If Text Then Code

Reflection post, Group 3

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The project we are working on is a room escape game. The protagonist is trapped in a cabin in the woods and he/she will wake up in a coffin with his/her hands chained by a hand cuff. There will be five chances to obtain hints. Before the game starts, the player will be required to enter 5 names of his/her friends, and there will be a timer when the game begins. After 10 minutes, if the player can’t find all the hints to escape, he/she will see or hear that their friends are dying. After 25 minutes, if the player is still in the cabin, a fierce dragon will come in and eat the player. So, better to escape the mysterious room quickly!

The similarity between this text-based game and traditional fiction is that the author/designers decide the main plot of the text. Unlike the interactive or collective fiction that participants can make up their own stories, the players can’t change the clues. For example, the player can’t rewrite the plot and add meanings to a vase in the room – which is not part of the keys. However, like Rettburg suggests in his essay, this room escape game is similar to other MOOs in that it “is only a potential story until readers respond to and perform within the text” (Rettburg, 192). It will only be a list of descriptions and remain static if there is no interaction between the text and players. The player also has the freedom to decide how long it takes to get out of the room (and darkly, how many the player’s friends will die). Though some of the puzzles have to be solved in certain order, the player can decide the sequence of obtaining certain tools.

It is great to have a team of three so that we can corporate together and with each other’s strength, we can build the game collectively. Yash is a computer science engineering major student, and he is more familiar with programming. Therefore, he is helpful to evaluate the plausibility of our ideas and help to improve the design of the game with CS logical ways of thinking. As a student majoring in English and Comparative Humanities, I’m interested in writing plot and setting up puzzles for players. In addition, Julia is important in the way that she will review the pros and cons of our idea from the perspective of the players. In other words, if we compare our team to the forum of fan-fiction, Yash is the website that makes it possible, I’m the “author” who writes the story, and Julia provides reviews and gives suggestions on how to update the game. All of us are indispensable in this project.

The inspiration of this game comes from many similar games online and on smart phones. There are also many horror and suspension movies about the idea of “escaping.” The plot of having people dying one by one is inspired by the great novel And There Were None (and there is a new BBC adaption, watch the trailer here). Another movie that has similar themes is The Exam. If possible, we want to insert background music in this game, and we find some instrumental music play like this.

 

 

 

Who locked the door?

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For our project we started with a basic maze idea that we’ve developed into a better story. The player is inside a building with ten rooms. Each room has different things in it, and the player needs to use the items to help them escape the building. Originally the project was going to take on more of a stranded in the woods story line, where the story line would have been something like this:

“You’ve just woken up and feel groggy; the last thing you remember is getting a couple drinks with friends. You look around and realize you are surrounded by trees and shrubs. However you can see what looks like a path that you may have formed on your way here. You analyze the path and realize that you can either go left or right

Right: you walk around the corner and hear a rustling in the bushes after further investigation you realize there is a poisonous snake in the bushes and before you have the chance to jump back it strikes. You have no chance of recovering from this so you die! Start Over?

You can’t start over dummy you’re dead.

Left:  you walk down the path, but it is still dark out, you have the feeling that something could be watching you. As you continue down the path you hear wolves howling in the background and they sound like they are getting closer. You are getting very nervous and start to run, when you come to a fork in the path one to the left and one to the right which do you choose?”

However after discussing the idea we decided that this idea was probably too simple and wouldn’t really challenge the player since you would just be guessing left or right the entire time. So the team decided that it might be better to challenge the player intellectually. This gave us the idea of the ten rooms seen below. Each room has items inside it and some are necessary to get put and some are not.

Working on this assignment as a team has been very beneficial because it allows us to pool different ideas and mesh them together. I find it very interesting to see how people with different backgrounds and majors can contribute to an idea and continue to keep making it better. Personally this exercise is very helpful to me because the computer science majors that I have for partners are able to do an excellent job at explaining any questions I have regarding the coding portion of the assignment.

