choice design · Detectives · Narrative Design

Choose Your Own Mystery: Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey?

Clara Fernandez-VaraLeave a comment

The growing interest in choice-based stories in games and television, as well as my own interest in the perennial popularity of mystery and detective stories led me to finally read Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey? (1981) by Edward Packard, an early title (#9) on the original Choose Your Own Adventure books.

How do you make a choice-based whodunit interesting? One of the things that keeps us reading or watching a whodunit is that, after the crime is discovered at the beginning, the reader / audience is given snippets of information, which they try to piece together to be able to anticipate the solution to the crime before they reach the end of the story. Reportedly, this is what led Agatha Christie to write her first mystery novels, challenged by her sister to write a story that the readers could solve before reading the solution. But how does giving the reader choices change the challenge? (Partial spoilers ensue.)

Turns out that Packard was actually pretty smart when writing his book. The mystery itself is a paint-by-numbers mystery (millionaire gets poisoned in countryside house, and all the suspects are people who could benefit from his death), and the reader can choose different places to go to, different people to talk to, or different stories to pursue, as the blurb of the book describes. More interestingly, at a certain point the reader can actually give up on the investigation, thus forfeiting the chance to learn the solution to the case.

My battered second-hand copy of Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey?

And that’s what makes the book compelling–a whodunit in the end tells the reader / audience what the solution to the mystery is, which can be satisfying even if one did not get anywhere near figuring out the solution. But here the reader has to pursue the solution, and in order to get all the details of how the murder happened has to actually re-read and choose different paths in order to get all the information that they’d traditionally get by just continuing to read or watch. At a certain point, the reader is told “if you’re sure you’ve solved the murder, go to page 122”, which would seem to be a shortcut for them to learn the solution even if they don’t really know it. But it is really a red-herring – the paragraph just tells them that they’re calling the police inspector Prufrock and say they have the solution, without providing any additional information or solving the case. The reader must actively pursue all the pieces of information.

For my first read-through, I figured out who one of the culprits was (there’s actually more than one) and then the protagonist was immediately killed, which was not very satisfying as a reader, but it was a very clear message telling me to try again. And this is one of the achievements of the book – it does encourage re-reading in ways that choice-based games don’t often encourage – the recent Overboard being an exception – at times because of their length, at times because there is not a sense that what the player may be missing is that interesting at all.

The book also manages to make some of the choices very dramatic – one of the early choices involves joining the victim to the dinner where he will be killed. This allows the reader to witness part of the events directly, including hearing Harlowe Thrombey’s last words. In one of the branches, one of the culprits misrepresents those last words, which makes the reader realize they are lying – but the reader has no agency to act upon that information, it is a revelation for us instead of the detective protagonist. One of the options leads the protagonist to say he has a recording of Thrombey’s last words, which feels wrong if the reader has actually read the passage with Thrombey dying on the protagonist’s arms. This is also not a choice – the protagonist does it for us. But it leads to a satisfying ending – the culprits reveal themselves and get arrested, while the reader learns that the recording was a bluff. While the reader does not have agency in this resolution, the gap between the reader and the protagonist gives way to a compelling dramatic moment.

The book thrives on this gap – while the protagonist keeps trying to solve the case in each potential branch, the thrill for the reader is to collect and contrast the information with every read-through, carrying out an investigation of sorts while exploring the different choices in the story. The detective work takes place at the meta-level, outside of the story, which turns what is otherwise a trite murder mystery low on characterization into and interesting and charming read. The book creates a loop for the reader, in consonance with the fashionable mysteries on a loop that we have seen in traditional fiction as well as games, but in a work written almost four decades ago.

Adventure Games · Thoughts

The Death of Adventure Games that Never Was

Clara Fernandez-Vara5 Comments

Dear reader, I’m tired. A couple of months ago, I read a couple of articles, both academic and journalistic, that talked about the “death of adventure games”, more than 20 years since it supposedly happened. I expressed my frustration on Twitter, and the popularity of the post reminds me that I’m not alone in my frustration. Here’s the long version of why the phrase “death of adventure games” pushes my buttons.

Adventure games are a genre very dear to my heart – I wrote my dissertation on them, and I learned the ropes of game development making them. I had never heard of the “death of adventure games” until I came to study in the US, because in Europe adventure games kept being made and played by audiences well after the 1990s. Why do people mean when they say they died?

Most people refer to Erik Wolpaws’ article, which eviscerated one particular puzzle in Gabriel Knight 3, and identified it as the death toll of the genre. I’d say the article is a symptom of what happened in the North American industry, as well as the tendency that journalism and certain fans have to oversimplify game history.

