['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This week she takes a look at Batman: Arkham Asylum.]

I got an Xbox 360 for Christmas, and the first game I rented for it was Batman: Arkham Asylum, about which I'd heard great things. And I really enjoyed it: the gameplay was smooth and fun, and the narrative was engaging throughout. As I played, though, I found myself thinking that Arkham Asylum is a case study in the way that the commercial demands on a AAA game play against storytelling.

In order to explain why, I'm going to include extensive story spoilers for the game, including a detailed discussion of the ending and mention of several boss battles. Please don't read on if you have not played the game through and still intend to.

Firstly, Arkham Asylum starts with certain advantages over a game with fresh IP. The audience is likely to come into the game with at least some prior knowledge of Batman, which means that some sympathy for the characters is built in: we start already knowing who the heroes and villains are, and rooting for the right ones. When it comes to exposition, the gameplay doesn't have to explain Bruce Wayne's backstory fully, either. The passage that treats it can afford to be allusive rather than didactic. A player who really doesn't know the mythos can look at character biographies, but this is supporting material not folded into the plot of the game itself.

Even better, the narrative designers clearly knew what was thematically interesting in the Batman story, and built gameplay and narrative episodes around that theme. Batman is uncomfortably like the supervillains he defeats; in a world where traumatic childhood events mostly lead to adult psychosis augmented by fiendishly clever tools and toys, what should we make of the billionaire who spends his time hanging upside down in a cape?

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': Structure in Arkham" »

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['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This week she looks at Home and The Graveyard.]

I hate the word "pretentious" in art criticism.

I understand why people use it. Often we call something pretentious when we think the artist might be concealing a lack of meaning or vision behind obscurity, jargon, or a set of conventions currently hallowed by the art establishment. It's a way of saying "I don't get this, and I don't know that there's anything to get" that shifts the blame (if blame even applies in so subjective an area as one's response to artwork) onto the artist rather than ourselves.

Two things I don't like about this approach. First, it operates from an instinct of contempt. Labeling an artist pretentious assumes the worst about someone whose motives aren't knowable.

Second, it says nothing, nothing at all, about the work itself. It's all about the artist.

Recently I've played two games about old age and the approach of death that have been tarred as "pretentious", as well as boring and ungamelike: Home, by Stephen Lavelle, and Tale of Tales' The Graveyard, from last year. ("Pretentious" citations for The Graveyard: 1, 2, 3; for Home, with some discussion, 1.)

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': On Aging" »

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['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This week she looks at Zylom/GameHouse Studios Eindhoven's Delicious: Emily's Holiday Season, a Christmas-themed time management game with an unusual amount of story content.]

Ever since Miss Management, I've been hoping for another time management game with a decent narrative arc, memorable characters, and a connection between gameplay and story. Delicious: Emily's Holiday Season is the best I've yet seen in that line. (Disclaimer: I gather there are a number of previous Delicious games starring Emily. This is the first I've played through, though I did sample the demo of Emily's Taste of Fame.)

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Delicious: Emily's Holiday Season shares a number of features with Miss Management. It's briefer, but it has a similar structure: there are five major stages to the plot, each with its own mini-arc.

Many of the levels incorporate some small optional challenges, which knit the gameplay and the story together more tightly. There's a lot of dialogue, and Emily's Holiday Season skips having a single villain in favor of a number of sometimes-friendly NPCs who nonetheless impose on the protagonist in irritating ways.

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': Neither Nor" »

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['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This week she looks at "The Shadow in the Cathedral", a commercial interactive fiction game by Ian Finley and Jon Ingold, released by the text adventure game publishers at Textfyre.]

I have a soft spot for steampunk; have done ever since I read The Iron Dragon's Daughter at an impressionable age. So it's with mixed pleasure and annoyance that I've watched the style become ubiquitous and diluted, until it means nothing more than an aesthetic of gears, ironmongery, and jugendstil curves.

"The Shadow in the Cathedral" is set in a steampunk universe, but not in the same steampunk universe that everyone else is puttering about in. This is not The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello, with its airships and cloudy vertical cities. It's not the oily, clanking, boiling environment celebrated by Vernian Process.

This is a universe in which clockwork is not merely a means to an end, but a religion, a cult. Time is not only measured but made possible by the existence of cogs and winding key and pendulum. Newton, Babbage, and the swiss watchmaker Breguet are saints. The Goddess of Klockwerk visits good children at Newtonmass.

The Difference Engine, the holy grail of steampunkery, is a mystical object: if you can just encode your question properly, it can answer anything there is to know about the universe. This is a game partly written for young people -- Textfyre's target market is middle-schoolers -- but it does not feel dumbed down.

In developing this world, "Shadow" makes an argument for text as a living gaming medium -- not because it offers settings that would be difficult or expensive to render (though it does), but because there is so much attitude about the world that could not be captured effectively with visual images.

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': Gaslight and Cog" »

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['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This week she looks at an interactive storytelling experience advertising HBO.]

HBO has an ad campaign around the phrase "It's more than you imagined". One of its key features is a website installation called HBO Imagine, and put together by BBDO and The Barbarian Group.

The installation offers a network of still images (such as scans of newspaper clippings), sound (such as recordings of phone calls), and film. Some fo the film is ordinary single-frame stuff, images fictionally from security cameras or advertising campaigns. Others appear on the faces of a cube. Rotate the cube, and you view the same scene from another angle, allowing you to see what is going on in the next room.

What appears to be an amazingly unsuccessful art theft turns out to have been orchestrated for entirely other reasons, for instance, and it's fascinating to watch two characters argue when you can spin the cube and see the reactions and responses of two other characters hiding off-screen. All the films and evidence taken together are meant to tell a story: a rather convoluted one about theft and betrayal and people not being what they claim to be.

In structure this reminded me most of Le Reprobateur, a French multimedia artwork that allows the player/reader to explore the interlocking lives of a number of characters by reading vignettes and viewing images and videos. Le Reprobateur maps all of its snippets of story to the faces of a three-dimensional object, and each snippet is thematically related to those that appear on adjacent sides. Le Reprobateur is not exactly a game, but review copies were sent out to game reviewers, which suggests that the author had some idea of the potential crossover appeal.