Not your usual clickbait: Creating a Text-based Escape the Room

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(play audio for optimal reading experience)

After brainstorming for a bit during class, our team of three rejected the idea of developing a text-based Sherlock Holmes thriller. It was too cliché according to us, and after much thought, we decided on a game, central plot of which is based in a locked cabin. A player finds himself trapped inside a coffin, his hands handcuffed. Is this too dark for you already? Wait for it! He gets out of the coffin only to find his helpless friends across the transparent walls. The time has already begun, and if he does not act fast enough, his friends are going to die in the weirdest of ways. But what if he turns out to be a self-absorbed person? After a certain period of time, a dragon enters the cabin and eats him alive.

Initially, the player would need to move the coffin to find a key to unlock the handcuffs. Our team is figuring out the details of the story. This is where working collaboratively proves to be an advantage. Each one of us has read or watched related works, such as The Exam and the best-selling thriller And Then There Were None, which has helped us think about our plot right from the onset.
And Then There Were None

For further motivation, Tong is looking into existing room escape games on various platforms, such as mobile applications and web-based 3D games. Her critical thinking ability is greatly valued, and alongside Julia, she plans to sketch the storyline, set up puzzles, and determine the player’s superpowers, if any. As a Computer Science & Engineering major, my objective is to gauge the feasibility of our design, build a minimum viable product (MVP), and see if advanced features can be incorporated successfully. In addition, Julia will oversee our progress and critique the project as and when appropriate. I think our biggest challenge while working as a team would be finding time to meet, given that all three of us have packed schedules.

So far, our work resonates with the writing process of The Unknown in which the authors “began with a general scenario, but … there was little conscious agreement about how the plot(s) might proceed.” (Rettberg, S., Stories and Storytelling in the Digital Age, pg. 192) Nevertheless, we agree to review each other’s contribution to get a sense of the “context” before proposing any changes. As we look at other similar games, we try to decipher what designers of these games have encoded for their players. In the process, we may draw parallels with how we envision our game to function, and “in turn generate crossover fiction.” (Thomas, B., Harry Potter Fanfiction and Narrative as a Participatory Process, pg. 212) This is especially fascinating to me because we are acting as reviewers and authors (or designers) of texts simultaneously.

Trailer of Exam (2009)

Literary Gaming: Questioning Traditional Agency in Game-Play

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My group (me, Iris Fu, and Matt Fay) is creating a superhero game in which the player can choose between three superpowers: super-strength, the power of flight, and invisibility. With the limitations of their ability, the player must navigate one of three different scenarios assigned to them by probability/chance. All three scenarios feature the player (superhero) confronting and trying to defeat a villainous force. Each scenario is written to favor one power, thus limiting success by chance and ability (superpower). Even though certain scenarios are more adventitious for a certain power, the outcome of any run of the game is not as clear as win or lose. For example, the player might be successful in saving the day but still end up in jail; life isn’t black or white, but it’s messy and gray.

The Netflix hit show Jessica Jones inspired my scenario in which the player is an investigative journalist trying to get at the bottom of a government conspiracy. Unlike a lot of superhero narratives, Jessica Jones questions traditional concepts of agency and morality. At the end of the season, viewers are not rewarded clear winners or losers and conflicts still remain at large.
The Netflix hit show Jessica Jones inspired my scenario in which the player is an investigative journalist trying to get at the bottom of a government conspiracy. Unlike a lot of superhero narratives, Jessica Jones questions traditional concepts of agency and morality. At the end of the season, viewers are not rewarded clear winners or losers and conflicts still remain at large.

