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GDC Highlights, Tuesday/Wednesday

Tuesday: I went to several AI panels; they were fun, but mostly not related to what I write about here, except by loose analogy. (When AI goes wrong, it goes really really wrong, though.)

Richard Rouse III gave a talk on dynamic stories for games, with shoutouts to some IF work, Versu and Prom Week, and Sam Ashwell’s CYOA types. (Gamasutra writeup here.)

Sam Barlow talked on Her Story: the research that went into the project, the use of mystery and player imagination to fill gaps, etc.(Gamasutra writeup.)

To me, the most compelling moment was the slide of the spreadsheet he used to track word use and figure out which elements needed to be changed. I could really have gone for a 20-30 minute deep dive just into that aspect of the writing. (Hypothesis: because Her Story was successful and looks simple, there will probably be ripoffs, and they will probably be terrible. There is a lot of invisible craft that goes into the word choice to make the game function as it does, and someone careless about that issue could get it very wrong.)

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The Last Hours of Laura K

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The Last Hours of Laura K is an interactive film and transmedia project, which I’ve mentioned before in my interactive film roundup. It was short-listed for the Kitschies Invisible Tentacle prize, and I was on the jury, so I spent a fair amount of time with it, though I can’t claim that I watched all twenty-four hours of the main footage, let alone got to the bottom of it.

When you start the piece, you’re granted access to many, many hours of footage of Laura K during the last hours of her life, collected from cell phones and surveillance cameras and other sources – the sort of tapestry you might imagine law enforcement being able to pull together either now or in the very near future.

These include, towards the end of the footage, a sequence in which Laura seems to stabbed by an anonymous stranger in a crowded place, and we see her death and the discovery of her body. (This is something you could easily watch as the first two minutes of your play experience, or not think of trying until hours in.)

There’s too much here to watch straight through, though, so you can also access different snippets associated with times when Laura was sending or receiving social media messages.

The borders of the fiction are interestingly broken: characters within Laura K are, on Twitter and Instagram, following one another but also real people. There’s a Tumblr site that’s part of the background on SaturnEye that links into a number of real-world situations and events. At every turn there are bits that reinforce the idea that this story is part of the real world, and its threats (oppression, bad policing, corporate greed, surveillance, creepers on the internet) are the same threats that exist in the real world.

More than that: I ran into a few stilted-feeling bits here and there, but for the most part what I encountered felt very plausible: the body language and the dialogue communicated that these were real people going about a day they were finding stressful, but that their behavior was not being performed for anyone’s benefit. In that sense it is almost the opposite of Her Story, where the main character is self-consciously performing in a way I think is part of the story, but others have mentioned they find rather off-putting.

And yet the scene in which Laura’s sister Jess finds her dead, and we watch this layered with a voicemail message left by Laura’s mother, has a compelling sense of focus and irony that most real-world footage doesn’t. They pull off a neat trick here balancing between the scripted and unscripted feel.

All that said, though, I didn’t get to the end of Laura K, and I did get to the end of Her Story, if by “the end” we mean “a point at which I had seen most of the content, felt I knew who had done the crime, and had my own version of the narrative worked out.” And I think there are several reasons for that.

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GDC Highlights, Monday

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Today got off to an excellent start with the Narrative Innovation Showcase, which included Samantha Gorman on PRY; Aaron Reed on the Ice-Bound Concordance; Katie Chironis on Elsinore, a time-looping Hamlet game that you play as Ophelia; Nina Freeman on Cibele; and Richard Rouse on The Church in the Darkness. There’s a Polygon article about the panel, though that leaves out TCitD and may also give the impression that the discussion was mostly a tired rehash of the Authorial Intent Vs. Player Agency battle. It wasn’t.

The showcase was curated by Clara Fernández-Vara and Matthew Weise, and it made for a really great overview of some of the current experimentation in interactive narrative. There was new information even about the projects I knew a fair amount about: for instance, that Ice-Bound Concordance contains only 50K words of text, a surprisingly small total considering how richly varied the experience seems when you’re playing; that one single text passage of PRY contains about 45 minutes’ worth of video, accessible if you pull apart the text at the right places; that The Church in the Darkness randomizes the motives of the cult you’re investigating, so that in one playthrough it might prove to be sinister and in another, perhaps, well-meaning or at worst a bit misguided.