It's not clear that The Barbarian Group conceived of HBO Imagine as a game at all. They should have. The thing they've put together is vastly glossier than Le Reprobateur or than many an indie game production. The video scenes are slick, well-directed, well shot, with the clarity and crispness we expect from a movie. On the other hand, its interactivity raises problems familiar to game designers: how to give the reader/player agency, how to offer adequate freedom, how to achieve coherence. This is where the HBO project falls down.

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': Cubical" »

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['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This week she looks at "Fatale", Tale of Tales' take on Oscar Wilde's play Salome.]

Recently Tale of Tales (of "The Path" fame) released a new interactive piece called "Fatale", which explores the tale of Salome, the dancer who in compensation for her dancing requested (and got) the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter.

Like "The Path", "Fatale" is by turns frustrating and fascinating, with controls that vex and nervewrackingly slow pacing. It's infuriatingly easy to nose yourself into some corner of the playspace and have trouble backing out. (It doesn't help that I was playing on a Mac, so the work's built-in instructions to use, e.g., the middle mouse button were unhelpful.) On the other hand there is so much incidental beauty and horror that one almost doesn't mind.

The player's chief interactive task is, as in "The Path", to find objects of interest in the environment and then interact with them very trivially. There are lots of these objects, and some of them are tucked away in odd places, and moreover even if you know where they all are you can only handle them in a certain order.

This time Tale of Tales has included a readme, but it's a perplexing document, which both contains explicit instructions on how to interact and suggests that the player might want to skip reading them until after a first encounter with the work. Obediently, I gave the work a first try on my own, found it frustrating in many respects and awkward but just finishable; returned and read the document, only to find that there were shortcuts that would have decreased my frustration if I'd known of them.

The content is also mysterious. The Tale of Tales website presents this more or less as a gloss on Oscar Wilde's play Salome, or perhaps as an introduction to it -- something, at any rate, to help us understand the original. I found it to be just the opposite: "Fatale" was very hard to understand until I had read the text of the original play.

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': Mole's Eyes" »

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['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This week she looks at Tale of Tales' horror game The Path.]

A few weeks ago I wrote of Terry Cavanagh's Don't Look Back that the game works because it is hard. Because it is hard, some people only see the end on YouTube.

But the difficulty fit the story; and there are times when a game has to make demands on the player that will, necessarily, cut some people out of the audience.

Would The Path work if it weren't so slow?

This is the thing you run into, reading reviews of Tale of Tales' Red Riding Hood story. People love it, hate it, want to recommend it but aren't sure how; but descriptions of the piece (which arguably isn't a game) by and large agree that in gameplay terms, it has some problems, and the most serious of them is the agonizing pace. You have to explore the woods with one of six red riding hood avatars, but they are dawdlers, all of them.

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': Red" »

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['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This week she looks at Lionhead Studios' Fable 2.]

Fable 2 attempts a hard bit of interactive storytelling: it combines a fairly predetermined plot arc, your character's quest for justice against the world's chief villain, with more emergent narrative, in which you are allowed to form friendships and connections — and even marry and bear children with — the people you meet along the way.

At the end, the game tries to draw the two forms of player involvement together, having the villain threaten something or someone that you've grown close to in sandbox play. The idea, clearly, is to let the player define for the game what he/she will care about, and then use that as emotional leverage.

This is an ingenious design approach, but it works better in concept than in practice — at least for me. Two moments in particular stand out where this design let me down:

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': Communicating Character" »

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['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This week she looks at challenge as a story-telling device in general, and some specific issues raised by Jonathan Blow in his presentation on conflicts in game design.]

Jonathan Blow's November presentation on conflicts in game design raises a fundamental problem:

"For a story to occur, it has to keep proceeding... challenge is about preventing you from continuing in the game... Story and challenge work against each other. No matter how hard you work on a game, if you've got a story in the traditional way, and you've got challenge elements like we traditionally use them, they work against each other. -- Jonathan Blow"

Accepting the main theses of Blow's presentation -- that challenge is essential to the nature of games, and that challenge does not work with story -- might be enough to make me give up this column. And, unfortunately for me, there's a lot of what Blow says that I agree with, about the difficulty of designing dynamic stories, providing solid pacing, and giving a sense of importance to a constructed non-linear tale.

So here's the question: Can the challenge be part of the story instead? Can it lend value to the storytelling? How and where?

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': Challenge and Storytelling" »

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['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This week she looks at Mind Gamz' "Think Like a Shrink" for iPhone.]

Achilles' reaction to being told his dearest friend Patroclus is dead:

"Oh man, I gotta go."

At least, that's the take found in Think like a Shrink, a new iPhone app from Mind Gamz.

"Think Like a Shrink" invites the player to learn the techniques of a therapist, and then apply them to Achilles, hero of the Trojan War.

I find this fascinating in three directions: as a new idea in conversation-based gaming, as a reception of a piece of classical literature, and as a blend of narrative and procedural play in general.

Conversation

As conversation-based gaming, I saw some things to like and some not to like. Mind Gamz has invented a new mechanic of interaction: you can "focus" Achilles on feelings you want him to explore more, or "challenge" him about what he's saying. If you choose to challenge, you have to identify the dodge you think he's currently using and which you want to get out of the way (anger, displacement, avoidance, etc.).

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': Achilles on the Couch" »

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['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This week she considers the problem of romance in gameplay.]

A recent NowGamer article quoted Peter Molyneux, talking about how videogames could grow stronger in the romance department:

"For a truly emergent (and yet well-written) romance simulation to be possible, there needs to be a way to not only generate “romantic content” based on player input – and how this would actually mix with pre-recorded dialogue is unknown – but the characters involved also need to be able to build on organically derived behaviours and motivations. The midpoint between The Sims and Baldur’s Gate, in other words."

I agree that's one way it could happen, and definitely the way that Peter Molyneux would be most likely to endorse, all things considered.

What I worry about is that, if one frames the problem simply as a problem of building a "romance simulation", the result will be a slightly slicker but even less narrative variation on the dating sim, with statistics reflecting how much time you've devoted to each of your possible mates, but no connection between that simulation and the other kinds of gameplay available in the game, and no solid structural ties between the sim events and the rest of the story.

Fable 2 already goes a bit in that direction, rewarding the protagonist with romantic relationships when s/he's spent enough time making flirtatious faces at the lover of his or her choice.

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': The Romance Problem" »

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['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This week she looks at Playfirst's DinerTown Tycoon.]