What happened back then is that two of the largest companies making adventure games, Sierra On-Line and Lucasarts stopped developing them at the end of the 90s while continuing working on other genres. Why did they close down their adventure game divisions? We can probably guess some of the reasons, but my theory is that they probably have to do with mounting development costs, derived from projects that aspired to be interactive movies either using FMV or 3D spaces, as well as the market becoming larger and opening up to wider audiences. More importantly – and here’s a key difference between North America and Europe – game consoles were taking up a larger part of the US market, and the point-and-click interface was quite burdensome to control with console controllers, which limited the market to PC desktop machines. While the PC market remained relatively strong in Europe during the 2000s, it does not seem it was the case in North America. The profit margins were getting narrower, and investors will always take their money to whatever will give them the largest return of investment. There are probably other reasons, which may have to do with how good or bad the games were, for example, but my hunch is that it’s always money.

The adventure games of Sierra OnLine and LucasArts have been tremendously influential in the design and storytelling of games for the last two decades, including adventure games that were still being released after the supposed demise of the genre. Adventure games were not AAA blockbusters any more, they missed the “mainstream” train that would have allowed them to maintain ballooning development and publicity costs and reach larger audiences. On the other hand, they kept being developed by smaller teams, which in certain cases has allowed them a creative freedom that has kept adventure games fresh, as well as given way to a myriad subgenres, and reached smaller and underserved markets of players.

The “death of adventure games” is part of a narrative created by journalists, fans and even some developers, who revel in self-pity or want to feel special instead of celebrating the variety of games that have been appearing in the last 20 years.

Genres keep dying and reviving constantly, as Víctor Navarro-Remesal mentions – once everyone had had their share of playing with plastic guitars, music games were apparently done for. Never mind that series like Dance Dance Revolution has just turned 20, or Beat Saber (2019) was one of the runaway hits on VR headsets, and Just Dance just announced its next title. Music games had their moment where they millions of living rooms and tech offices, but although they are not as visible and omnipresent they have not gone away either, particularly outside the US. In contrast, there is no such discourse around flight simulators, which had a similar trajectory as adventure games – a relatively popular genre that did well in home computers, but which requires streamlined controls to play well in consoles. LucasArts, which was also famed for their fantastic flight simulators designed by Lawrence Holland, stopped making flight simulators a few years after closing off on adventure games. In comparison, the volume of flight simulators released in the last couple of decades has been much lower than that of adventure games, and yet the genre is celebrated with the release of certain titles, such as the latest Microsoft Flight Simulator or Star Wars: Squadrons.

And while flight simulators may have experienced a modest revival, there is hardly any acknowledgement that adventure games still remain a popular genre, even if they do not rack up the millions of AAA games. In comparison with flight simulators, we have a long list of games developed during the supposed “death” of adventure games: The Longest Journey (1999), and its sequel Dreamfall (2006), Syberia (2002), a couple of dozen titles in the Nancy Drew game series, and half of the games in the Blackwell series. These games, released during the first decade of our century, are key referents of the genre. But perhaps having women as protagonists, all of them investigators of one kind or another, independent and adventurous, may not have been in agreement with certain parts of the videogames discourse. They were plenty other titles released during that period: the Runaway series (2003-2009), as well as a good bunch of Frogwares’ Sherlock Holmes titles; both Quantic Dreams and Telltale Games rose to fame in those years. Mind how many of the titles listed are game series, which fostered enough interest to allow developers to release multiple titles and having loyal groups of players in spite of being titles of varying quality.

During this period, many people who started as “hobbyists” in the interactive fiction and adventure game communities have become comercial game developers of some of the most interesting narrative games released in the last 15 years: Emily Short (Failbetter Games), Jon Ingold (Inkle Studios), Sam Barlow (Half Mermaid) , Dave Gilbert (Wadjet Eye Games), and Francisco Gonzalez (Grundislav Games), to name but a few.

The influence of adventure games is also more than obvious in escape the room games. Originally, they were web games that took the lock-and-key mechanics of adventure games and turned them into their core gameplay. The became their own digital game form, to then inspire the thousands of escape the room spaces that are available all over the world.

The consequences of the US-centric, money-centric discourse on adventure games, which also extends to other genres, is that smaller game communities tend to be overlooked, as well as left out of funding resources because they’re not perceived as popular blockbusters. I already complained about how mid-budget games are becoming rare – when a narrative game makes a lot of money, investors considered an exception; if a narrative game by a “proven” team doesn’t make back its money in a month (even if it recoup costs in a few months), it’s supposed to be the norm. This bias derives from the way journalists, fans, developers as well academics talk about the games, not based on analyzing data, looking at the history, or finding the communities that love playing and making these games.

