when it was started in 1995, the interactive fiction competition existed as motivation for authors to contribute to a then-small library of free interactive short stories. over a decade later, i feel justified in saying the competition’s outlived its purpose. there’s no longer a shortage of short-form text adventures; the competition has become a venue for people to contribute half-finished or bland stories, knowing they’ll be widely-played and written about despite a lack of quality. emily short, whom i’m sure i’ve mentioned before as one of my favorite writers on design and theory, makes note of this herself in her reflections on this year’s set of entries. authors, how about we release stories when they’re finished and not rely on cheap springboards to critical discussion?
along with her reflections, emily short lists her favorites of this year’s heap; playing through them, the one that struck me as most interesting is jeremy freese’s violet.
i’ve written before about conflict between the player and the protagonist; violet does an interesting thing. text adventures use prose to communicate with the player; usually this is written in the voice of the protagonist. in violet, the narrator is the protagonist’s girlfriend (the game’s namesake), or the protagonist’s mental construction of her, who encourages the protagonist to finish the dissertation that has come to be an unmovable obstacle in their relationship. all that the protagonist does or experiences is conveyed to the player in the voice of this girlfriend, who characterizes their relationship through the details she relates and how she relates them. violet watches, and reproaches, as the protagonist makes sacrifices in order to preserve their relationship - but this violet is a mental projection of the protagonist; this is self-judgement.
i find this premise believable: we all carry the voice and perspective of those we love with us. we see and judge our own actions through the eyes of those who love us, those whose opinion of us we value. i have inner-monologued in the voices of loved ones. in violet, it gives us insight into the emotional state of the protagonist without putting words into the player’s character’s mouth. this is the silent protagonist we rely on to maintain the player’s agency, but that protagonist’s thoughts and feelings bleed into the game through the voice of the one who loves the protagonist most.
related: if there’s one thing i think interactive fiction has on the the rest of the videogame medium, it’s that there’s room for stories to be about these small, personal conflicts. too often “the fate of the world hangs in the balance,” which is an awfully impersonal motivation. if we want to grow as storytellers, we’re going to need to move away from the epic.
12 comments
Perhaps, but perhaps video game’s overall rejection of the banal and its embrace of the extraordinary and epic is part of the appeal for so many people.
I’m sure there’s room for both.
I thoroughly agree with the last paragraph. Saving the universe sounds difficult and boring. I’d rather stay home and play computer games.
wow it must suck to have my voice and perspective in your head screaming all the ti me
do you think the same will be true of the IGF someday?i mean already the volume of games being entered has gone up exponentially and with more content, comes less quality
maybe the same amount of compelling nad interesting games are being entered in that IF contest, but since more people know about it, there are more entries, and not all of them are top tier?
my fear for the igf is actually the opposite: because the entry fee is so high, i feel like it’s becoming more an avenue for professionals to find publishers than a celebration of independent development.
robot, i don’t think that personal stories or localized conflicts have to be mundane or ordinary. stories about saving the world invite melodrama and banish a reasonable investigation of character and motivation. if the scope of my story is the entire world, how can i hope to create a meaningful connection between each character in that world and the player?
i think ico is a good example of a commercial title with a small-scale plot: it’s made clear very early that the conflict is local to a small village and a neighboring castle. the game is about two characters, and the relationship that develops between them. you aren’t saving the world, but there is the feeling that you’re saving one soul, and that’s a scenario i find a lot easier to attach myself to emotionally.
I’m not certain that an increasing IGF fee really bars talented indie developers. Obviously, it could get high enough to do so, but Petri isn’t made of money, and neither are Kyle and Ron (although those two might be if the Goo sales are rather good). I would argue that a sufficiently high fee guarantees quality submissions. Maybe that’s the solution to IF competition over-exposure.
On a side note, I saw your post about MegaMan 9, and I thought it missed something that is rather interesting about the game. It seems to me that one would have an easy time of classifying the game as masocore. I was playing with a friend when we came across a level (Tornado Man’s level, I believe) which fairly systematically screws with player expectations. Rain pushes the player left or right (and transitions at one point with no warning except a slight difference in the background), and some clouds can be walked on but others can’t. The game is very hard, but this is balanced by the freedom to continue as much as you want, making player death an inconvenience rather than a true obstacle.
I’m sure a lot of old NES games actually had these qualities, some to the point of being more masocore than the MegaMan series, but that’s an argument that masocore was more widespread and unrecognized back then, not an argument that MM9 doesn’t qualify.
well, megaman nine is interesting in that its mission is pretty blatantly to replicate the difficulty and challenge of a nes game, which is the same objective of many of the harder freeware platformers. a little while after megaman nine came out, i heard someone ask whether the wily castle stages might be influenced by i wanna be the guy; the games that most influenced the design of i wanna be the guy were the early megaman titles.
i think what characterizes contemporary masocore games is how deliberate they are. the design of early nes titles was influenced by that of arcade games - which were still strong then - a market where there was a monetary incentive to create more difficult games. as the arcade has receded and the home game has become the norm, the trend has been away from that level of challenge. masocore games deliberately buck that trend: twenty years ago making a hard game wasn’t transgressive.
and yes, megaman nine is a game that’s deliberately hard in a way most games no longer attempt to be. it was given the license to be, though, since it’s marketing itself as a nes megaman game made twenty years after the fact.
In one sentence you say that the competition has outlived its purpose, but in another you note that you found “Violet” through Emily’s comp summary.
Many games are released outside the competition, and most fall into obscurity. Without the comment-generating atmosphere of the annual competition, an argument can be made that Violet would have similarly fallen through the cracks. I don’t think the competition is as useless as you think it is.
you don’t believe violet would have received any attention had it been released outside of the competition? and you don’t see that as a problem?
Well for a lot of people (by which I mean for me) the IF community is practically invisible aside from IFComp, which becomes a sort of ‘Let’s Play IF’ day of the year.
It’s not that Violet wouldn’t have received attention outside the competition, it’s that none of these games would.
i think the price is high enough to keep joke games out, but low enough for average joes to enter
90 dollars isnt really that much if its an investment in what could be your future career
I wholeheartedly agree — as you probably already know — about moving away from the epic. Though I play games that, through marketing, purport to be epic, they are often quite the opposite. Gears of War is a great mainstream example. It’s a linear, focused, rather small game, which is what I like about it.
The joy of playing games for me is the rush of getting to do something I don’t/can’t. I’m not a freerunner, so the idea (the single idea, mind) of Mirror’s Edge is captivating.
An “epic” game usually means doing a bunch of disparate things that don’t feel right, versus doing one thing (running, jumping, shooting, etc.) that works incredibly well.
post a comment