Statistics: Posted by Hullalla — Wed Aug 31, 2016 10:52 pm
Statistics: Posted by Slloyd14 — Wed Aug 31, 2016 8:32 pm
Statistics: Posted by Slloyd14 — Wed Aug 31, 2016 6:46 pm
Statistics: Posted by Slloyd14 — Wed Aug 31, 2016 6:33 pm
Statistics: Posted by Ruffnut — Wed Aug 31, 2016 5:29 pm
Lorian wrote:
After ages spent planning a small elvish settlement in the forest of yore I had to relocate to the forest of spiders, but after finding out that sittle woad and dree are in it ! the session is soon and I have no location. Please help me find a location. If preferable it would be no more than a month away from port blacksand and temperaturate to tropical. Although any location would do if nothing else came up. Also it would need to be in an mostly empty forest near mountains. Any other features would be OK.
Statistics: Posted by Ruffnut — Wed Aug 31, 2016 5:28 pm
Statistics: Posted by Lorian — Wed Aug 31, 2016 5:23 pm
Attempt 6?!? You’ve gotta be kidding me.
Arrow Cutting, Climbing and Poison Needles, for the curious.
After thinking about it for about two seconds, I take the path of least resistance, and again follow Chigeru to Nara.
You were just waiting for the bullet points, weren’t you? Happy to oblige!
Take it away Sherlock :
Stats : Endurance : 17, Inner Force 3, Shuriken 6, All modifiers : 0
Recommended web-page : Although he commentates more on twitter nowadays, I highly recommend checking out the archives of Las Vegas Cabbie Chronicles. It is truly a warts-and-all description of the interesting (and often difficult) life of a cabbie in Sin City.
Upcoming Events
September 4, the Oxford/London IF meetup has an open problems session in Oxford. Join us if you’d like to discuss something that’s stumping you in a WIP (or give advice to people who are in that situation).
September 10, Australian IF folks are having a meetup in Melbourne. (Link is to a Facebook page that organizes the group, which might be of use even if you aren’t able to attend this specific event.)
If you are instead in the Bay Area on Sept 10, the SF Bay IF Meetup has an event that day as well.
September 10 is also the voting deadline for IntroComp, if you were considering participating. That’s a good chance to give authors feedback on their work in progress. (And if you’re up for it, reviews are great too — IntroComp hasn’t had a huge number of reviews this year so far, and it would be cool to see more.)
September 28, Boston area, PR-IF is holding its next meetup.
Finally, September 28 is also the deadline to submit games to be shown at WordPlay London, a November event centered on interactive text and held at the British Library. You may submit your own works or nominate works by other people.
IF Comp launches at the beginning of October. We’re just about at the deadline for submitting an intent to enter, but if you’d like to donate prizes, that option is still open to you.
*
Speaking of IF Comp, that is going to be the theme of our London October IF Meetup. Last year we played a bunch of comp games together and it was a blast, and we only wished we had a little more time available. This year, I’ve got a more central (Shoreditch rather than Maritime Greenwich), wheelchair-accessible venue in London on October 16. It’s a weekend slot rather than our usual weekday evening, so that we can afford to run for most of the afternoon rather than just a couple of hours. If you’d like to join but can’t make it right at the start, there will still be stuff going on if you arrive later.
If you’re a comp game author this year, you’re going to be in London at that time, and you’d like to see a group play your work live, let me know in advance and we’ll make sure we include your game in the mix.
Please also let me know if you’d like to volunteer as a reader (reading aloud on-screen text so that we’re all on the same page as we play) or to bring snacks (mm, snacks).
Also, please feel free to invite people! The meetup is free and public, and we always welcome new members, but especially here: this is meant to be a fun and festive intro to some of the best of what’s going on in IF right now.
New Releases
Worldsmith is a new commercial parser game with an ambitious simulation and a JS-enhanced interface. I discuss my first experiences with it here.
Brendan Patrick Hennessy has a short and wholly adorable post-Birdland piece called Open Up.
