were getting feedback that the hacking game we did would be sufficient to carry this one through to the end.

Multiplayer: Given that there is a fan-following for this hacking mini-game, have you guys thought about or considered or seen anybody already extract the code and make it its own game? I certainly could see it working as a standalone.

Hart: I suppose it's possible, but I have to plead ignorance on that point. I've heard nothing along those lines.

Multiplayer: It's not something you guys play in the office?

Hart: No. We've already moved on to new things.

Multiplayer: You mean you don't just finish a game and sit and play it for a few months?

Hart: Well, the game as a whole, absolutely. I think it's a mark of a good game when people are still playing it long after they have to, after you've put hundreds of hours. I will say that, towards the end, some people tried to make a contest out of trying to complete hacks with the most exposed tiles on the board.

Multiplayer: The most convoluted route?

Hart: Exactly. Specifically, it was a supreme victory if you could arrange the [largest puzzles] with every tile turned over and used in the path. I think it was done once or twice.

Multiplayer: Does the game automatically generate for you at least the pieces that you need in order to complete it?

Hart: I believe that the game always has the straights and curves you need to complete it. Though, it is randomized, so if you are attempting an extremely difficult hack without having installed hacking tonics, it is certainly possible that there will be so many short-circuits and negative tiles on the board that you won't be able to finish it.

Multiplayer: I think that might have happened to me once or twice in the game. Is it true that if you freeze a terminal before you start hacking it that it slows the flow of the water?

Hart: That is absolutely true.

Multiplayer: A lot of hidden stuff in the game, huh?

Hart: Yep.

Multiplayer: Well, thank you for chatting with me about this.