Category: interactive fiction

Narrative and Chance in Orion Trail

Orion Trail is a parodic space game in which you’re going on exploratory missions, trying to conserve your resources and keep your crew alive, and sending out the occasional away team: in other words, a number of structural concepts from Oregon Trail, redone with Star Trek tropes. It’s casually entertaining.

Though there is text associated with the various encounters in space, it feels more like it’s there to provide flavor and variety than like it’s contributing to any significant character arc. You have a few named crew members, but there’s also no major relationship development with them, so far as I saw. (If you want Social Life Simulator in Space, see Redshirt instead.) So in sum, Orion Trail is amusing, but not the kind of work that I would usually cover here – except that it has a probability mechanic that I really liked and found narratively expressive, and I wanted to talk about that here.

Game designers have long complained about the fact that players don’t understand probability very well. If you tell them that they have a 9/10 chance of winning an upcoming encounter, they tend to read that as you will win, and they get frustrated if they don’t. Giving them a fake die roll, so that they can actually see and have a tactile sense of something coming out wrong, may help with this.

Orion Trail goes a step further: it presents the probable outcomes of an interaction with an interface functionally similar to a roulette wheel. You can immediately see how many chances there are for critical or regular failures and successes (this varies depending on how hard the encounter is to start with), and also visualize how the stat bonuses are changing things.

Here’s the Probability Drive before it’s applied my stat bonus. It’s not entirely encouraging – one critical hit and two regular successes, but eight regular failures and one critical miss.

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IF Comp 2015 Guest Post: Duncan Stevens on Final Exam

final_examAs part of the project to get more reviewers talking about IF Comp games, Duncan Stevens has shared his thoughts on Final Exam, a dystopian science fiction parser piece by Jack Whitham.

Duncan has also written about Koustrea’s Contentment and Map for this project.

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That Dragon, Cancer (Numinous Games)

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Out today, That Dragon, Cancer is a game about the slow, painful, and confusing death of the author’s son by way of a rare cancer.

It tells its story through a series of vignette levels; in each, you have restricted navigational options to explore a 3D space, while audio and in-world manifestations of text fill in what is going on in the family at this point. Often you can hear the conversations of people whom you cannot see, which gives the sense of a ghostly dissociation.

The mechanics vary: sometimes you’re there only to look at a set number of things before triggering an advancement; elsewhere, you actually need to complete some small task, such as running a not-too-difficult platformer. Sometimes you need to spend a certain amount of time in a space with a screaming child in pain, and not be able to do anything about it. This is not a remotely pleasant or play-like experience, which of course is the point. But I often did feel that I was being offered an experience I haven’t seen anywhere else in games.

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IF Comp 2015 Guest Post: Liz Albl on Nowhere Near Single

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As part of the project to get new reviewers talking about IF Comp games, Liz Albl has written about Nowhere Near Single.

Liz Albl is a scriptwriter for Ubisoft and author of short stories.

Other posts written as part of this project can be found at this roundup post.

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What Fuwa Bansaku Found (Chandler Groover)

Screen Shot 2016-01-06 at 9.09.45 PMWhat Fuwa Bansaku Found is a new piece at Sub-Q by the astonishingly prolific Chandler Groover. In it, the eponymous samurai must investigate a haunted shrine: the emperor has sent him there, but the emperor was certainly spurred to do so by Bansaku’s enemies at court. The piece draws on translations of Japanese poetry, plots from kabuki, and images from woodblock prints.

It is a parser game, but a relatively accessible one. As with quite a bit of Groover’s other parser work, Fuwa Bansaku tightens the list of needed verbs to a simpler subset of the usual library. It also gets rid of the standard compass directions and acknowledges ADVANCE and RETREAT instead. This serves the piece well: it’s quite short, and not having to worry about a possible complicated map frees the player to concentrate on other concerns. (Gun Mute also does this, but it’s a comparatively rare feature in parser IF.)

Then, too, a number of the responses specifically prompt what the player should do next:

>x grass
These long grasses resemble hairs
growing from a courtesan’s skull.
They tower around Fuwa Bansaku.
He will search them.
>search grass
Fuwa Bansaku pushes the long grass
aside with one hand at his katana.

In a different context, this kind of guidance might be exasperating. But Bansaku is extremely focused and brief.

These hints also serve as a reminder that the character of Fuwa Bansaku is not the player. He is someone specific and skilled, a man of culture and intrigue and warfare. In fact, he is based on a historical figure, though with considerable embellishment. What’s more, everything he encounters in this haunted shrine receives a short but evocative description. Every item seems to point back to the details of the experience that sent him here.

Even though the piece is quite short, there is room enough in Groover’s story for several surprises. A lovely, eerie meditation on what is truly monstrous.

IF Comp 2015 Guest Post: Duncan Stevens on Koustrea’s Contentment

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As part of the project to get more reviewers talking about IF Comp games, veteran IF reviewer Duncan Stevens has shared his thoughts on Koustrea’s Contentment. Duncan is one of the prolific reviewers of IF in the late-90s newsgroups, and has previously taken a look at Map for this series.

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