Adventure Games · Detectives

Ace Attorney: The Perry Mason of Videogames

Clara Fernandez-VaraLeave a comment

After 6 years of waiting, the Great Ace Attorney games finally get a release outside of Japan, to the delight of fans and many narrative designers who don’t speak Japanese (and are also fans). The release will mark the 20th anniversary of the Ace Attorney series, which has spanned 13 games, a bunch of novelizations and manga adaptations, an animated TV show, a movie version directed by Takashi Miike, and three musicals by the Takarazuka Revue. The popularity and longevity of the series around the globe is undeniable, and the release of the Great Ace Attorney games, set in 19th century japan, was long overdue.

Poster for Gyakuten Saiban: The Truth Reborn, the first adaptation of the Ace Attorney series to a musical. Source: Ace Attorney Wiki

The formula of the Ace Attorney series is the following: the player plays the role of the attorney, who has to defend someone who appears to be guilty of a crime. At first glance, the circumstances and evidence all seem to demonstrate that we’re defending a lost cause, although our defendant says they’re innocent. Our goal is to turn around the story–the “turnabout” is the core motif of all the Ace Attorney games. It’s up to the player to find the evidence that will exonerate our client–and here’s where the game proves to be a really a detective game. Our lawyer, alongside their assistants, visits the crime scene, finds pieces of evidence that go into the case report, cross-questions people, and when they have found all the information they need, then they go to court. The game will not let players progress until they have found all the materials that will help them make the case in the courtroom.

The courtroom is where the player must fight for justice, though this courtroom is very peculiar–we only have three days to solve our case, while all the arguments that our lawyer can make are based on depositions from witnesses rather than appealing to specific laws. Apparently, one doesn’t really need to go to law school to be a lawyer in these games. Witnesses tell their stories, and we have to find the contradictions and the lies by pressing them on specific statements, or offering evidence that proves that their statement is not correct. The courtroom scenes are a fight for truth and justice, almost literally. When the interrogations get heated, the music speeds up and pumps up, just as it does in the fighting games by the same publisher, Capcom. The sound effect whenever the player raises an objection or marks a contradiction, with a loud “Hold it!” or “Objection!”, has become as iconic of “hadouken!” in the Street Fighter series, also developed and published by Capcom. (It’s no surprise that Phoenix Wright appears in Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 (2011) as a playable character.)

The Ace Attorney games are not really about being a lawyer, but being a good detective. None of the lawyers who are protagonists or the prosecutors that they face doesn’t need to know the code of law, but has to be able to rewrite the story by finding the lies or inaccuracies and provide the evidence that will set it right. This is what a detective does – a detective gathers evidence and information in order to solve a mystery, figure out how a crime has happened, which is what the attorneys in these games do to begin with. The goal of the detective is to be able to reconstruct the story of the crime by looking for fingerprints, broken glass, traces of blood, and a variety of depositions. In mystery novels, how the crime has happened is often baffling – for example, there is a whole subgenre of detective stories where a murder happens within a locked room. The Ace Attorney series starts with a crime where the explanation seems evident, and so the story that the lawyer-detective has to tell has explain the crime in a way that will exonerate their client.

The model that the Ace Attorney games are followed actually comes from a long tradition of detective stories, particularly the Perry Mason series. The character was originated in a series of novels, which are the third best-selling book series in the world, but he rose to worldwide popularity thanks to the 1950s-60s TV show with Raymond Burr. The formula for each episode may sound familiar to the Ace Attorney fans: at the beginning, the audience is introduced to a potential victim, and the people who surround them, including someone who has very clear motivations to kill them. Then the potential victim becomes the actual victim of a murder, and all points to the most obvious subject, who immediately becomes the client of Perry Mason. The second half of the episode consist of courtroom scenes, where things look really bad for the client as the district attorney presents evidence that first allows the judge to send the case to trial. With the help of his trustworthy assistants, PI Paul Drake and secretary Della Street, Mason gathers evidence that demonstrates unethical and even criminal behaviors on the part of other characters and at times even law enforcers. In the end, it’s one of these pieces of evidence that makes the actual culprit break down at the stand, and confess the crime. Thus the client is found not guilty, something that is celebrated by the client and the team, who do a short debriefing after the trial.

Opening credits of Perry Mason (1957).
Source: Wikipedia

If you’ve played any of the Ace Attorney games, this formula will feel terribly familiar, because it’s exactly the same as the structure of a typical case in the games. Continuing with the parallelisms, in the original TV adaptation (there have been others) there is only one instance in which the client is actually guilty, as is the case (to my knowledge) with Ace Attorney, which also gave way to one of my favorite moments in the whole series.