Sub-Q Magazine brings us Before the Storm Hits by JY Yang, a piece about what you choose to do before the end of the world. Which of the items on your to-do list is top priority? And can you make any difference if you do things in a different order? I don’t want to spoil it by going into too much detail, but
I wrote a small piece for Texture called Endure. It’s an interactive translation, where you’re resolving Homeric Greek into English phrases, but you have several different translation modes you can try — and you can juxtapose serious with jokey readings, for instance, if you want to go for particular stylistic effects.
Your results will also depend on the order in which you translate. If, for instance, you start out your translation by focusing on text about the Cyclops, you will get a different slant on the rest of the passage than if you start by focusing on Odysseus’ cleverness.
In a way it’s sort of a companion to First Draft of the Revolution — not because of its subject matter, which is completely unrelated, but because both are trying to use interactivity to convey something about the mental process of translation and the flexibility of meaning to be found in a single text.
Endure is pretty niche, which is why I haven’t done more to talk it up. It might not appeal to you at all. Some people have said they liked it even though they don’t read Greek, but others have said they felt they were missing something. (The one player I know of who did already understand the Greek really liked it, but this may not be statistically significant.)
If you do like that, I also recommend B Minus Seven’s Relentless Drag.
I also wrote more about Texture for my IF Only column at RockPaperShotgun.
IF-Adjacent Fields
While doing some background on my escape room articles, I ran across references to Block Stop’s By the End of Us, a live theatre experience where one player performs the role of a video game player and the audience collaborates as their antagonist. thelogicescapesme reviews the game experience from the audience perspective, and there’s also a comment from the person who played the single-player role.
I also learned that there is apparently a trade show for room escape designers.
Craft, Training, and Tools
Jason Grinblat talks about procedurally generated titles and descriptions of games for Caves of Qud. Also, mentions Annals of the Parrigues, yay.
Jedediah Berry shares an exercise for writing collaborative shuffle narratives like his own Family Arcana, usable in workshops.
This is not new, but on my Twitter feed last week someone linked this article on the concept of the act structure in screenwriting, and how it’s not really very useful as a way of thinking about structural concerns, and about alternative approaches to think about plotting. Because it’s by the movie reviewer who posts as HULK and writes in ALL CAPS, the article is also in all caps. I dislike reading long passages in all caps, so I mean it extra when I say that the content is very worthwhile. Maybe copy and paste into a text editor and auto-convert it into sentence casing if it gets to be too much for you.
Community Development
Rami Ismail writes about the stages of game development communities in different territories. He’s basing this on experience with particular communities, but I think some similar criteria could apply when looking at the niche genres or forums looking for more wide-spread recognition.
Statistics: Posted by dcpchamber — Wed Aug 31, 2016 1:39 am
Ruffnut wrote:
Lorian wrote:...
I curse thee.
.
Statistics: Posted by Ruffnut — Tue Aug 30, 2016 1:06 pm
Lorian wrote:
...
Statistics: Posted by Ruffnut — Tue Aug 30, 2016 1:02 pm
Aside : Sorry to my legions of fans for the lack of entry yesterday. To be honest, the reason was a personal one, which involved work, family, and sleeping at 9.30pm.
Onwards!
I’m rebooting, if you will, from the commencement of the adventure. My skills are Poison Needles (remembering that I need poison before this is any good), Arrow Cutting and (drum roll) Climbing!
After crashing and burning at every previous option, I elect to go, once more, to Nara, following the same path as Chigeru.
For those who don’t remember, we once more face the three enemy ninjas.
I throw a Shuriken, removing 5 Endurance from my initial adversary. I then do the throw / kick combo and remove a further 5 Endurance. He only has 2 left. I finish him off, although he does take away 7 of my precious Endurance points.
Endurance : 13
I pummel the final enemy into submission, and once more spare his life in return for information.
The defeated enemy talks about their (as in the monks of Vile) mission to stop us, and we quiz him and then send him off down the road, no doubt with suitably arrogant taunts ringing in this ears.
Chigeru and I enter Nara, and I again elect to try for the same flag as him (him being Chigeru). Climbing the wall of the palace, the following then occurs :
I then subtly sprint (!) down the road to Takahiri, and run into the samurai with the possessed sword. I manage to save him, although at the cost of 5 Endurance. In a small piece of consolation, his help restores 2 Endurance.
Endurance : 10.
In summary, I enter Takahiri, and secure the help of Nao in infiltrating the palace. I face the Pit Feeder and….