The Diner Dash series has established itself as a source of steady income for PlayFirst, but one with predictably cloned gameplay and minimal storylines. So I was curious to see what would become of DinerTown Tycoon: DinerTown Tycoonbills itself as a casual tycoon game, which puts it in company with some of my favorite casual works, the Chocolatier and Tradewinds series.

Unfortunately, the gameplay of DinerTown Tycoon is still fairly unadventurous; it is merely borrowing from a different genre than Diner Dash. There is little in the play of DinerTown Tycoon that one can't find in the deeply bland and profoundly unexceptional Cinema Tycoon, Cinema Tycoon 2, Cinema Tycoon Gold, and for all I know Cinema Tycoon Platinum Studded with Diamonds XXVII.

That is to say, instead of clicking on endless chains of customers and foodstuffs as in the traditional time management game, the player controls the restaurant business at a higher level: choosing menus for several different stores, maintaining inventory, researching customer preferences, investing in ad campaigns, and upgrading the physical premises. More is always better and you always want to wind up with all the possible upgrades sooner or later, so it's just a question of picking which items on a non-diverging upgrade path you want to buy first.

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': Grub Burgers" »

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['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This week she looks at Super Energy Apocalypse Recycled.]

Super Energy Apocalypse Recycled is part persuasive game, part resource management toy, part tower defense sequence, and part zombie survival horror story. By day, you can build farms, factories, power plants, recycling centers -- and gun emplacements; by night, waves of zombies sweep the land. Your defenses work only as long as you have sufficient energy to power them. To make matters worse, zombies feed and gain power from eating trash and breathing smog.

Lars Doucet wrote Super Energy Apocalypse for a Jay Is Games contest, and then -- with the support and assistance of the Houston Advanced Research Center -- revised it to incorporate the best available real-world figures about the environmental concerns represented in the game. It is thus in the unusual position of having been optimized once from the perspective of player entertainment and once from the perspective of education about energy issues.

The result is mixed but curiously compelling. If you are anything like me, when you encounter a game with both campaign and sandbox modes, you start with the campaign -- which seems to be the intention and the right choice here. The story is present in part to explain the otherwise rather odd background of the simulation. The narrative structure is constrained and straightforward but well-written, with a few chilling reversals of fortune and some sinister dialogue that reminded me of GlaDOS. (This was probably intentional, and is only reinforced by the Portal-esque song at the end of the game.)

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': The Coming Apocalypse" »

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['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This week she looks at "Don't Look Back" (Terry Cavanagh) and "Judith" (Terry Cavanagh and Stephen Lavelle).]

If only this column were called Ovid in Silicon, or Vergil in Silicon, I'd have the best topic ever: Terry Cavanagh has written a game, "Don't Look Back," recapitulating the journey of Orpheus to the underworld to retrieve his dead wife, Eurydice.

You know how it goes, I hope. Orpheus is the greatest musician in the world, but his gift does not protect him from misfortune. His beautiful young bride steps on a viper shortly after their wedding. (According to Ovid this is clumsiness; Vergil has her fleeing a would-be rapist.)

Distraught, Orpheus makes the journey to the underworld, lulling the guard dog Cerberus to sleep, entrancing all the ghosts, until he finds Hades and his wife Persephone. Orpheus sings a song about how terribly he misses Eurydice, the gist of which according to Ovid goes a little like this:

"I'm asking, please --
renegotiate the terms for Eurydice.
Everything in life is mortgaged to you.
Whether we put you off for fifteen years
or thirty, you always foreclose in the end,
humanity's only permanent bank.
This girl you can repossess as well,
as soon as she's aged into a pensioner.
We're asking only to borrow her
on a short-term loan with favorable rates."

(I have exaggerated Ovid's financial terminology less than you think.)

Persephone, moved, consents to send Eurydice back, on one condition: Orpheus must not look back at her until they reach the world above. So he begins the terrible climb, and finally he comes to where he can see the upper world -- green land and sunlight over the lip of the cliff -- and the anticipation of arrival and the bottled apprehension is so great that he cannot help himself. He turns. And in that moment Eurydice dissolves into shadow and is lost for good.

This is the story that Terry Cavanagh tells as a spare, difficult platformer. Orpheus doesn't sing in this version. He shoots a gun, and jumps over snakes, and dodges hell's falling stalactites. Spare music accompanies his journey. When he reaches Hades, he gets a follower, and he must not turn back toward her, a problem that complicates the journey. And then -- well, I won't give away the end.

What makes Cavanagh's rendition is that it is hard.

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': Cavanagh on Challenge and Complicity" »

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['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This week she looks at the idea of the accretive player character in two works of interactive fiction: Adam Cadre's classic "Varicella" and Jon Ingold's recent "Make It Good".]

"Accretive player character" is a term of art in interactive fiction. It refers to a protagonist who has motives and abilities that the player doesn't understand or share the first time he plays through a game, but that he gradually learns over the course of many replayings.

Perhaps the classic example is Adam Cadre's "Varicella", a scheming palace minister in some alternate-reality Italian principality that combines the technology of the modern day with the ethics of Machiavelli and the methodology of the Borgias.

The title character hopes to outmaneuver everyone else and end up with the regency. Varicella is a fastidious man with a protocol fetish -- not the strongest nor the most charismatic nor the most openly ambitious member of the court. But he does happen to know all the weaknesses of all his opponents and he's poised to take advantage of them all.

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': The Accretive Player Character" »

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['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This week she looks at PlayFirst's non-combat casual RPG Wandering Willows.]

My childhood fantasies always began with being orphaned. Nothing against my parents, you understand -- the details of their untimely demise were always airbrushed out of the story as too upsetting to contemplate. But no really good adventures could happen to me while they were around.

I imagined that once free of parental protection I would spend my time foraging, picking nuts and berries, building a primitive shelter, digging firepits and catching fish. It was a scenario that drew heavily from Island of the Blue Dolphins, Little House in the Big Woods, and Julie of the Wolves, but minus the gritty realism. My imaginary wooded island had plenty of every food; its weather was temperate; its stones were automatically the right shape for building walls without mortar.

This universe seems to have escaped my imagination and is now the setting for Wandering Willows, a casual PC RPG from Playfirst. The protagonist lands in a damaged balloon on a mysterious island. It is a land where every kind of metal can be found ready-pressed into ingots just beneath the surface of the soil; where blackberries and raspberries grow at the tops of trees; where animals carry worked precious stones, but are happy to share.