There have been previous game adaptations of Perry Mason, all inspired on the Raymond Burr adaptations. The first one was a board game tie-in with the original TV show from 1957, where players are driving around to gather evidence, interrogate suspects and be the first to bring the evidence to court. A second board game from 1987, probably a tie-in with the TV movies that Burr starred in at the time, focuses on the court case, where players have to cross question witnesses and obtain the answers that will allow players to find the culprit. Both games come with a variety of cases that can be replayed, and use detection as one of their core mechanics, a common feature in many detective board games.

There is also a videogame also directly inspired by the 1950s TV show, Perry Mason: The Case of the Mandarin Murder, which reproduces beat by beat the structure of one of the TV episodes. It is a graphical text adventure where the player controls Mason, who meets the victim and the prime suspect, then examines the crime scene, and then sends his assistants for different information while the court case is going on. Again, a formula that will be very familiar to the players of the Ace Attorney games. You can play the DOS version here, although if you speak Spanish and have access to an MSX emulator, the MSX2 version of the game used scanned photos from the original show.

This is all to point out that, even though the game series has “attorney” in the title, the Ace Attorney games are really detective games, not only because the player does a lot of detective work to gather evidence for the case file, including fingerprinting and examining objects in detail, but also because the texts that inspired the games were also detective fiction to begin with.

Adventure Games · Thoughts

The Vanishing of the Medium-Budget Game

Clara Fernandez-Vara2 Comments

Veteran game designer Jane Jensen, creator of the Gabriel Knight series as well as a slew of other adventure games, has set videogames aside to become a prolific author of erotic novels. She has written novels before, but this time she seems to have found her audience and a good creative space. I’m happy to hear she’s found a rewarding avenue for her creative energy–making a living out of your art is hard, people. And she’s successful and has a following–what is not to like?

Well, I for one don’t like that the games industry loses someone with her extensive experience as a game designer, especially when there’s such a dearth of women designers. The article that covers her career pivot explains in detail the tribulations of developing and releasing Gray Matter (2010) and Moebius (2014). Jensen’s heartbreaking conclusion is that “There’s not much opportunity in adventure games anymore.”

The article linked above encapsulates the dilemma of being a creator in games and trying to get the financial support to make new games in the following passage.

“The very particular path Jensen had to carve out for herself is revealing of how the industry treats its superstars. There’s no real opportunity for an independent writer-director to lead a large budget work without either submitting to employment within a massive corporate structure or building a corporate structure of their own. The industry does not give any one person power and independence at once, especially not at the scale Jensen once enjoyed.”

The budget of adventure games is far, far from that of AAA games with filmic aspirations, which are made by hundreds of people over several years, to be released to thunderous PR in all platforms. Why wouldn’t publishers or investors give a chance to someone with the track record of Jane Jensen? Compared to the millions and millions that big companies spend in their games, making a story-driven game for a devoted fanbase should be a sure bet–may not make a fortune, but probably could get recoup costs and then some if they can reach their audience. Part of the struggle of creating the games Jensen wanted was that she and her husband were spending their own money to make the game, which adds to the stress and raises the stakes of making an independent game; when the budget is also tight, it can also stretch the development of a project over years because developers end up working on commercial projects to make ends meet.

Gabriel Knight in the streets of Munich in The Beast Within (1995)

One of the reasons why publishers and investors are reluctant to give money to make classical adventure games is the trite and untrue phrase that “adventure games are dead,” which the article linked above perhaps inadvertently contributes to. Publishers and investors tend to seek not only sure bets, but projects that have the potential to make obscene amounts of money–something that most adventure games are unlikely to do. And when there is a successful story-driven game, be it an adventure game, walking simulator, or something of that ilk, it is always taken as an anomaly, an exception. The money people just want more of the same.

My problem is that the tone of articles like these contribute to the insidious idea that there’s no money not only in adventure games, but in story-driven games that aim at being original and veer away from the cookie-cutter popular games , when it is patently not true. Surely, there is no AAA money to be earn, but there are plenty of people releasing so many exciting, original and refreshing games, and making a living out of it. Some of them make games evoking the style of 90s adventure games, and in some cases are directly inspired by Jensen’s work, others tell heartfelt stories with animals or mutants; some others retell works of literature from the point of view of women, there is an explosion of fantastic visual novels that tell LGBT+ stories, and a lot of the population that is wearily underrepresented in games. These developers, alongside many more, have managed to release fascinating works and find their audience, which is no mean feat. If we think about game development as an artistic career rather than software development, it becomes evident that the game developer life, particularly when one puts creativity over product, is really hard. That is why having the financial security and endorsement of publishers and investors helps being able to focus on one’s game and help developers find their audience through PR, and the final result is all the better for it.