I reduce it to 4 Endurance and….
That 2 dice of damage that it does on every hit has its inevitable effect.
Damn you, resolve to play this book honestly!
Web-page recommendation : If you enjoy lengthy and detailed reviews of bad movies, you can’t got past Jabootu’s bad move page. They spend thousands of words dissecting such masterpieces as Highlander 2, Body of Evidence, Superman IV and so on. Highly recommended.
Statistics: Posted by LordArioch — Tue Aug 30, 2016 11:02 am
Statistics: Posted by Lorian — Tue Aug 30, 2016 9:55 am
Statistics: Posted by Lorian — Tue Aug 30, 2016 9:53 am
Statistics: Posted by joesmith — Mon Aug 29, 2016 9:37 pm
| Seriously - I remember staring at the little logo next to the disk drive as this little thing would sit and think and think and think |
| FAO Numbers |
| ICYB numbers |
Boston GameLoop is an annual game development unconference. I’ve been going for years, and I’m always impressed by the sheer wealth of knowledge available.
I have fewer notes from this discussion than any of the others, since I ran this one and couldn’t take notes simultaneously. To compensate, I’ve done a more extensive writeup below, but it’s from memory rather than notes, and I’m doubtlessly forgetting stuff.
Here’s a terrible photo of the whiteboard.
A game engine is a collection of libraries and programs that are used to create a game. Game engines keep you from having to build your own everything from scratch.
Visual scripting engines are generally most accessible to nonprogrammers. Visual scripting engines represent game logic with visual graphics rather than lines of code.
Some game engines don’t require programming per se, but do require non-visual scripting. “sound = beep.wav; play(sound)” is an example of regular scripting. It does require you to learn the specific language of the engine, but (in this example) you don’t have to write your own audio system for it – you’re drawing upon existing programming libraries without delving into them.
You don’t have to be a programmer to build games, but you do have to work within the limitations of your game engine if you don’t know how to program. If you do know how to program, then you can move beyond the normal limitations of your game engine. Choose your game engine carefully.
Twine: Browser-based hyperlink system designed for interactive fiction. It is possible to teach the basics of Twine in 30 seconds, yet it supports variables and sophisticated CSS, and it’s extendible with Javascript. Very good starting place. Also good for prototyping. Free.
Construct 2: Graphical equivalent of Twine in that it’s also visual scripting and fairly easy to pick up. Drag-and-drop code blocks. Includes a physics engine. Size-limited in free version.
MIT Scratch: Graphical engine aimed at kids (8-16) but very good at introducing basic programming concepts. Large community. Remix system allows users to see the code for any game and then create their own versions. Not exportable/commercial.
Stencyl: Related to Scratch, uses the same programming language.
GameMaker: Graphical engine that allows you to build logic either with visual scripting or in its own scripting language. The GameMaker scripting language allows you to do more than the visual scripting system does, which is typical for hybrids.
Flixel: Open source, Flash driven game engine. Uses ActionScript 3.
Unity/Playmaker and Unreal/Blueprints: Unity and Unreal are extremely popular commercial game engines that normally require you to learn coding (C# or modified Javascript for Unity, C++ for Unreal). Playmaker and Blueprints are plugins that allow you to use the engines without knowing how to code, but it doesn’t take away the fact that these are still extremely complex engines. Not recommended as a first game engine for nonprogrammers, even with the plugins.
Amazon Lumberyard is a CryEngine fork and unfriendly to nonprogrammers. Ditto Cocos2D.
Specialized game engines are great for specific projects. Some examples:
Starcraft, Warcraft 3, Skyrim: These are all extremely moddable games. Modding games is a good way to learn about game logic in a context that’s already familiar. Skyrim in particular allows you full access to the game’s internals with the same tools used by the actual dev team (may be true for Warcraft 3 and Starcraft too; I just haven’t seen those personally.
Pico-8: Fantasy console system for making and sharing teeny tiny games. Lua scripting.
Want to learn programming? Search for an online REPL (stands for Read, Evaluate, Print Loop) for your chosen language – this allows you to put in code and see the execution results immediately.