Cotton, wheat, sugar cane, and vanilla can be planted and grown in a matter of minutes. The abundance becomes more and more surreal as the protagonist discovers a need for sulfur, petroleum, hot lava, dinosaur teeth... all of which may be dug out of the yielding earth and transported in her capacious backpack.

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': Wandering In The Willows" »

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['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist.]

"Kate's Fix-It-Up Adventure" is a PC casual time-management/tycoon game developed by Polish team World-Loom (here's a neat interview with them) in which the protagonist, Kate, is apparently a genius for car repair.

It's a balanced and entertaining piece of work in its genre, which is more strategic and less speed-based than pure time-management games like the "Diner Dash" series and closer to building/real-estate games such as "Build-a-Lot" and "Be Rich." And I'm on record here often enough complaining that these games could be narratively interesting but just, in general, aren't.

In the interstices between levels, "Fix-it-up" offers a story told in comic book style, another mainstay in the time-management genre. But this one was better than average: instead of following a perfectly upward trend line of career advancement and social success, Kate encounters some problems.

She has family members who help her, but some of them are not actually that nice and are really using her for their own benefit. She has to deal with egocentric jerks, and with friends who make poor choices. By the end, she is divided between the claims of her buddy/romantic interest Steve and the career-oriented claims of her Hollywood business partner.

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': Narrative Lacunae" »

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['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This week she looks at conversation design in support of narratively compelling, well-paced scenes.]

Last year, Brent Ellison published a Gamasutra article on dialogue systems in games. A little while later, Jonathan Blow posted on his blog an open-ended query about designing conversation in games. Then, this February, Krystian Majewski posted about dialogue choices in Emerald City Confidential, speculating about the challenges of presenting decision-filled conversation to casual players.

These three posts -- all interesting -- and the followup comments suggested that there's relatively little public discussion of core methodologies for conversation design.

In particular, much of the existing analysis conflates user interface (how are dialogue options presented? when do they appear on the screen? is the player offered full text of the next sentence, or a truncated version of what his character will say?) with the underlying model (how does the game decide which options are available when? how are the player's options restricted or made open? what controls when and whether the NPC speaks on his own?).

User interface is the more visible and thus the better understood of the two. It's easy to play a game and see how the dialogue choices are being presented, but much harder to guess what code lies beneath.

Yet the underlying model does matter a great deal.

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': Sub-Façade" »

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['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This week she looks at Jojo's Fashion Show 2, by Gamelab.]

I do love Gamelab.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Since Gamelab laid off employees and seems to have de-emphasized or even ceased its casual game production (its site just redirects to the Gamestar Mechanic website now), this article might be a bit of a stealth eulogy for them. Anyone know if they are still making casual games?]

Jojo's Fashion Show 2 starts off with an obvious handicap, viz. being a numbered sequel. Reviews focused on the repetition and lack of technical innovation from the first installment in the series, and I would have to agree that those are fair complaints.

Several things make it stand out, though. First, the writing is unusually perky for a casual game. I would have said "surprisingly", but in fact this does not surprise me, since several of the people working on this project also worked on Gamelab's Miss Management, a piece so successfully written that I still remember the major characters with amusement and rueful affection many months after playing. The characters in Jojo's Fashion Show 2 aren't quite such a bundle of neuroses, but they are unusually distinct and opinionated.

Jojo also affords a rather larger cast than the average frame-story cast in a casual game. The Diner Dash episodes usually get by with Flo, Quinn, and other cookie-cutter gal pals assembled from various Dash variations, with perhaps Flo's grandma thrown in for color; but I'd have a hard time naming any way in which Flo and Quinn differ in personality (for instance), and adding more members to their posse would just make it bigger, not more interesting.

Besides which, Flo has become such a franchise that we can be safely assured nothing remotely interesting will ever happen to her again. Jojo's Fashion Show 2 does borrow a few popular stereotypes in order to distinguish its characters -- the fashion magazine editor courtesy of The Devil Wears Prada being the most obvious. They've even given her Meryl Streep's hair, lest there be any question about the intended casting.

Nonetheless, there are more distinct personae, and they're more fun, than you'll see in any other game of the same ilk.

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': Complex Style" »

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['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This week she looks at real-estate themed time management games.]

There is something utterly surreal about house development games such as Build-a-Lot and its sequels, or Be Rich.

There always was, I suppose. The game mechanic assumes that if one mansion is good, ten are better; that it will never be hard to find a millionaire to buy your latest 20-bedroom palace with built-in climbing wall; that there is no need for low-income housing balance in a neighborhood, and no prospect of trouble if you crowd it out.

It is an assumption built into the core of the game that real estate prices never fall, that housing credit is never difficult to obtain, and that continuous upgrades are always desirable. The only significant constraint is the amount of viable land.

At some points (I noticed this especially with Build-a-Lot 2: Town of the Year), there is even what one might call a bit of procedural satire.

You're given level goals to meet that require certain environmental outcomes, such as the presence of a recycling center, some number of empty lots. What you do on the way to achieving those goals, on the other hand, is completely unregulated, and may include all sorts of environmentally disruptive behavior, such as building and renting out a dozen McMansions in order to reach the revenue goals for the level... only to tear them all down again.

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': Be Richer" »

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['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This week she considers "Heileen", a visual novel of an adventurous trip to the new world.]

Heileen is a "visual novel" in Ren'Py, produced by Tycoon Games (whose collaboration on "Summer Session" I wrote about in an earlier column). Unlike "Summer Session", "Heileen" has no resource-management element or structured gameplay, only a sequence of dialogue and action choices for the main character, which (as in dating sims in general) determine how she winds up relating to the characters around her.

I've noticed that authors of choose-your-own-whatever-style works often seem to think that their job is simply to put in decision points now and then in some otherwise fairly standard (or, indeed, substandard) story, and the results will be entertaining and replayable.

This is not the case. Choice-based games need to do many of the same things that challenge-based games do: engage the player with a strong hook; provide a sense of agency; keep its implicit promises.

"Heileen" treads a middle line, with some successful design choices and some unsuccessful ones -- which makes it a useful case study. The analysis that follows is based on my own highly opinionated take on what makes a choice-centric design work, namely: convergent plot, non-arbitrary options, strong pacing, and effective writing.