There is a dearth of support to middle-sized games, in a similar way to how the middle-budget films disappeared for a while – think of the independent movies of the 1990s, for example. These are the kind of works that take a moderate investment, bring a gust of fresh air to the mediascape, and can recoup costs and occasionally provide a hit. This is where one can reach the myriad smaller markets, rather than one large mainstream; where we can find the works that are personal, political, innovative, quirky. As we say in Spanish, variety is where taste is. In film, this kind of works are now being produced by streaming services, which a loss for those of us who used to love watching movies in a dark theatre with other people before that was brought to a halt. Games have not quite found their equivalent yet, the space for these middle-sized games that need more than a Kickstarter, but much much less than Call of Duty. This is the budget size that Jane Jensen needed and couldn’t get. There are a few publishers who are aware that there are audiences who crave new, daring, original games, and are willing to bet on them, and work more as patrons of the arts rather than venture capitalist looking to hit the jackpot. But we need more.

I do not have enough information state with absolute confidence how the industry failed Jensen, particularly after she created her own company, Pinkerton Road, to make shorter, low budget games, which should have been the right move for her. The outsourcing of development, where she wrote the game design document for the team to work on seems to me a bit odd approach, since it may leave out the processes of playtesting and iteration that are also part of adventure games, albeit at times iterating based on player feedback can be a production challenge. Perhaps it was a matter of PR, and making sure that the game got to the right audience. Perhaps the games didn’t live up to Jensen’s ideas since she didn’t have access to the resources that she would have liked to have. Perhaps she needed better PR to get to her players–there are many wonderful games that get lost in the deluge of releases every week. I’m sad we couldn’t get Jane Jensen to stay making more games, and I hope one day the industry can lure her back to make the games she wants.

choice design · Narrative Design · Reviews

Bandersnatch, or why Choosing Your Own Cereal is important

Clara Fernandez-VaraLeave a comment

Bandersnatch, the first interactive episode of Black Mirror, was recently back in the news because of the lawsuit launched by the Choose Your Own Adventure publishing company has been settled, which has made me realize I didn’t get around to write about the episode yet. As anyone who works in narrative games / interactive narrative, of course I have opinions.

Hearing some of my colleagues in games and narrative design has been interesting, particularly those who made angry pushbacks and talked about it with derision. Much has been made of the first choice of the story, which lets the audience choose what kind of cereal they want to protagonist to have for breakfast, for instance. However, we should not dismiss the cultural impact that Bandersnatch has had on general audiences–thanks to Netflix, many people have learned the title of an actual unreleased game from the 1980s, plus it has made choice-based narratives accessible to others in ways that no other interactive television, let alone videogame, has before. Bandersnatch is very accessible–users do not have to install a new app or learn a new interface by making it available through one’s streaming subscription. Many videogame designers wish their work was as accessible and popular as this piece of interactive television.

The notorious “choose the cereal” moment is actually there for a very particular reason: while seasoned videogame players are used to making choices in games, much of the Netflix audience is not. Anyone who’s shown games at venues where you come across non-gamers knows how intimidating interacting with a game can be for them. Something as innocuous as choosing a cereal and seeing how it changes the advertisement on television helps putting users at ease, so they learn how the interaction of the story works. They make a choice, and soon after they see a consequence, and see that they have not broken anything. It makes them comfortable with interaction, which is good for a story that goes quite bonkers later on.

And before I go on explaining what I like about Bandersnatch, let me state that not every choice has to change the plot or not be trivial, because anyone who’s juggled branching narratives knows how much of our time is spent creating the illusion of choice or giving players small expressive choices so they feel they’re in control when they really not. Rant over.

The episode tells the story of a young man who is working on what he intends to be the ultimate choose-your-own-adventure game for the Spectrum 48k, one of the most popular computers in Europe in the mid-80s. The protagonist is marked by the trauma of losing his mother in a tragic accident, and is trying to gain control of his own life by working on this game.

Bandersnatch was made for me: I love Black Mirror and its frequently cynical approach to humanity (although current events make the show feel less science fiction and more speculative drama). The world of the episode is quite familiar–I work in videogames and mostly hang out with indie developers; on top of that, I have taught a class on European videogames of the 80s and got to learn a lot about the bedroom developers in the UK like the protagonist, as well as the story of the original Bandersnatch. Even without the interaction, the story resonated with me (yeah, indie game development is a challenge to one’s mental health), and I had a blast by figuring out all the easter eggs and references.