Recommended first language: Javascript. It runs on the browser, so you can turn what you’re learning into actual results very rapidly. Also, knowing Javascript converts well into learning C#.
Don’t overlook unusual options for learning programming basics. More than one person in the room got started on a TI-83 calculator.
Boston GameLoop is an annual game development unconference. I’ve been going for years, and I’m always impressed by the sheer wealth of knowledge available. I’ve written up my notes below, but I haven’t fleshed them out this year and they’re more than a bit incoherent (apologies for that!) I hope they’ll still be useful.
GameLoop participants: I have not attached anyone’s names to these writeups, and I’ve mostly scrubbed personal anecdotes out to maintain the privacy of attendees. Please contact me (carolyn at sibylmoon.com) if:
Thanks!
(To a large extent, this is a list of citations. On the plus side, if you play the citations, they are funny.)
Some ways to bring humor into video games:
Overcooked <– restaurant management
Stay committed to the joke (Saint’s Row 3 zombie voice)
Pit of 1,000 Snakes; Jazzpunk
NASA moon exploration game <– search for the video; players took a really serious game and made it really funny
Multiplayer games produce social humor
Humor can be interpreted as a reaction to transgression; games are a rules set that players can transgress against
WoW – the disease that spread (Corrupted Blood incident)
Pac-Man 2 <– look up smug Pac-Man (dramatic irony)
The Sims <– simulation and variables and chaos
Catlateral Damage <– physics
Most comedy-centric games come from indies. AAA is frightened of humor, and humor is risky.
Level design: subverting expectations
The Narrator Is A Dick
Saint’s Row 3: absurdity
Flip side, humor can come when something super light pitches to dark (uncomfortable laughter)
Parody: Press X to Not Die
Situational awareness: What does your audience expect?
Dangers of humor: will your audience want to buy your game if they’ve already seen it played on Twitch?
Portal 2 <– humor and gameplay, people want to watch and play
Goat Simulator <– played for humor value only, not really played as a game
Procedural generation: leverage for surprise, streamers won’t see all content
Branching humor and content: streamers won’t see all content
The Stanley Parable <– demo didn’t match the game; also, changing voiceover while keeping set in places allowed for more bang for buck
Unlock additional content <– achievement system to expand horror
Call of Duty – DLC announcer packs add humor
Rick and Morty VR humor game (upcoming), Justin Roiland – Squanchtendo
Tim Schaefer everything
Boston GameLoop is an annual game development unconference. I’ve been going for years, and I’m always impressed by the sheer wealth of knowledge available. I’ve written up my notes below, but I haven’t fleshed them out and they’re more than a bit incoherent (apologies for that!) I hope they’ll still be useful.
GameLoop participants: I have not attached anyone’s names to these writeups, and I’ve mostly scrubbed personal anecdotes out to maintain the privacy of attendees. Please contact me (carolyn at sibylmoon.com) if:
Thanks!
We need “emotional physics engines” – have given far more thought to how to simulate physics than emotions
NPCs are playersexual, have no true consent – NPCs like players, end of story
Standard game relationships: rise to plateau, stop there, no concept of trouble and recovery
Persona <– must spend time together; relationships and romances both depicted
Relationship as a means to an end <– problematic
Fallout & Dragon Age <– followers approve/disapprove of actions
Relationships are more realistic when they’re more subtle – hide points, etc
Pet relationships <– sometimes easier to invest emotions when the relationship is constant and reliable (Fable 2 dog, Fallout 3 dog) but player behavior should still impact pet behavior
When games represent friendships, they’re often better at it than romances
In many cases (esp Fable series), marriage == house decoration
Relationships are often not part of the game – they’re separated out
Until Dawn – domino chain of conversations and relationship
So much talking about Mass Effect! – Garrus as bro
Good relationship writing matters more than good relationship mechanics
One More Dog Game; Never Alone
A Boy and His Blob <– hug button
Relationship as plot device vs. actual relationship
Halo/Cortana connection: no choice, prewritten, but people cared
The Darkness, watching TV with your spouse to form a connection – doesn’t work
Enemy relationships are relationships too, when tracked and built
Shadows of Mordor: Enemies changed by your actions and their actions
Players form connections by doing things actively, not passively.