In the introduction of Literary Gaming (2014), Ensslin states that literary games are “designed to make players reflect on conventional aspects of games such as fast-paced action, rule-governed kinetic behavior, goal-directedness, and simplistic friend-and-foe binary thought ”(7). Indeed, our game fits within this framework of literary gaming as our game delineates from traditional aspects of fairness. For example, many traditional games start with players on equal level fields; regardless of the race you choose in Skyrim-whether Breton or Argonian- you will get the same quests. In our game, however, players are assigned scenarios that are easier or harder depending on their power. Even beyond the realms of game or narrative, our game asks players to question their experience of life in terms of the choices awarded to them by chance and/or ability. How does privilege affect your circumstance? What abilities or lack thereof affect what you can do or accomplish? How much “luck” do you reward to your current situation in life?

Like many literary games or really games in general, our game is a collaborative effort. Using Rettberg’s definition, each team member is a conscious participator- we all know the restraints, nature, and our role in the project (137). For instance, each of us is writing one scenario that favors one superpower: Iris is doing super-strength, Matt is doing flying, and I am doing invisibility. Even though we each write a scenario, we have to be mindful to balance our stories in terms of length and difficulty with each other’s. Additionally, we have to be mindful not to make our scenarios to similar to each other. One challenge or difficulty of working in a group of three is that we can’t read each other’s minds; we have to continually communicate about how our scenario is evolving. Also, in terms of the division of labor, our method (we all write and code) is inefficient. It delineates from traditional group work that assigns a role to one person, such as one person coding and another writing the story. On the other hand, our method offers a greater variety of game-play and lets each of us participate in storytelling process. If I were to create the game alone, I would not have the time to create 3 scenarios much less have the creativity to ensure that they each represent different points of view.

My narrative outline of the game. WARNING: contains spoilers.

A Student Created a Blogpost, You Won’t Believe What Happened Next!

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Progress on the game was a bit slow at first due to some unforeseen circumstances, which put one of our group members out of commission. As a result we ended up assigning aspects of the project to focus on based on what we were more familiar and comfortable with. Sarah and I would focus on the story and text of the game, while helping with code, while PJ would focus on the coding while helping with the story. To this end, we created a collaborative google doc for the story section of the game, which was nice as it gave the entire group the ability to view and edit the same document. However, there is unfortunately no easy google doc for coding, and the nature of coding makes it difficult to work simultaneously. So we decided to try and focus on our areas separately before coming together for a meeting the night before to be able to work together in the same geographical location, which would allow us to combine our disparate parts into a whole product. To this end I have written an outline as well as a chunk of the actual dialogue, mapped with pseudo-code.        

Rough draft of the script, using pseudo-code

Script/Pseudocode

The idea for our game was inspired by another Game Called The Stanley Parable, which despite being a 3d game with a navigable environment, bears remarkable similarities to the text adventures of old. The game features a narrator who describes the player’s actions before they happen. However the player is always given multiple options, including doing the opposite of what the narrator describes. The idea is that it challenges the traditional conceptions of a game, where there is a defined win point and when the game tells you to do things, you generally assume that by accomplishing them you will eventually win. However this game has no win state, but merely multiple endings, most of them bad. The same principles were applied to our game, as we decided that the narrator would actually have the worst interests of the player character at heart, and thus by following what is the perceived path to victory, the player will be working directly against his own interests. 

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The narrator of Stanley Parable

This approach to the game allowed us to purposely mess with the ideas of encoding/decoding, as we encoded information that was purposely meant to be interpreted the wrong way, as since the player is assuming control of a character with 0 motivation or backstory, so that it is easier to empathize with. Then we provided the player with a path to follow, and given the tactical lack of other leads or details to grab onto, we hope that the player makes incorrect assumptions. This in particular is what makes this type of communication so interesting, since in a traditional piece of writing, the reader has no agency, and can only follow the path the author has designed. Whereas in a text game the roles are changed since while the creator can design and lay out a narrative or path, the agency belongs to the player of the game, who can choose to follow or subvert the game designer’s narrative.

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Creative Commons License Bucknell University Humanities 271 Course by Diane Jakacki is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.