The interactive story is very meta: it’s a choice-based story about someone working on a choice-based story. The self-referential aspects help smooth over one of the main challenges of designing choice-based narratives–each choice creates an alternate timeline, which makes it easy to fall into inconsistencies and complicates writing a branching story (at least when branching is understood in an oversimplified way). The editing of the episode is really smart, reusing shots with different sounds or dialogue lines spoken off-camera, as a way to avoid having to shoot large segments of different content at the same time it shows how there are different timelines and realities. To some the episode seemed revolutionary–in the past, branching narratives have been either poorly designed because they are written by screenwriters with a poor understanding of interactivity, or by game designers who have a trite understanding of storytelling. Charlie Brooker is the rare person who seems to understand games, and also happens to be a pretty decent screenwriter, an unfortunately rare combination of skills.

The self-reflective nature of Bandersnatch turns the story into a gimmick–our decisions as an audience/user create alternative timelines that some of the characters seem to be aware of; in certain scenes, the protagonist behaves as if he’s aware that someone is forcing him to do things he doesn’t want to do, turning us into the incarnation of his mental problems. But this is only true in certain threads of the story, while others turn the story into a conspiracy, while some others tell us a more intimate and ultimately tragic story. But the triumph of the story is bringing all of them together–this is a story about ontological instability, about worlds that have multiple versions with characters that are somewhat aware of that multiplicity. The huge poster of Philip K. Dick’s Ubik in one of the character’s living rooms is a pretty big and unsubtle giveaway. On the other hand, the metafictional gimmick also makes it really difficult to reproduce the success of Bandersnatch–it’s a one-trick pony that can get old fast, and not all choice-based narratives need to comment on the unstable worlds that they create.

(Excuse me if I don’t deign to discuss the “breaking the fourth wall”, because I’m tired the belief that any narrative should make “immersion” prevail, as if there is only one way to tell stories. Only one rant per day.)

Thus, the choice design of Bandersnatch is not about branching nor about agency or control over the story, but exploring the possibilities of the world, focusing on the “what if” and surprising the audience rather than making us feel like the story is at our service. The point where you can tell the protagonist about Netflix, or choose to go on a rampage are part of the fun of the story, which goes in many different directions and story genres–from personal drama to horrible murder to action movie to nostalgia trip.

Yes, choice-based narrative videogames are way ahead of this–see the wonderfully sophisticated works that Failbetter Games or Inkle Studios have been producing over the years, for example. But even with the smartest narrative designers out there, their fantastic works are still intimidating to a large part of the audience because they’re perceived as “videogames”. These are players and users who would be head over heels playing these games, but they seem too complicated to them. For example, I had someone who loved playing Her Story at a film festival ask me if he could download it through the streaming service Kanopy. The technological barrier is overwhelming to many.

There are things that Bandersnatch could do better, certainly. The aspect of social commentary is not as solid or resonant as other episodes, for example, probably because it’s more of a trippy period piece than science fiction. Since the story is about itself and the choices, there’s little room for anything else. There are issues with gender representation–the women in the episode are mostly wives/mothers or helpers and have a supporting role, for example. Mental health issues created by trauma are associated with psychopathy and murder, which is something that we storytellers should be better at–although it is part of the storyline exploration of the episode, the murder storytline reproduces stereotypes that do not need reinforcement. Although my particular pet peeve of the story is how the protagonist is creating a game for the ZX Spectrum in BASIC, and there’s no way that a game of that scope, with graphics and all, would fit in the paltry 48K of RAM that computer had. But while there are issues of representation that could be better addressed, we also have a few lessons to learn about how to engage a wider audience that may recoil at the mention of videogames, while they may probably love playing choice-based narrative games. And at times all it takes is starting by letting them choose their own cereal.

education · Resources · Thoughts

Mentoring for Diversity: Getting things Done

Clara Fernandez-Vara1 Comment

We can all make big statements on social media about increasing diversity in the video games, but when it comes to making things actually happen, it turns out that the problems are systemic at the core, and that it feels like there is little that we can do. We could throw one hands up in the air and give up. Or we can try to hack the area of influence that we may have – if we all manage to modify the cogs of the machine one piece at a time, maybe we can overhaul the system. It’s hard, but worth it.

For some of us, one possible way to do so is through mentoring of people of underrepresented groups who want to work in games. As mentors, we can help them navigate this broken system in which we’re trapped, teach them so they can figure out how to break into the industry, as well as how to thrive, persevere, and have the career they want and deserve.

This article is for those of us who are in a position of relative power in education and the games industry, and it is mostly based on my experience working in game development and education for the last decade. I cannot claim to have figured it out – I’ve made many mistakes myself, though I’m listening and want to do better. What I’m sharing here is what seems to have worked so far.