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': To Kiss John, Turn To Page 73" »

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['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This week she looks at "Emerald City Confidential".]

Emerald City Confidential is a graphical adventure by Wadjet Eye Games, under the creative direction of Dave Gilbert. The protagonist, Petra, is a film-noir-esque detective led to explore deeper and deeper into the web of lies at work in the Emerald City of Oz, which is not really at all the way you may remember it from the books; she spends most of her time questioning people and solving some not-too-difficult puzzles.

Structurally, ECC is not doing anything especially new. It is a very linear game with carefully directed gameplay. The magic system's Enchanter-esque spells are strangely specific in their effects and conveniently work only when the designer wills that they should.

There are many fetch-quests, and the occasional lock-and-key or get-x-use-x puzzle. The game unabashedly repeats character dialogue verbatim if the player needs to hear some hint over again. Moreover, when it wants to represent characters who are "busy", it will sometimes put them into a loop of repeating dialogue while the player solves some puzzle.

In other respects, the gameplay is fun but sometimes too directed. The puzzles are fairer than graphical adventure puzzles of the past, but many of them are so blatantly hinted that the player is deprived of the pleasure of really solving them. I suppose that this is partly because a) this is an adventure game marketed to a casual game audience, so difficulty expectations are lower; b) this is an unusually narrative adventure game in which getting stuck for a long time would be a disruption of the intended pacing.

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': Green and Sparkly" »

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['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This week she considers the interaction between fiction and gameplay in the latest Chocolatier game for PC.]

The Chocolatier series of casual games is a favorite of mine, as I've written about elsewhere before. So I was excited to see PlayFirst announcing the launch of their latest, "Chocolatier: Decadence by Design".

The new version is fun in many of the same ways as the originals: you get to command a growing chocolate empire, buying ingredients and selling products, and playing small arcade games to establish the baseline productivity of your factories. The arcade elements this time around were a little less challenging than in "Chocolatier 2: Secret Ingredients", but in a way that made them less distracting from the overall game structure. They've also smoothed out a few other little game-design hiccups. It's no longer possible to strand yourself someplace without money and without chocolates to sell, because another character will offer you a loan. So there's good stuff here.

I was even more pleased to see that this version of Chocolatier was branching out to allow the player to design her own chocolates to sell. That idea was a logical extension of the gameplay in the second game, where the player has a chocolate tasting lab, but can only experiment to discover recipes previously intended by the designers. In "Decadence by Design", the player gets the opportunity to combine ingredients freely, then create an appearance for the new confection and provide it with a name and a description.

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': Almost, Almost, Almost" »

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['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This week she looks at Blue Lacuna, a novel-length work of interactive fiction that offers the player a great deal of control over narrative outcomes.]

Aaron Reed's Blue Lacuna is a mammoth new work of interactive fiction, and one of the most ambitious ever written in the degree to which it allows the player to shape the narrative and define character interactions.

The interactive fiction community has been interested for a long time in the development of stories that can be shaped significantly by the player, though what exactly that means varies, of course, from author to author.

Two particular approaches to this problem have received a good deal of attention. Victor Gijsbers' Fate and The Baron and Aaron's previous work Whom the Telling Changed all explore the possibilities inherent in giving the player significant (often morally-driven) choices that control the outcome of play: these are all highly variable stories with many possible paths, but risk pursuing their philosophical aims so rigorously, or so much to the exclusion of personal details, that they lose the ability to affect the player emotionally.

The IF genre of conversation games consists mostly of single-room, single-character interactions in which the player can reach a host of different relationships with the major non-player character. While these pieces tend as a rule to give more weight to the emotional development of the story, they sometimes risk other flaws -- shapelessness, a lack of clear player direction, or a lack of thematic consistency.

Blue Lacuna is set apart from these earlier works by its length and by the fact that it combines both forms of player-responsiveness. It describes itself, justly, as an interactive novel, and it will take many hours of play to complete. Unlike most of its gaming kin, it does not put off its significant branch points until the last quarter of the game.

There are choices to make from the very beginning, which means that early decisions will have later ramifications for the whole duration of play. Some of the choices are morally or philosophically freighted; some more reflect personal tastes. The length gives it a kind of cumulative gravity that is often absent from shorter games, even ones that explore important choices or emotional oppositions.

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': Blue" »

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['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This week she looks at "Ruben & Lullaby", a short emotion-centric piece for the iPhone.]

"Ruben & Lullaby" is a new kind of interactive story, developed specially for the iPhone. It calls itself an "opertoon", "a story you play like a musical instrument."

This is a fair description -- if you're a little loose about what you mean by story, and if your ambitions for musical instrument fall considerably short of the iPhone Ocarina.

This opertoon begins with its two main characters, Ruben and Lullaby, sitting on a park bench. They are lovers about to engage in their first fight. You get to conduct.

Tipping the phone left or right moves the story along, while leaving it flat can create long pauses; tapping the phone directs the characters to look towards or away from one another; stroking or shaking the phone makes the currently pictured character angrier or calmer.

As you play, the game improvises its own jazzy soundtrack. Sometimes this is melancholy, sometimes irritably discordant, sometimes angry.

This trick works pretty well, though on replay I found that there was less total musical content than I had initially expected. To a large extent that doesn't matter, though, because the soundtrack is accomplishing two things: communicating moment-to-moment mood, and encouraging the player to keep an overall pace.

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': An Improv Love Story" »

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['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This week she looks at Summer Session, a teen summer school PC casual simulation/story game by Hanako Games in collaboration with Tycoon Games.]

PC casual game title Summer Session is a dating simulation implemented in Ren'Py. That means that it belongs to a long tradition of Japanese dating sims, but is quite unlike anything in the U.S. casual or hardcore markets: it deals with the management of time and resources, certainly, but the chief goal is to connect with one or more of the girls you encounter.

Game-play in Summer Session consists of two kinds of interaction. One is pure resource-management: you set up your schedule, a week at a time, to determine what you'll do each afternoon. You're allowed one activity per day. Activities adjust your stats: studying makes you smarter but less cool, exercising makes you stronger, and so on.

In this respect, Summer Session is a lot like Kudos, only quicker to play through, and without the mini-games associated with some tasks. Also as in Kudos, you can go to the mall on weekends and stock up on objects that improve your stats or make your life easier somehow.

