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Recent Interactive Reading

No-one Has to Die is a fairly easy puzzle game, framed with a textual story about time travel, secrets, revenge, and family loyalties. To my taste the puzzles are a little too easy — there weren’t that many serious “aha” moments for me — but the structure is clever, as puzzle solutions require you to experiment with which characters you’re willing to sacrifice, and understanding the story fully requires working through several variant possibilities. As to the writing, it could have been both briefer and more effective; character dialogue is very on-the-nose, and they argue exhaustively about who should be saved next and why. (Contrast all the long-winded, sterile argumentation about who should be saved here with the sparer and much more moving writing in Hide&Seek’s James Bond game.)

What’s most interesting about No-one Has to Die is the structure: puzzles used to represent significant and morally charged decisions, inventive reuse of the same puzzle levels with slightly different parameters depending on the time-travel, etc.

Alan DeNiro’s Corvidia is a brief, surreal piece in Twine, more interactive poetry than story. A man looks at a tree and sees… well, it’s hard to explain, really. Due to some CSS work, the linked words appear first, and boldest; the rest of the words, the sentences that give the links context, fade in slowly. It’s a fitting effect given that “Corvidia” seems to be describing someone fixated on a few particular images or ideas (the words linked), with only a vague and fantastical notion of what’s going on in the rest of the world. Or maybe what he imagines is true, but in that case, he lives in a universe very unlike our own.

Star Wench is a Choose Your Own Death book by Anna Anthropy. Not Choose Your Own Adventure, because (aside from the whole trademark issue) you don’t get to pick what leads up to the death:

How does the story end? Only YOU can find out! Your one choice: which page to open up to. Keep reading until you’ve suffered not one but MANY terrible fates.

The genre is lurid pulp SF, the same sort of thing parodied in Leather Goddesses of Phobos and in Anthropy’s Twine adventure The Hunt for the Gay Planet. The endings conform to genre expectations: you spend a lot of your time being tied up, or sacrificed, or eaten, or made the slave and plaything of the sinister Queen of Space. Endings are no more than a page long, in large type, though a few are doubled up with line-drawings by guest artists. Many of the endings are solid ultra-short stories in themselves. Others imply things about the story that must have led up to this point, or play on CYOA or genre expectations. (If you read ending 1, you get a stern telling-off about reading non-linear narrative in a linear way.) There’s no narratively meaningful agency, since you’re really only picking an ending by number — it’s not like you get to make in-context choices for your protagonist — but that fits as well, celebrating the arbitrary nature of both pulp fiction and old-school CYOA books.

Entertaining, if not especially work-safe.

Castle of the Red Prince is parser-based gothic horror IF by CEJ Pacian. Lots of Pacian’s past work in some way sets aside a standard aspect of the IF world model: Gun Mute puts the player on a linear forward/back movement track, Walker & Silhouette can be driven largely by keyword, Rogue of the Multiverse uses auto-generated grids of space for its exploration sequences. “Castle of the Red Prince” participates in that tradition by eradicating the usual distinctions of IF space. Everything in the game can be interacted with at any time; if you try to put an object in a container many rooms away, you will move there automatically. You can look at any place on the map, any room, at any time. If you’ve ever seen something, it remains in scope for you to refer to.

The protagonist is a student of arcane arts who is able to gain new knowledge in sleep and who first came to know of this place through dreams. There are some characters, but we so easily move in and out of their space that it’s hard to feel they are equals of the protagonist, or that we’re really in any kind of ongoing social context with them. Because there’s no need to remember directions, I didn’t build up a strong sense of relative space, of where things were in comparison with other things. I also found that the lack of local description unmoored me a little, because I’m so used to moving through rooms and LOOKing if I think I might have missed something. That’s probably just my IF-playing habit fighting against the new mechanisms, though.

Narratively, the surface story is fairly trivial — collect needed objects, solve a couple of puzzles, have minimal personal investment — while the backstory remains complex and largely mysterious. There are hints of significant past battles, of entities both evil and Faery, of generations of heroes trying to put things right, but only a few outlines of their struggle become clear in the course of the game.

The whole game, therefore, feels a bit gauzy and distant, reminiscent of Ebb and Flow of the Tide or The Guardian. There’s something intriguing and pleasurable about it, and I enjoyed seeing the experiment in IF world model, but it wasn’t a very intense or compelling experience. I am likely to remember Pacian’s other work longer.

The Pulse Pounding, Heart Stopping Game Jam was a weekend-long game jam for dating sims, producing over 80 works, many in Twine, about dating or relationship situations.