Aaron Reed talked about conceptualizing Ice-Bound’s narrative in terms of a sculptural interaction — the player working with clay to shape the story, rather than moving through it as a maze or customizing it as though it were a car with selectable colors. And he referred to Ice-Bound’s use of props as “Chekhov’s dollhouse,” in which the player gets to decide which items take on the role of the gun on the mantelpiece, guaranteed to have an effect later on in the story.

Nina’s talk about Cibele was focused more on the shape of the story: that Cibele is intentionally a vignette, capturing one moment in the emotional development of the characters, and that the abruptness of the conclusion is intentional and designed to create part of the emotional effect.

Anyway, really good talk; well-attended; and it was gratifying looking around from where I was sitting and seeing old parser hands as well as folks from inkle, Choice of Games, and Failbetter in the audience.

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You Can’t See Any Such Thing (Matt Sheridan Smith)

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You Can’t See Any Such Thing is a curious parser work that riffs off standard parser behavior; the opening explains that it is the descendant of a previous game that the author used as part of a gallery show.

The interface is enhanced with fancy typography and elements such as photographs you can mouse over to expand: an unusual degree of elaboration, given that this is Inform under the surface. Screen Shot 2016-03-09 at 12.10.04 PM (Certain library responses are familiar, and if you delve into the source, there’s a telling Release/play.html URL for the playable content. If, however, you type VERSION to verify this, your command vanishes silently into ether, unacknowledged. Asking about the machine producing this text is apparently forbidden, which is consistent with its themes and aesthetic intent [even if also a bit of a license violation].)

[Edited to add: Juhana Leinonen remarks that it is using a Vorple interface.]

The piece focuses on the way that the parser experience lets you control different sensory approaches to a scene. It’s as overt as possible about the interactive elements — interactive nouns are in bold; verbs are specified and particular verbs go with particular rooms.

The writing is literary, and the interaction is about exploring rather than about solving a puzzle or causing certain actions to occur in the plot. Though we are allowed to LOOK, SMELL, TOUCH, and so on, we are still readers rather than actors, and our reading function is reinforced by the narrator’s manner of clarifying things, and by responses to parser errors.

When I played, I was immediately drawn northward, to the Widow’s perspective, and was immediately satisfied with lavish descriptions of perfume notes and a Proustian trip into her girlhood recollections.

In another room, the room for examining, each examination carries the player over to another location, in deepening vistas reminiscent of Lime Ergot.

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Enter the Oubliette Room Escape

Sunday a group from the London IF Meetup got together to tackle the Enter the Oubliette escape room. This was my first contact with escape rooms, though I’ve heard about a number from friends who’ve either played or worked on creating them. (If you’re in Seattle, here’s Sam Ashwell on the work of Puzzle Break. In London, I’ve also heard good things about Time Run; in fact, here’s a whole blog about escape rooms, biased towards but not exclusively focused on London, with a review that gives Oubliette five stars.)

Enter the Oubliette was put together by project members who have Punchdrunk experience, and indeed a number of things about the props did remind me of Punchdrunk things I’ve seen: the meticulous documents with retro design, paper types, and illustration; the functioning retro technology; the inventive use of sound, film, lighting, and smoke effects as well as space and objects to create a particular experience. The room wasn’t as crammed-full-of-stuff as the setting of a Punchdrunk stage production, but that was a mercy: we already had plenty to search and already had to have some strong hints to guide our attention to some missed items.

With something like this that thrives on novelty and where each person who sees spoilers is a person who can’t realistically be a customer, it seems actively hostile to give too much away. So I want to be extra careful not to do that.

If you’re just looking for advice about whether this is worth doing: we liked it. We had a great time with a mixed group; most of us hadn’t been to any kind of escape room before. We had different degrees of self-confidence about our puzzle solving ability, but we did fine and everyone got to contribute in meaningful ways. And although you might try to place it by saying it’s a bit like a cross between immersive theatre and a graphical adventure game, in practice it is still really, really different from either of those things.

Below are some fairly general comments about how this experience worked as an interactive story experience, which I will still cordon off in case you don’t want to see even those.

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GDC 2016 for IF Enthusiasts

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This post contains three things: a list of talks I think are probably interesting to IF people, if you’re an IF person attending GDC this year; some thoughts about where to look for GDC-related content even if you are an IF person who cannot go; and finally some general strategies for first-time GDC-goers.

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