Month: December 2008

Gloom and other thoughts

This Christmas I received a copy of Gloom, which I’ve been curious to play since it was reviewed over at Play This Thing. The mechanics of the game exist to enable the players to tell increasingly implausible and horrific Gorey-style tales about their characters, until at last they are all dead.

As is usually the case with story-telling games, the results are more amusing than coherent. But there are a couple of mechanics I thought worked reasonably well.

Cards in Gloom are transparent plastic with text and numbers in specific areas. As you play, you stack cards representing plot events on your character; the cumulative effect of all these twists and turns is what you see when looking down through all of the stacked cards. Some events overlap others, wholly or partly blotting out their effects. From a story-simulation point of view this is a very coarse-grained kind of bookkeeping (right for a card game, but you’d expect subtler from anything implemented on a computer).

Some cards (in addition to bestowing positive or negative points) come with “story icons” — hearts for romance, coins for monetary adventures, etc. Some subsequent cards receive a bonus for being played on the correct story icon, or are restricted only to be played over a specific icon. This aids in the construction of semi-coherent stories, because you are more likely to play, say, “widowed at the wedding” on a character with some prior romantic events.

But the storytelling aspect is not really about plot as such. Most of the fun here comes from inhabiting the expectations of a particular genre, though — it’s not exactly a mockery or parody of Gorey as an invitation to wallow in a pseudo-Goreyverse for a while. This is not surprising — Second Person has some essays about storytelling boardgames that basically argue that they work best when they rely strongly on genre conventions. IF doesn’t really work on this level: if it did, a game wouldn’t be so much about being immersed in a story, making choices, solving challenges for the protagonist, or playing a role; it would be more about story organization, about choosing developments from outside the tale.

I did once try to construct a game that would be essentially on that level: you had a magical puppet theater, and you could pick objects and puppets and put them on the stage and then start them up; the next scene of the plot would be generated based on the current story state and the selection of characters and props you had chosen. But it was so boring that I gave up after not very long. I am not at all sure IF has the right granularity for that kind of game. Or maybe I just wasn’t thinking about the design right: I was trying to make the computer do the hard (but fun) part, while leaving the tedious management part to the player, which is exactly wrong. What if…

—–

>LULU KISSES MR OLERUD
But Lulu dislikes older men.

>LULU BECOMES DRUNK
Having stolen the keys to her aunt’s liquor cabinet, Lulu spends an evening becoming seriously intoxicated on single malt scotch.

>LULU KISSES MR OLERUD
In her drunken state, Lulu approaches Olerud in the back garden and insinuates herself into his arms.

Olerud is embarrassed: though he would like to respond passionately, he knows that Lulu is acting out of character because of drink. He pushes her away rudely and departs.

>LULU IS SICK
Lulu then wanders over to the rose bushes and is vilely ill.

—–

Of course, a huge problem here would be communicating to the player the range of what can practically be done in this story. Lulu and Olerud exist in too much of a conceptual vacuum. There needs to be a genre with a highly conventional set of standard moves (e.g.: Zeus rapes someone, someone has a child, someone battles a nine-headed monster). There needs to be a clear set of rules for determining when an ending has been accomplished (e.g.: the protagonist founds a city, someone is turned into a tree). There needs to be some source of challenge; possibly in fact the game would provide a goal state explicitly and it would just be up to the player to achieve it (provide a foundation myth for the cult of Demeter; get Aeneas to found a city…).

Hm.

One Room Game Competition 2008

The One Room Game Competition 2008 is now ended, so we can post our reviews.

I played only the three games in English, which were as follow:

Bad Toast. This is a completely bare-bones implementation of a very easy logic puzzle. The only notable thing about it is its implementation in AAS, a system introduced as an April Fools’ prank some years back. As you might imagine of a game written in a deliberately crippled system, the results are not very polished: the parsing and world model is minimal (though in a game this tiny and vacant that doesn’t matter too much), but that’s nothing compared to the magnificent lameness of how you get the game going in the first place: if you don’t have the java runtime you have to install it, and then you have to run it from a command line. People who argue in favor of cross-platform java terps do not, I’m sure, have this in mind.

I gather from RAIF that the author was not fooling around (unless the RAIF posts are themselves a prank): he thinks that XML is an ideal basis for an IF language and considers AAS to be proof of concept that IF games can be built with an XML-structured language. I’m afraid that this game did not help to persuade me of his theory.

At the opposite end of the spectrum was The Moon Watch, a Glulx game with music (I gather — I wasn’t able to get it to get past the opening screen on Spatterlight, and Zoom for OS X doesn’t do sound) and charming cartoon-like graphics. In every way the opposite of the Bad Toast experience, Moon Watch makes the most of being something other than just text. The framing around the game window offers a sort of minimal depiction of your environment; and it cleverly offers some state information, too, because if you put on your space suit, the surroundings blur out, as though seen through a helmet.

In general, this fits with a trend I’ve already observed a number of times: the non-English communities are more consistently doing interesting multimedia work with Glulx than the majority of anglophone authors, and anyone interested in multimedia possibilities really ought to be paying attention to what they’ve done. Look at Beyond, Ekphrasis, Little Falls, or last year’s Kinesis (by the same authors as The Moon Watch, but in Italian). Beyond and Little Falls are in English; with the others, even without playing in full, you can get a sense for the design sensibilities at work and what is being done. The notion of providing an attractive graphical frame for the game seems to be particularly popular.