Journey as a relationship experience <– depends on who you get matched with
People care deeply about Bastion <– the game, not the robot
People want to interact like people – thinking in terms of numbers interferes with relationship building
Ib <– RPGMaker; play multiple characters
Shadow of the Colossus <– people care about the relationship with the horse, because it’s there with you always and helping you (like Fable 2 and dog, or Nethack and d)
Catherine <– make time for each bar patron; more impactful/effective than the actual Catherine/Katherine choice
How do games represent broken relationships?
Harvest Moon and Mass Effect 3: NPCs can get together and have relationships in-game if you don’t interfere
Earthbound <– relationship with dad linked to save points, relationship exists even though in-game contact very sparse
Dyscourse – survivors on an island, how do you prioritize talking to people?
Boston GameLoop is an annual game development unconference. I’ve been going for years, and I’m always impressed by the sheer wealth of knowledge available.
GameLoop participants: I have not attached anyone’s names to these writeups (except for talk leaders), and I’ve mostly scrubbed personal anecdotes out to maintain the privacy of attendees. Please contact me (carolyn at sibylmoon.com) if:
Thanks!
Discussion leader: Arden Ripley
Mental illness horror perpetuates harmful stereotypes; this is not cool, don’t do that
Many different kinds of horror:
SOMA – same studio as Amnesia, no combat, very different
STALKER series – Russia/Ukraine, example of scarcity narrative
Pathologic – similar vein, plague/existential horror
Horror games rarely have morality systems – very shades-of-gray. Ambiguity and agency together inspire emotion and investment.
Playing a horror game isn’t like watching a horror movie – “Don’t go through the door!” You choose to go through.
Liz England – IF horror game (Her Pound of Flesh)
One horror source: uncaring world, impersonality of horror
Immersiveness as the key – mechanics subdued, tutorials either blended or concealed
Horror games often force you to make an authentic choice/action (even when they’re not actually branching games)
The Walking Dead (Telltale) <– to make this game extra creepy, let every dialogue sequence time out
What kind of person are you?
Active choices encourage connection. Passive do not. (Note: This was a recurring theme in the relationships talk as well.)
Zero Escape <– visual novels, metaaware
If a game is too scary, it will overwhelm players and they will quit. Think about what success means: are you okay with players quitting?
What kind of challenges are people up for? Always a fail state –
Silent Hill 4 – repeatedly sends you back to your apartment as a safe place/save spot… and then the apartment starts morphing in subtle/awful ways
Save points help you control a player’s mindset when they return to the game
Forcing breaks in the game has pros and cons (see: the debate over Christine Love’s Hate Plus, which forces play over three real-time days, and also enough time to bake a cake)
IM/text message games on mobile <– immersive
Pacing is a key element in horror.
Mystery is a key draw in horror – why?
Mechanics: in a conserved resources game, there are two fail states:
Non-horror games can have horror aspects – see nighttime in Starbound and Minecraft
Don’t Starve <– okay you finally have to try this (Note: you don’t, O Reader, but that’s literally what my note says)
The Long Dark
Horror stories: What are we afraid of?
Death is scary – but actually dying is jarring as heck, breaks immersion, shuts down the horror experience
Death does not have to be the source of scariness or the end of a game
Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem <– lose control rather than dying
Avoid systems/story dissonance
Haunting Ground: cut scenes and situation-tailored death, AI learns where you hide
Common horror themes: being chased, hiding, powerlessness
The Forest <– Steam, impressions from first death
Demon Souls: Why go back when you’re safe? Works for some people not for others.
Make death part of the content – plot, character, situation
The Path: encourages you to break the in-game rules and seek out death, experiments with death as a win condition
Blocking death entirely can make players unhappy, removes agency (one of the Prince of Persia games did this, not the storytelling one)
Boston GameLoop is an annual game development unconference. I’ve been going for years, and I’m always impressed by the sheer wealth of knowledge available.
GameLoop participants: I have not attached anyone’s names to these writeups, and I’ve mostly scrubbed personal anecdotes out to maintain the privacy of attendees. Please contact me (carolyn at sibylmoon.com) if:
Thanks!
(This discussion focused on released games, not games in process. It often veered into “why do companies fail?” territory.)
Concepts of success vary… who’s defining failure?
