If Text Then Code

Reflection

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In 2022, the player and two other students who have graduated from Bucknell University for two years. The set of another two virtual characters is for giving advice and help to the player, then the player could decide which of guide he or she may follow. The background is about implementation of the TPP, Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, which was signed by US government in 2018. The economy situation gets worse and worse for the tremendous decrease in exports and imports for this act, and the unemployment rate gets another highest level comparing to the Great Depression. The three main characters are struggling in living for both student loan and hyperinflation. At this time, all three go back to Bucknell campus, seeking for any job that might be available. They accidentally find a letter lying in the mailbox they used to use. After playing number guessing game, they finally open the mailbox. The letter says: “follow the whale”. They start a journey to work for a gang in Hong Kong to steel an artifact in a museum to make money. The main conflicts are to avoid being noticed for example choose a discreet movement, and to open the safe case using Caesar cipher.

Due to the definition of “exploratory hypertext” by Joyce,  which means the text itself is changing every time with the reader’s reaction. This functions on our project. The player should read the instructions and understand the facial expressions of virtual people. Then he or she might give a corresponding action whether to pass by or to talk to them naturally to cover his or her identity as a thief. “Collaborations are both the work itself and the series negotiations between collaborators that govern the work’s creation.” (Rettberg, P194) Our game ,just like collective work, needs a lot of collaborations between the player and the other two virtual characters which are set by code. While we communicate by codes and series of texts and choices.

There are many benefits to work in Group 2. I am a first-year and this is definitely the first time I deal with computer science, and Dale has experienced a lot with Python, so he is the main director of codes. Ella and I are in charge of thinking and modifying the main story line and writing the text in the game. While, the biggest challenge for me to work collaboratively is to understand what the concept they were talking about. The cultural difference is unavoidable for example when we were brainstorming, they could easily talk about hundreds of movies that I have never heard of before. While finally, we didn’t apply any one of them and agreed with the story now it looks like.

The whole idea is inspired by the game I played during class called “Sherlock Holmes and the Indecipherable Cipher” in playfic.com. So we also put some other virtual characters to give some clues to the player, decreasing the difficulty of the game and directing him or her to what is supposed to do, other than doing a lot of codes to cover every possibilities. Also “follow the whale” and the character’s name “Neo” are inspired by the movie “The matrix”. “Follow the whale” gives the player the direction and clue what he or she needs to do next and shifts the set location to Hong Kong. But why Hong Kong? It is just for the reason that based on my knowledge Hong Kong is the right place to steel artifacts and breeds lots of gang.

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The game is going to be reality.

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.

Weekend_is_for_Gaming.py

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Superheros

Superheros

We, Matt, Maureen and Iris are from Group 3, and our project is a story about superheros. More accurately, the player will first choose their superpower from invisibility, super-strength and flying, and then randomly assigned to one of the three scenarios and trying to save the people as superheros always do. The objective of this game for the player is successfully stops the crime and save all the people and get to an happy ending. However, unlike in movies, superhero doesn’t always success even if they chose all “correct” answers. We’ll set the possibilities and the computer will decide the ending of the story. In my scenario, the player will control the trend of the story by making subtle personal choices but the ultimate challenge will be a moral question that has no right or wrong answer to it. My scenario will be in second person narrative which can furthermore make the player feels and acts in their role as a superhero.

Our work will be presented with a digital form. Like mentioned in the introduction of Literary Gaming: “With a new generation of cross-media writers emerging on the horizon, a greater variety of explorative texts will become available. ” Our game relies on algorithms that enables the player to interact with the text. Their decisions will affect the ending of the game. Such interactions might be hard to present without the help of modern computer science technology. However, our works are subject to constraints as well. We need to set a bunch of rules based on our discussions and write the scenarios accordingly. For example, we even set how many options will we give the player each time. Although our scenarios are not written collaboratively, but for the good of the project we worked like The Unknown mentioned in Rettburg which is built upon respect.

The benefit of team working is that we can divide the work up and thus each of us don’t have to write as much as we have to when working individually. For example, each of us only have one scenario to write but when adding up in total we have three different scenarios. Also different scenarios that has different perspective in them will make the game more playful. However, since we need to write the algorithm to achieve the functionalities and to present the texts as an interactive game,  we need to work collaboratively and determine the trend of the stories in advance. If we didn’t agree and shared how we’re going to write our scenarios, it might cause difficulties when writing the computer program later on. Also, each one of us has different schedules so finding a commonly available time to meet might become a challenge. I assume later on coding might be a real challenge. In my experience combining individuals code might cause a great problem of what should a function takes in and what should comes out. If this cannot be handled properly, the program will not run and we’ll spend lots of time changing what we’ve coded.

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We’re thinking about finish writing the scenarios before this Tuesday and starts the coding part later this week.

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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.