Unlike Kudos, though, Summer Session also allows you some direct conversation with your friends and potential girlfriends. These interactions can directly influence how people feel about you; the key is usually to demonstrate that you've been paying attention to the characterization by discussing topics that interest the person you're talking to.

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': Refining Simulation into Narrative" »

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['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This week she considers MolleIndustria's social message game Oiligarchy as an example of persuasive narrative -- as opposed to persuasive simulation.]

Oiligarchy might (at first glance) seem like an odd game to mine for narrative content. It is a game written for political persuasion by Molleindustria, whose previous works included a ruthless dark satire on McDonalds, and a disturbing game about concealing pederasty within the Catholic Church.

Oiligarchy sets up a scenario in which, as oil tycoon, you can only perpetuate your play by buying politicians, pushing for wars, and pillaging the planet to the point of apocalypse. The goals of the game are simply incompatible with a sane environmental policy or a legal relationship to elected officials.

Is this a fair piece of propaganda? Not really, and I say this as someone who strongly supports a more environmentally responsible agenda and a reduced dependence on non-renewable energy. There's no doubt that big oil has caused serious problems, but I don't hold oil corporations solely and uniquely to blame for our problems in the middle east, nor do I imagine that no one in the oil industry has a conscience.

But Oiligarchy doesn't have time for such caveats. It works, essentially, by saying -- as the McDonalds game did as well -- "Look, people in this position have every self-interested reason to behave like villains; thus we may conclude that, in fact, they do."

For added impact, Oiligarchy juices up your interactions with hilariously cruel pictures and sounds. When you build a new oil pump, it clangs and drums like an instrument from hell's orchestra. Put a new building in the wilderness, and you get to watch trees fall, caribou disperse, tiny birds scatter into the sky. In third world countries, the inhabitants peacefully enjoy life around a campfire, until you build over their village and hire their own government to oppress them.

There is even a happy whale swimming in Alaska's waters-- until you come along and set up your offshore rigs. It's basically the same message as the one implicit in the interface of Electrocity, only amped to be considerably more extreme: nature is good because it is pretty. Industrial development is bad because it is not pretty.

Never mind that nature sometimes produces things like forest fires and volcanoes and earthquakes and tsunamis, all on her own, that turn the landscape into a twisted smoking wreck. But Electrocity is responsible enough to offer some perspective on the gains and costs of different kinds of infrastructure. Oiligarchy doesn't bother with any balancing points.

Oiligarchy has a beautifully smooth, responsive design, too. Naming no names, I've played several persuasive games whose authors were banking so heavily on the value of their content that they didn't bother to make the gameplay smooth, fast, or comprehensible. The slickness of Molleindustria's work adds substantially to its appeal, and to my willingness to replay.

But all these trappings, on top of the already biased model, make Oiligarchy feel so extreme that even people who sympathize with some of its message are likely to find themselves muttering "oh really" from time to time.

So it's a little hard to take the game seriously as a piece of persuasion.

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': Drill, Baby, Drill" »

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['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This week she looks at Dan Benmergui's "Storyteller" experiment and what it suggests about game narratives.]

Storyteller is a charming toy by Dan Benmergui. It gives the player three windows onto the same events, a vertical triptych. The player manipulates the first two scenes, moving characters around in a way that indicates their alliances. The third panel reflects the outcome, the result of the player's manipulations.

This is not a game, because there are no goals. I hesitate to say that what it produces are really stories, either: at best, we wind up with a somewhat terse comic strip in which most of the linking explanation is left to the player to choose for himself.

Despite that, the elements of narrative are here. There is a beginning, and it determines future character: people who grow up in the castle turn out good, while those who grow up impoverished in a hut turn out bad.

There is a middle, the crisis, where the most fluidity is possible. Characters can be locked up, can kill one another, can stand around peaceably; it all depends on whether their mores are in conflict at that point, and on who has the physical advantage.

There is an end. Those who were killed in the previous scene now are dead (represented by small tombstones). Those who rescued, or were rescued, may now be in love. (Shared hardship is, evidently, a great determiner of affection.) Good or evil may rule the land.

Out of the simple combinations come a range of amusing outcomes. For instance, the game's story-logic doesn't care about gender; there is nothing to stop you from setting up a gay romance in which the female character grows up to be an evil wizard and one male character must rescue the other.

But still: at the end of the day, it isn't a game; it's a toy, and a small one. Benmergui casts it as an experiment. It's less lyrical than I Wish I Were the Moon, or The Night Raveler and the Heartbroken Uruguayans, both of which explore characters who long for connection, and grant the player godlike powers to allow or destroy this connection. Where "I wish..." and "Night Raveler" explore the unlikely through poetic imagery, Storyteller works through and because of its clichés. Does it have anything to tell us about interactive storytelling?

If so, what it has to say is probably this:

Explicit structure matters.

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': The Three-Act Play" »

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['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This week she looks at Mousechief's unique social indie PC/Mac RPG, Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble.]

Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble is a game about prejudice, repression, and parochial thinking, in which your avatars are spunky teenagers determined to discover everything that's going wrong around their (apparently) sleepy 1920s town. In order to reveal secrets and find clues, your gang of girls challenges the other characters to mini-games that represent lying, flirting, teasing, and other forms of social engagement.

That description on its own ought to be enough to attract some curiosity: DHSGiT takes on aspects of human interaction that just don't appear very often in computer games. It does so in metaphorical terms (exposing secrets relies on a kind of word puzzle; lying is a bluffing game using card suits) rather than through direct conversation -- but that's not necessarily a bad thing, and there is plenty of written dialogue to accompany the more abstract interaction.

The game-play does manage to take some advantage of characterization, too, in that some of the mini-games need to be approached with different strategies depending on the personality of your opponent -- a strength I would have liked to see taken further.

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': Trouble and Danger" »

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['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This time, she examines popular PC casual time management game Burger Shop, finding out why it's really well-crafted, but ultimately just not that different.]

So, we have GoBit Games' Burger Shop. It's a time management game like many others, in which you have to assemble orders for customers before they get bored and leave. So why is it so much better than the average?

Well, production values are high. The art is consistent, attractive, and smooth. (It's astonishing how many casual games there are out there with really rather sub-par art -- I think because the pressure is to create as many as possible of this kind of game, with a minimum of investment. But it shows.)