The Problem

The first thing to know about mentorship is that it is hard work, which not everyone may be in a position to do. Mentorship involves emotional labor because, more often than not, the support that mentors provide involves listening and understanding what our mentees struggle with, and offering guidance tailored to their experience. Real mentorship builds a relationship over time. Chatting with someone and giving them advice a couple of times can help, but productive mentorship needs to be a longer commitment.

The second thing to know about mentoring is that those who belong to underrepresented groups often feel like they do not belong. Again, it’s a feeling – hence the emotional labor. It has nothing to do with their talent or capacity for work. The world around them is constantly telling them that they are not good enough, that they have to like the “right” kinds of games and behave in a specific “gamer” way in order to “fit the culture,” and even when they do, they may remain invisible and still be shut out. This also means they feel they cannot be themselves, but rather follow someone else’s script. It can take a toll on their mental health. It also leads to almost unshakeable impostor syndrome, and makes them more likely to quit.

People from underrepresented groups have to do a lot of extra work in order to prove their worth. You may have heard the phrase that Ginger Rogers had to do the same as Fred Astaire but backwards and in high heels. That’s true of most people in underrepresented groups. The impostor syndrome is exacerbated by the fact that they are held to standards well above the average, which require extra effort and commitment to achieve.

The higher standards to which they’re usually held are also due to implicit biases that we all have – even people who think of themselves as progressive intellectuals fall into these traps. White men tend to be regarded more positively, and their faults are also more often forgiven – their threshold for making mistakes is way higher, whereas if a woman / BIPOC / LGBTQ+ slips a bit it’s often catastrophic and regarded as evidence that they cannot do the job.

Your potential mentees have to prove their merits, but meritocracy is a myth that elites invoke to keep their privilege. “Merit” involves having access to specific groups and knowledge, which are often selective and (surprise!) not diverse at all, so the vicious circle keeps going. Factors that can provide an advantage are being able to attend a renowned school, living in or near a city that grants access to meetups where they can forge social relationships in person, developing a specific taste that allows you to connect with like-minded people. Having access to games and a computer to make them is a form of gatekeeping – not everyone can buy games at full price on release date to be part of the current discourse or buy a high-end PC, for example.

Is there a solution?

The lack of diversity is a very difficult problem, and we’re not going to solve it in a few months, even if we have the best of intentions. But we cannot stand idle. So here are some suggestions that may work for you and your (future or current) mentees:

  • First of all, a bit of self-reflection. Check your own biases. Yes, this part hurts. But it’s for a good cause.
    • Who are you giving preferential treatment? Why are you doing it? How diverse are they? In an educational setting, students can tell who is getting extra help and guidance – and people of underrepresented groups can tell it’s usually not them.
    • Of your mentees, who has been successful? Who has fallen through the cracks?
    • Those who fell through the cracks, is it because they were not committed or talented? Was it financial? Mental health issues? Is there anything that you could have done to improve the situation? Would a white cisgendered male have eventually been given a pass in the same situation?
  • Offer yourself as a mentor, seeking spaces that may bring you into contact to underrepresented groups. Post it on your social media; if you’re an educator, reach out to students. Make yourself visible. Find groups that are looking for mentors, or team up with other mentors. The hardest part of this is that these potential mentees are less likely to ask for help / mentorship – remember, they are told they do not belong. But forcing yourself to mentor someone is definitely not the best way to make them trust you, particularly if you hold some sort of privilege (e. g. being white / male / cisgendered / in a situation of power). And trust is the foundation of mentorship.
  • When you mentor, listen to and try to understand your mentee. Acknowledge who they are, what they want, and what is getting in the way. One of the main reasons some people give up on their studies / careers is feeling that they are not listened to. Taking a moment to say “Let me see if I understand…” is a basic exercise to connect with your mentee, get them to know better, and get to know them as people and artists.
  • Reach out regularly once you’ve established a connection. As I said, this takes work. And again, your mentees are less likely to ask for help. So remind them you’re there. Calendar reminders, recurring items in your to do list, are easy ways to remind you and check the last time you talked to them.
  • Fight for your mentee. Show their worth to others. Send them job ads. You may be in a position where others are more likely to listen to you than your mentee, have access to contacts and information that they don’t. This is all work beyond meeting with them.
  • Provide constructive feedback. One of the main obstacles to keep underrepresented groups in games is that they often feel they don’t have the talent or skills, as part of the false meritocracy that rules the industry and academia. Feedback needs to be honest, because they’re learning and that’s why you’re helping them. But feedback that just points at what they do wrong without offering solutions or support does not help, and reinforces the sense that they do not belong. So when giving feedback, remember to:
    • highlight what they’re doing right. Remind them what they’re good at.
    • point them to how to make it better, if there’s something that they’re struggle with, or can be improved. Provide them with references (web links, video tutorials, articles, books if they can afford them).
  • Teach them the invisible rules (if you know them). One of the things that prevent people from thriving in specific industries and groups is not knowing the etiquette of a group, from social expectations to creative standards. This is another very challenging problem, first of all, because as a mentor you may not be aware of what they are. Maybe because you take them for granted, or maybe because you’re also part of the underrepresented group. The main challenge is mentees may feel like they have to change their behavior and who they are in order to adhere to those “invisible rules,” which are not explicit or easy to formulate, because their invisibility and haziness is what helps excluding others. Help them understand that these are arbitrary rules, that change from place to place (e.g. AAA vs casual vs indie; North America vs Europe); the balance they need to find is how to operate within those invisible rules while still being true to themselves.