Among the entries (and obviously, with 80+, I didn’t get to try nearly all of them):

Porpentine’s “UNTIL OUR ALIEN HEARTS BEAT AS ONE” is a two-player Twine game about communicating through symbol and image.

Christine Love’s “Magical Maiden Madison” (shown) is an interactive texting conversation about a Magical Maiden’s evening adventures (which I know maybe just barely enough tropes to understand).

Mattie Brice’s “Blink” tells the story of dates that go wrong, over and over, in several different ways. If there’s a way to make things go right, I never found it. Possibly that’s the point. Possibly I’m just bad at these sorts of dates.

Joseph Miller’s “Dating Folksims” is a series of rules for live-action games to be played around the idea of dating faux pas and successes.

Mike Joffe’s “Benthic Love” explores the dating options of a young male anglerfish. It is surprisingly touching and also contains a surprising number of biology facts.

Elizabeth Sampat and Loren Hernandez’s “How to Be Happy” is a rather grim metaphorical puzzle game in which you can try to find other blocks to fit with your own, but are likely to fail, sooner or later, in keeping them with you.

Leon Arnott’s “Dining Table” is a creepy story about the dating lives of dolls. The end is, I think, a little overexplained, but the premise is genuinely disturbing; my main complaint is that I might have liked to see more of the story told interactively rather than through straight exposition.

Valentine’s “Greek Mythology PPHSJam game” is a Ren’Py piece that lets you cavort with various gods, though I’ve yet to find an outcome that was really positive for me. Hermes became my dating wingman, though, which has got to be worth something.

wattomatic’s “Life on Hold” is a Depression-Quest-like exploration of a relationship in a messed up holding pattern, where the more options you get, the less you seem to be able to change anything really important about the protagonist’s lifestyle.

Leigh Alexander has also written about the PPHSJAM here, with notes about some of the games that I didn’t cover myself.

Hide&Seek: Tiny Games Kickstarter

Tiny Games is a Kickstarter-funded app offering rulesets for dozens and dozens of short, simple games, designed for a variety of social situations: games to play at the the pub, on the train, in your living room. Hide&Seek has years of experience doing installation-style games at museums and festivals, including the very cool Searchlight game demonstrated at the GDC Experimental Games Workshop this year. The Tiny Games collection includes work by a long list of well-known experimental game designers.

I’ve enjoyed all the Hide&Seek work I’ve encountered, and I especially like the playfulness of this concept, as a source of social lubrication and fun when no one happens to have a pack of cards or wants to commit to a playthrough of Arkham Horror. Or you just want to do something new.

There are only a couple of days left on this project and it’s still shy of its funding goal, so if it sounds like something you might be interested in, check it out.

Dominique Pamplemousse in “It’s All Over Once the Fat Lady Sings”

Dominique Pamplemousse in “It’s All Over Once the Fat Lady Sings” (IFDB page) is a new claymation musical adventure by Deirdra Kiai. It’s compact (1-2 hours, rather than 12+) and the puzzles are on the easy side. Some people might find these features to be drawbacks, but considering the limits on my gaming time these days, I appreciated getting my story delivered at a good clip. And it’s a pretty entertaining mystery, with enough twists for a noir short story; people aren’t exactly what they seem, a point that starts with the gender-ambiguous protagonist but eventually comes to apply to just about everyone you meet.

I was also fine with the fact that the puzzles mostly made sense and weren’t too maddening to work out. Many of them boil down to legwork — get a lead, figure out where to go next in order to pursue it — with just a handful of more complex or physical interactions, most pretty clearly clued.

A few slightly-more-spoilery thoughts follow the break.

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Poems by Heart (inkle/Penguin)

Poems by Heart is an interactive text game created by inkle for Penguin. The idea is to make a game of learning poetry: you can play through an individual poem over and over, at different levels of difficulty, until you have all the words by heart. At the first level, a few words have been removed from the verse and you must fill them in from the selection of options at the bottom of the page. The blanks are marked up to show how many syllables are needed in the blank space. At each new level, more words are removed, until finally you’re assembling an entire stanza from bits, with a timer going. If you miss a word, or let the time run out, firm red handwriting marks in the correct version: your invisible English teacher intervenes.

The words you’re offered are not random, either. Often the right choice is accompanied by many close-but-wrong options, things with similar sense or sound. Learning poetry this way draws attention to repetition, syllable count, and rhyme, because those elements become active helps in filling in the missing words.

If you turn on sound, male or female voices will read the lines aloud as you complete them, helping teach the words aurally as well as visually. I find this useful, though it isn’t suitable for some of the times I use a tablet device. There’s even a mechanism to do a timed recording of your own, once you’ve mastered the words. I see the point of this, yet dread it; I recoil from the sound of my own recorded voice, and would like to be able to master spoken poetry without ever having to hear the results from the outside. This may be a personal quirk.