Failure to communicate with your audience
Failure to understand your audience
Developer/marketing communication failure
Developer/developer communication failure
Before updating a released game’s content/mechanics, think about: what are people doing in the game? and how will your update change what they are doing in the game?
Keep an eye on metrics… use them as evidence when arguing for a change
Marketing and community management team need to work together
When writing patch notes, keep them positive – help people understand how the changes will make the game better
Your friends are not necessarily your best colleagues – maybe don’t start a game company with them
Respect the community of players – especially when sunsetting an online game: build a positive experience that will encourage them to transfer loyalty to one of your other/future games
Avoid burnout – you’ll lose the ability to make decisions, and that will hurt your game
Keep games fun by playtesting, playtesting, and playtesting
Use rapid prototyping to playtest early, while you can still pivot as needed
Look for ways to measure results – don’t trust anecdotes and intuition
Understand development in terms of cost and revenue – use these metrics specifically when arguing for/against changes
Who is your audience? Why? They need to be the people playtesting your game.
Usertesting.com <– affordable user experience research platform for mobile betas (not game-specific)
Someone usually knows that the game is in trouble before it fails. Getting that info to the right people is the hard part.
Be honest. Look for feedback. Listen. Address problems early.
When talking to other developers/management, be honest about your concerns – but cover your butt
Books to read: Getting To Yes and Having Difficult Conversations
Why don’t people speak up? Fear of retribution.
Useful thought experiment: before the game ships, while there’s still time to make changes, pretend the game has failed. Run a postmort where people talk about why the game has failed. Helps dig out concerns in a safe environment.
Being part of a good team includes being willing to reach out and ask for help.
Open lines of communication:
joesmith wrote:
Just wanted to say that having the PDFs available on Drivethru is brilliant, something I've been wanting for a while, every since I lent my copy of AFF2 and assorted books to a friend who moved away with them... So this is cool.
Just one query though, why do some of the books on Drivethru have watermarking and some don't? It doesn't worry me whether they do or don't, just wondered if there was a reason that's all.
Anyway, keep up the good work and the releases!
Statistics: Posted by bottg — Mon Aug 29, 2016 6:28 pm
I’m back from GameLoop 2016! It was wonderful as always, and much appreciation to Scott Macmillan and his team of audacious volunteers for making it happen.
Talks I attended:
I’ll add links above as I get my notes ready. This year will be somewhat less coherent than last year (you’re getting my raw notes) but I hope they’ll still be useful.
I did not successfully document who ran various talks this year (apologies!) so please chime in if you ran one of these or know who did. Also, if you were present and have corrections/clarifications, let me know!
Edward Gorey, the author and illustrator probably best-known for macabre alphabet book The Gashlycrumb Tinies, had a prodigious output and an immediately recognisable style, often imitated but almost never equaled. He published a number of books which are interactive in one way or another, usually in odd or incomplete-feeling ways; The Awdrey-Gore Legacy, for instance, starts out feeling like a murder-mystery story but steadily devolves into disassociated possibilities for weapons, locations, different versions of characters, dramatic twists and inexplicable clues, more like a set of prompts for a storygame or a Goreyish version of Clue than a particular narrative.
The Raging Tide: or, The Black Doll’s Imbroglio was published in 1987, and it bears the obvious mark of influence by Choose Your Own Adventure. It contains thirty nodes – small by any standard – each with a single page with one illustration. The accompanying text is always a single, one-clause sentence describing the action; this is always followed by two choices, except for in the two endings.
The story features four characters: Figbash, Hooglyboo, Naeelah and Skrump. All are faceless, and look like awkwardly-handmade children’s toys. (In fact, the collector’s edition of the original was accompanied by a stuffed Figbash doll, hand-sewn by the author.) They act against a changing and indefinite landscape, usually including sculptures of the final two joints of giant fingers; there is always the same patterned carpet in the foreground, and there’s a general feeling of a puppet-theatre stage. (Gorey was also a theatre set designer.) For most of the book, the four characters fight one another using mundane household items as weapons: these all have the kind of early-C20th, kinda-British flavour you’d expect of Gorey (suet, golden syrup, library paste, tintacks).