Sounds are well-chosen and unintrusive, the kind that give you feedback about whether you've accomplished what you wanted to do (and remind you what you have to do next) without getting too distracting.

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': The Customer is Always Right" »

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['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This time, in honor of the debut of the game's sequel, Emily looks at the original version of unconventional life sim Kudos. ]

Positech's Kudos is a game of social interaction and self-improvement. In subject matter, it's a little like The Sims, except in that the player controls only one avatar, and does not get to design the layout of her house.

But play entails many decisions about how to allot time and money: should we buy a bike? take Italian lessons? go to the opera? And these feed into larger goals: what career do I want to have? How in-shape do I need to be? Which friends do I want to cultivate?

The avatar starts at age twenty. You get to play until she's thirty, and then a curtain drops: whatever you've accomplished by that time is it. Plausibly enough, many of the best jobs are hard to reach in that time period, especially if you make some false starts.

On my first play-through, I got my player educated enough to take a job as a biologist, but the jump to the next level -- as a senior botanist for a major pharmaceutical company -- would have required that I raise her intelligence farther than I considered achievable, given her starting abilities. So I gave up on lab science and had her embark on a new career as a chef -- but she never had adequate people skills to rise really high in that field, either.

There are some implausible pieces to the way the simulation is constructed. Among other things, your character lives in such a high crime area that you are likely to be both burgled and mugged several times a year, until you acquire a dog to protect your home and take kickboxing or kung fu lessons. (Once you have enough fu, you can perform citizen's arrests. Listen for the combination of fight noises and triumphant battle cries.)

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': Kudos & The Social Sandbox" »

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['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. The latest column examines a Flash-based RPG for lessons on story.]

Krinlabs' Sonny is a Flash RPG which consists of a lot of tactical battles interspersed with chances to level up. It's like Monster's Den: the Book of Dread, only with a more eclectic setting and smaller parties.

Sonny is clearly the result of a lot of love and attention. The animations are sweet and smooth. The interface is easy to use. There are some occasional spelling errors, which irk me (maybe hire a proofreader next time?), but they're relatively infrequent. There's even some decent voice acting and the beginnings of a story about illicit government experimentation gone horribly wrong.

Only the beginnings, though -- and here is where Sonny turns seriously disappointing. The first few scenes set up relationships between the characters and hint at narrative revelations to come -- but they don't. Instead of explanations and discoveries, the end of the game turns into a long, grueling, stats-oriented fight against four special boss levels. The ending of the story never arrives -- and in fact before we reach the bosses, there's a helpful note which explains that "the next part is not part of the story".

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer in Silicon': The Courage to End It" »

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['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist.]

Confronted with a new game with minimal narrative trimmings, my instinct is to ask: how could we do a story with this mechanic? How do we make it good? Sometimes I have to conclude that we really can't -- that the game is so abstract or so essentially lightweight that the elements of narrative can't be convincingly hung on that hook.

But sometimes I can imagine what the story would be -- except that it would fundamentally change the nature of the game.

Take "Monster's Den: Book of Dread": it's a dungeon-crawling game, with a party of four who can engage in tactical battles with assorted monsters.

I've had a guilty fondness for this genre since Wizardry, though Monster's Den is slicker and easier to handle than the versions I tried in the 80s, and it's free, too. Monster's Den offers a little bit of framing narrative for each of the three campaigns available (one of which is a survival mode where you face wave on wave of attackers until you and the city you defend finally collapse).

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': The Reflective Leather Hood of Character Depth" »

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['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist.]

I play a fair number of casual games, and I'm interested in story-telling, so I was intrigued by Mathew Kumar's recent Gamasutra article about the state of the casual games industry, particularly this bit, from John Welch at Playfirst:

"At PlayFirst we introduced character and narrative to our games -- we obsessed on meta-structural devices such as story development and even simple-sounding aspects like map screens and expert levels, all in service of answering the player's question, 'Why am I doing this?' which wasn't being answered by abstract match-3 games."

"Our consumers could say, 'Oh, I'm solving this level to help Flo fix up her restaurant and become a successful entrepreneur.' The ability to nurture our consumers' connection to the characters and provide them with a clear sense of objective through storylines has proven very powerful," he continued.

This made my eyelids twitch.

I would love it if casual games took more seriously the kinds of stories they can tell, and the ways in which casual-game types of interaction might be narratively interesting. To do that, though, they need not to kid themselves about what constitutes a narrative.

The plot arc of almost all the Dash games -- and the majority of time management games of all brands -- is essentially the same: an entrepreneur in the burgeoning field of (waitressing/dog grooming/wedding planning/dairy farming) gets a break-through opportunity at a (restaurant/pet salon/catering business/farm). Through hard work and perseverance, the entrepreneur does well enough to expand the business over and upgrade her own talents and equipment, until she (it's always a she) reaches some zenith of business acumen. Then the game ends.

(One caveat: as so often, the original in this field is considerably better than most of the follow-ons, and the first Diner Dash does have a more interesting ending than average. The developers of the sequels also seem to have conveniently ignored the surprise outcome of the original because it's somewhat difficult to build on.)

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': Narrative vs Fiction" »

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['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This article looks at the problem of separating player and protagonist goals.]

Last year I participated in a panel on tragedy in interactive storytelling. One of the big questions there was: if the player identifies with the protagonist and is motivated by the desire for the protagonist to "win" or "succeed", how can satisfying interactive tragedy exist? Won't the player always be trying to avoid actions that propel the story to an unhappy conclusion? What can an interactive tragedy offer to the player in place of traditional metrics of success?

My ideas then were largely about tapping into the player's desire for other kinds of gratification: the desire to see the end of the story; the desire to make significant choices (even if those choices lead to endings that are unhappy in different ways); the desire to explore the constraints of the universe in which the story takes place.

To that list, I would now add: the desire to precipitate a dramatic crisis.

The player faces a situation where he could do something risky and stupid, with negative ramifications for the protagonist, which would nonetheless be narratively interesting. He's probably curious about what would happen if he did.

How does the game get him to go ahead? How is the player cajoled into doing something that sets the protagonist back?