Playing repetitive poetry madlibs might sound not very fun, but it is, in fact, entertaining, in a slightly virtuous, Concentration-y way. There are scores, and achievements, and the whole presentation is polished and slick, in the way inkle has proven to be very good at. Still, the app pitches itself not just as a game, but as an educational tool for people who want to master poetry.

A couple of free poems are offered to start with, and you can buy more from the poem store, in “packs” arranged around themes: love, odes, Elizabethan, etc. The selection covers a number of crowd-pleasing standards: Shakespeare and Donne, Wordsworth and Whitman, the inevitable Poe. Very long poems, like the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, are broken over multiple sections — and, cunningly, sold piecemeal in different packs, to encourage expensive completionism. (I say expensive, but each poetry pack is $.99, so buying several is not necessarily going to break the bank.)

Because the app is not just about being fun but also about teaching something, the selection is going to be particularly important. People will vary in just which poems they want to bother committing to memory. I would have picked a little differently, had I been selecting purely the things I’d like to have memorized myself: some Pound, some Yeats. Perhaps some other modern favorites, though I realize for recent poets copyright may have been an issue. Bits of Chaucer and Beowulf. Other pieces by Donne and Dickinson that I happen to prefer to the pieces they picked. Perhaps some Chinese and Japanese poetry in translation. I’d even go for some untranslated Latin or Greek, but I accept that there may not be such a sufficiently large number of people clamoring for an in-app purchase of the opening of the Odyssey, or a selection of Horace’s odes, to make the effort worthwhile. Still, I think foreign language poetry readings would be great from a language-pedagogy perspective.

I wished at times that the gameplay engaged more than it does with the sense of the poems. Possibly what I’m imagining would be more like, somehow, an interactive game enactment of Le Ton Beau de Marot, playfully trying out multiple metaphors for the same concepts, offering translations and comparisons. Skinning sonnets to show the structural bones beneath. Contrasting a poem with the text or texts to which it is an answer. “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” has meaning because of what it reacts against, after all. Perhaps this kind of play would not be so good at teaching the exact words of a poem, but there are different ways of knowing poetry.

This is not really a fair criticism of Poems by Heart. I found the app slick, pleasurable, and effective at its aims. It would be a lot to demand that it also function as literary critique by way of gameplay. I suppose what makes me wistful is that it sort of approaches more sophisticated pedagogical territory by forcing the player to think through the verses again and again, ask what fits, remember what goes where, and so internalize certain structural rules. But I think it does not really contribute new aspects to the experience or comprehension of those poems — not the way Gregory Weir’s Silent Conversation does, not the way a literary commentary or an illustration does, not the way The Waste Land app does, not the way a translation does.

I want a game that is a translation of a poem.

I want to write a game that is a translation of a poem.

This is my own problem.

Poems by Heart is pretty cool. If you want to do the things it teaches you to do, you should check it out.

Spring Thing 2013: A Roiling Original

A Roiling Original is a wordplay game by Andrew Schultz, a sequel to 2012’s Shuffling Around (my review). It uses a similar mechanic of changing one object into another via anagrams, and is an entrant in Spring Thing 2013.

More detailed thoughts after the break. If you’re planning to play and vote on Spring Thing games yourself, you may want to wait before reading this.

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GDC: Me at Indie Soapbox, Ranting about Text

At GDC 2013 I was onstage three times — twice to speak about Versu, but once also at the Indie Soapbox, which is a session in which ten indie game developers get five minutes each to talk about whatever they want. The soapbox topics were extremely varied and covered everything from the pleasures of writing indie games while traveling the world to publicity challenges to how to make interactive music that changes as the gameplay changes.

I talked about interactive text. Actually, I kind of ranted about interactive text.

The gist of my rant was: text is not just cheap. It’s not just the medium you use when you have no resources and no high-end software. It’s a very powerful medium for communicating nuance, viewpoint, interiority, motivation, the experience of the outsider. It’s an artistic medium with its own beauties. And because language is all around us, embodying cultural norms and politics, word-mechanics can address big issues.

Sometimes in the game industry you encounter people who don’t respect text, or don’t respect the craft of writing, as though creating good text were less expressive than creating good art, or less challenging than creating good code. That’s their error.

Sometimes people assume text games must be ugly and have low production values. That isn’t true either. It is possible for text games to be visual feasts.

Here are some of the pieces I talked about or didn’t get time to talk about, and one or two more that I might have talked about if they’d been out at the time.

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