7. Figbash threw an antimacassar over Skrump.
The choices are not made from the point of view of any of the characters, but are questions asked of the reader, who is not a character in the story. They concern the player’s preferences, not any kind of story-influencing command, and are often reflective:
2. Figbash scattered cracker crumbs on Hooglyboo.
If this makes you comfortable, turn to 3.
If it doesn’t, turn to 8.
A number of options seem like complete non-sequiturs: “If you loathe prunes more than you do turnips, turn to 22.” Some are meta-choices: “If you want to keep on with the story, turn to 25. For a meaningful aside, turn to 15.” Most, though, are about the player expressing moral approval or disapproval of what’s happening, even though all the events are much alike. There’s a sense that your agency is being… not even denied, exactly; but the possibility of it mattering is made to seem ridiculous.
Gorey’s oeuvre is heavily concerned with lives and deaths that are pitifully pointless. He often constructs his stories to end on an anticlimax, or to rotate around a question that goes unanswered. Sometimes his narratives devolve into outright surrealism, characters uttering phrases with no relation to their inexplicable activities, evoking the feel of historical illustrations which you can’t interpret for lack of context. Many of his works take childish things and make them macabre, or at least infuse them with a very adult sense of anhedonia, disappointment, diminished lives. Gorey’s worlds are full of obsessions and lusts, but nobody ever seems to derive any fun from them.
In this context, it might feel as though Imbroglio’s attitude to CYOA is that it’s arbitrary, disassociated from intention or causality and therefore from meaning, until all that’s left is a world of pointless, inconclusive violence of all against all. CYOA is taken, like the animate dolls, as a childish thing. The action, too, reads most straightforwardly as the zany slapstick of children’s cartoons or a Punch and Judy show; but Gorey’s style is consistently wooden, heavy and weary-feeling, with none of the energy and emoting that makes slapstick what it is. (Figbash is the closest thing to an exception, and Gorey seems to have enjoyed his boneless motion enough to ) It is very consciously an out-of-place thing.
*
What appears to a casual glance to be a totally unstructured mess in fact has a fair amount of structure. The shortest possible playthrough is 4 nodes, but this is quite unusual; 7-9 is about the norm. The nodes can be filtered more or less into layers, with larger numbers generally lower down the diagram; although a number of choices backtrack or move laterally, and it’s possible to get stuck in a loop, the majority move the action forwards. There are a good number of large jumps, but most movement is pretty local; backtracking rarely jumps back very far. So, while it’s kind of a rat’s nest, it’s nowhere near the total arbitrariness that the text suggests.
The closest thing there is to a player choice meaningfully affecting the action comes towards the end, at 24 and 25. (There are a lot of parallel structures in the book.) These two nodes offer respite from the constant fighting: the characters forgive one another while eating either prunes or turnips. In the subsequent nodes they immediately start fighting again; shortly after, you reach one of two endings, either “And so they all lived miserably for ever after” or “And then everyone went joyously to an early grave.”
That loop also offers a fairly clear choice; you can choose to keep ignoring the plot and keep going around in irrelevance. (This section also has Goreyan tones of disappointment and making-do, and it still features the same characters, but at least they’re not locked in eternal battle.)
So there is a dramatic arc to Imbroglio: conflict, peacemaking which fall apart, and then an ending. But Gorey has no investment in this narrative and expects that you won’t either, offering ample opportunities to go off on a tangent or to end the story abruptly.
It’s possible that Gorey set out to make a more chaotic rat’s nest, but started writing with the low-numbered nodes, generally proceeding to higher ones, and thus ended up imposing structure despite himself. It’s fairly difficult to make a truly tangled choice structure off-hand; if you just draw one ‘randomly’ on paper, or write it as you go along, it’ll probably come out relatively orderly. But I’m not sure that interpretation bears out: if nothing else, the repeated pattern of paired nodes, each a version of the other, suggests that he was structuring it more in terms of reflection, of both sides of possibility being much the same.
Statistics: Posted by Slloyd14 — Mon Aug 29, 2016 12:08 am
The Boston IF meetup for September will be Wednesday, September 28, 6:30 pm, MIT room 14N-233.
Between now and then: Boston FIG, Sept 10th. As far as we know, PR-IF will have a table there! So say hi.