The clearest example in my experience comes from a game you almost certainly haven't heard of: "Treasures of the Slaver's Kingdom", a text adventure by RPG author S. John Ross. It's set in the parody-RPG universe of "Encounter Critical", and was marketed primarily to Encounter Critical's existing fanbase -- namely, people who enjoy a spoofily ridiculous mix of elements from Star Wars, Star Trek, Conan the Barbarian, and similar geek-sacred texts.

To discuss how "Treasures" gets the player to betray the protagonist, I'll need to spoil it a bit. Details after the jump.

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer in Silicon': Betraying the Protagonist" »

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['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist.]

I find the hidden object game a bit of a frustration. Here is a genre in which a great deal of effort goes into the framing story -- and, perhaps even more to the point, the games tend to advertise themselves on the basis of that story, in contrast with many sorts of casual games that advertise themselves on the basis of the mechanic.

We have hidden object games about expeditions to Mt. Everest, or assembling archaeological evidence from Egypt, or tracking killers in London. But in practice the interaction and the story usually have almost nothing to do with one another.

There's even a hidden object remake of The Count of Monte Cristo. An ambitious idea, and I couldn't resist trying it. It gets off to a fair start: there's thrilling if slightly cheesy music, a great sense of importance, and an illustrated summary of the opening portion of the book.

If you were going to pick a book to translate into an adventure game, The Count of Monte Cristo is a promising choice: it's a bit of a pot-boiler, but it has a hell of a premise, with lots of obvious, easy-to-share motivation for the protagonist. There's love, danger, money, intrigue, betrayal, imprisonment, a cameo appearance by Napoleon Bonaparte -- what's not to like?

This rendition somewhat flattens the original story (apparently the authors figured that "Chateau d'If" would be too strange to the American audience, so they translated it into the rather less evocative "Castle of Iff", which sounds neither plausible nor French). So it's not as good an opening as Dumas wrote, but even watery Dumas is rich by the standards of adventure game beginnings.

But then -- oh, then. Then we are given a screen showing an inscrutable clutter of items and told to pick "clues" out of it, the clues that will lead us to our betrayer. Clues such as a pineapple, a crumpled paper, or a wedge of cheese. Do this long enough, and the story moves forward just a little.

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': Playing the Reader" »

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['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This latest column analyzes the story and message behind casual title Ciao Bella.]

PC casual game Ciao Bella is a time-management game, of sorts: not the kind where you race from place to place assembling hamburgers or grooming pets, but a game about scheduling events into the densely-packed life of a young woman named Elena. There are only so many hours in the day, and too many things to get done, so you have to choose for her -- what do you want to give priority, and what can you afford to let slide?

I've argued before that this is actually quite a good mechanic for interactive storytelling about relationships, because it allows the player to articulate priorities and preferences in much the same way that we in fact do in our lives. Only part of our interpersonal interaction is about what exactly we say to one another when we're actually together; the rest is about how much time and attention we mark off for the people in our lives, and which responsibilities we allow to override which others.

And Ciao Bella bases its mechanic on that.

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': Gaming Meets The Rules" »

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['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This column looks at gameplay mechanics in PC casual exploration titles.]

Tradewinds Legends is part of the casual tycoon/empire-building genre of games: you have a trading fleet, which also dabbles in a bit of piracy (but always when attacked first, naturally), and you travel from city to city buying low and selling high. You can borrow money, or save some in the bank.

You can upgrade your fleet with bigger, stronger ships (and, eventually, flying ones). You can discover new locations on the map, and new commodities to trade. And you can perform a series of missions for the various governors and sultans in power.

So far it's very similar to the other installments in the Tradewinds series (though earlier editions take place in the Caribbean and allow only one ship at a time). It's a more distant cousin to the Chocolatier games, or to the classic Apple II title Taipan.

As story-telling, though, it's much stronger than Taipan (which didn't really make an effort) or Chocolatier (which made a perfunctory one, in which the missions are all pretty similar and the characters not very distinct).

Tradewinds Legends doesn't take its setting terribly seriously and has no trouble throwing in anachronistic jokes, jibes, and insults, but it does give some of the recurring characters a bit of distinct personality. It also has story arcs that consist of several missions apiece, and which grow longer and more significant as the game goes on.

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': Trade and Piracy" »

Posted by Emily Short at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist.]

Retrosabotage has recast a number of classic arcade games with new themes. Some of these are pure one-shot jokes, playing on the collisions between one idea and another -- Tetris crossed with Duck Hunt. Some are clever reworkings of old game mechanics so that you have to play a familiar level in a new way.

But one of them -- called "Twenty Lines" -- takes the mechanic of Tetris and places it against the background of scenes and music from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

What's awesome about this version is the way the interaction of the original game has been revised to support the revised theme.

Instead of trying to get rid of lines of blocks, you're now trying to build the black monolith. Completely filled lines sink to the bottom, exposing lines that still have holes in them. Problems rise to the top, so that they're easier to resolve. There are no hard sides to the game space, either: if a block sticks out past the borders of the monolith, the extra squares simply vanish.

Cinematic effects change the way the player perceives the game, as well. At first the monolith is distant from the player, placed in an alien environment, a bit difficult even to see clearly. The first lines of the game vanish into a hole in the ground, only half visible, and surrounded by gibbering primates.

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': Two Thousand And One Lines" »

Posted by Emily Short at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['Homer in Silicon' is a new biweekly GameSetWatch column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist.]

There is a line of argument I've seen in quite a few places, which goes like this.

1. Games would be better if they had better stories.
2. Stories are about characters.
3. Characters are hard because good interactive dialogue is hard. (Or: characters are impossible because good interactive dialogue is impossible.)
4. Rats.

There are lots of approaches to solving this problem, ranging from Chris Crawford's attempts to render conversation in a computer-friendly pseudo-language to the extensive reliance on not-actually-human characters or characters who are present only in cut-scenes and journal entries. Don't get me wrong: this is a difficult problem, and it doesn't have an easy solution.

All of these approaches assume, though, that the interaction has to happen at this micro level: that the game-play has to be about what the protagonist does and says from moment to moment, that it has to go by at the same general speed and granularity as real life. They assume that the plot is going to be made up of the big events, by arguments and interrogations and important confidences and love scenes.

Continue reading "Column: 'Homer In Silicon': Why Time-Management Games Ought To Be Great At Story-Telling (And Why They Mostly Aren't)" »

Posted by Emily Short at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)