As fiction, The Moon Watch not necessarily the greatest achievement: it takes a premise that could be very chilling (and is indeed rather scary for about 2 seconds right at the start of the game) and defuses it with humor, goofy sidekicks, and implausible puzzle solutions. The polish is visible elsewhere as well: there are some nice menus, complete with images of the authors. Many default messages have been replaced by amusing Soviet-slogan sorts of reasons why you can’t do the proposed action. Touches like this make it feel like a quality production without making any serious demands on the player emotionally. As for the ending, it is a twist that belongs more to a child’s storybook than to serious science fiction — but that too fits the cartoonish trappings.

The fact that the protagonist is supposed to be a Russian speaker also offers some excuse for the not-quite-idiomatic English in the game — this wasn’t too bad (and it plainly had received some proofreading), but there were some points where it was obvious that a non-native speaker had written it, and a few spots where the punctuation was a little mysterious. (Commas, in particular, were placed without particular regard either for strict grammar or for the places where an English speaker might normally pause.)

The puzzles are a mixed bag. I got through some of them all right (and felt rather proud of myself); others I felt were on the obscure side, and one of them so much so that even with the walkthrough I could not figure out how I was supposed to have resolved it.

So high marks for presentation and general charm; story and puzzles fare less well, but are still entertaining.

Escapade takes the escape the room idea and pushes it in a silly direction: you can escape repeatedly, but none of your escapes last for long, and you’ve got NPCs looking on to comment on your failed MacGyverish attempts.

Here again the game sets aside any kind of serious agenda in favor of silliness; in this case, not as consistent a tone as The Moon Watch, and some of the elements (like the flux capacitor) are more amusing by allusion than they are in their own right. To the extent that there is a coherent plot, it’s mostly reusing stock elements (having you be a less-than-super superhero or sidekick to same; having you locked up and needing to escape; having you assemble implausible contraptions). This is not a game that anyone is going to play for the story.

When it came to the puzzles, I felt a bit that I was struggling to find the specific solutions the author had in mind: there were cool things to do with the provided objects, but I could think of lots of other things also to do with them that weren’t implemented or even (apparently) considered. Refusal messages often said something like “That wouldn’t help you escape,” rather than offering more specific detail that might have helped me envision the puzzle more clearly. It also didn’t help that the game’s text didn’t draw my attention to certain essential features (though perhaps I would have found them by looking at the right time); or that the hints were buggy and started recommending solutions I had already completed, so that I had to go to the walkthrough in order to finish the game.

This is all too bad, and I really hope that the game receives more polish; I had a good enough time with it that I could see how it might have been even better, and I think given that extra work it would appeal to the casual-IF type of player.

I also liked the handling of HR: he had a great deal to say about a number of things, and the keyword-highlighted conversation seemed to work well in this context. One room puzzle games can be very cold and impersonal-feeling, and both The Moon Watch and Escapade avoid this by introducing useful, reactive NPCs. Even though in both cases you’re struggling to solve a series of mechanical tasks, the impression of dealing with a big puzzle box is much less, and I find that makes me more patient and more able to enjoy the process.

Minotaur in a China Shop

Played a few rounds of Minotaur in a China Shop, which is sort of a time management game — only not really. In the time-honored fashion of the Diner Dash games, you’re waiting on customers who want items from your shop (in this case, fancy china pieces) and who get more impatient the longer you take. Only (in distinction with Diner Dash) you have to physically maneuver your way around the stalls and stands, using clumsy controls that make it pretty much inevitable that you’ll knock a few things over on the way. Which makes perfect sense considering that you’re half bull.

Fortunately, your condition is recognized by a sympathetic society, and you have Rage Insurance: should you become too angry (as manifested by breaking a lot of stuff all at once), your insurance will pay out for everything you break. You can make a lot more money in a given turn by smashing your plates deliberately and giving up on the tedious and fiddly task of customer service. Leveling up options primarily enhance your rage capacity, as you can buy new maneuvers with which to destroy china, and more expensive china to destroy. So you end up with a game where the fun gameplay all comes from being antisocial, defying the expectations and desires of the nitwits who come into your shop with little heart-meters floating over their heads. While I play time-management games from time to time, I occasionally develop a certain resentment for the message that customer service people should faithfully put up with even the most absurd and demanding customers.

I’m not sure I share Play This Thing’s characterization of the game as an explanation of the financial mess we’re now in, but from an educational point of view it does concisely demonstrate the whole concept of moral hazard.

It’s not really fun enough (in my opinion) to be worth more than about three rounds of play. But as a comment on a social situation — and, simultaneously, a joke on a whole genre of casual game — it makes its point.

28

is up, though I haven’t done the conversation graph this time because too tired.

However! The good news is, an increasing number of the bugs-to-be-fixed are lightweight and cosmetic; even the run-time errors reported this time were of the “gosh that was a dumb typo” variety, not the “crap I must rethink my whole design” variety.

Though I still haven’t figured out what goes on with the very occasional too-many-activities bug.

Tentative plan: continue human beta-testing this weekend; if things seem to be stabilizing, declare that finished on Monday or Tuesday and spend part of Christmas break doing the final adjustments — more optimizing, removing the collaboration interface (or turning it off in the released build, one of the two), hardcode-caching things at start-up if possible. Working on the presentation layer. And so on.