These are just a few points – many come from having had great mentors and really terrible ones. I could have fallen through the cracks many times, so a lot of this comes from my experience as a recipient. It also comes from working with students; now that I’m in a relative position of privilege, I’m trying to do the work. I cannot claim I have figured things out, but I’m trying my damnedest to change the world, one bit at a time.

Thanks to my colleague Naomi Clark for her feedback on this article.

Narrative Design · News and Events

The Narrative Innovation Showcase 2020

Clara Fernandez-VaraLeave a comment

For this year’s GDC, Matthew Weise and I had prepared the 5th consecutive Narrative Innovation Showcase at the Game Developers Conference (GDC)  in San Francisco. It was going to be the opening session of the  the Narrative Summit on Monday March 16th. Since GDC was cancelled as one of the early casualties of the pandemic, we didn’t get our wonderful set of presenters to show their work in California, but we would still like to highlight the showcase we had prepared.  Here we explain why we selected the games for the showcase, in a year where there have been plenty of games made by very talented narrative designers. Our panelists are also putting together videos of what would have been their presentations, which will be made available in GDCs YouTube channel. 

Astrologaster 

Katharine Neil for NyamYam.

Game Website

Astrologaster is a particularly apt game to play these days, since it takes place during the plague in London in 1592. We are Doctor Simon Forman, an astrologist / astronomis / physician who can cure any illness and solve any problem by looking at the stars – he’s a true renaissance man. By solving the plights of our customers we can gain reputation and finally achieve the proper doctor’s license that Doctor Forman doesn’t really have. The historical setting is unusual in games – though not the only game set during a plague released in the last year. There are many things that we love of this game that we find truly refreshing – from its Renaissance songs, to the bawdy themes. This is also one of the rare cases where we have a writer who is on top of her craft, the care in the language in the dialogue as well as the lyrics of the songs is a joy to see in videogames. 

Before I Forget

Chella Ramanan & Claire Morley, 3-fold Games

Before I Forget is a poetic first-person experience attempting to capture what it is like to live with dementia. It would be unfair to peg it as a mental health awareness game because, though it clearly serves that function, it uses its thoroughly researched mechanics design to push first-person storytelling in new directions. The use of shifting color to signify something half-remembered, the way everyday objects provide fragments of memories that can suddenly cascade into full-on recall, or the way space folds in on itself to capture the experience of a memory just out of reach: these are at once fresh techniques for creating evocative spatial stories and also beautiful ways to drive the subject matter home. We love how Before I Forget portrays dementia’s effects, be they good or bad, with nuance and complexity by pushing the medium forward.

Cris Tales

Carlos Rocha, Dreams Uncorporated

Game Demo

 

Cris Tales is a great example of a group of talented folks taking a familiar genre to new personal, political, and mechanical heights. It is a fantasy RPG where the player has the ability to simultaneously experience past, present, and future at every moment of the game, allowing you to see the impact of actions across time instantly. Yet rather than just being a fun gimmick for another general save-the-world story, this core conceit is used to explore the cause and effect of systemic environmental collapse, the ensuing civic crisis it causes, and how that crisis exacerbates existing class inequalities in a fantasy world based heavily on Colombian folklore, architecture, politics, and economics. What we love  about Cris Tales because it is the very essence of artistically engaged genre work, using familiar forms to say something about real life through metaphor, via a fresh core mechanic that is impossible to divorce from its storytelling function.

Tick Tock: A Tale for Two 

Mira Dorthé & Tanja Tankred, Other Tales Interactive

The way Tick Tock: A Tale for Two pushes the art of narrative design forward is at once brilliant and simple. To a certain extent, it is a conventional adventure game, where a pair of co-op players must work together to solve the unraveling, multi-generational riddle of a mysterious dynasty of clock-makers. The two find clues, solve puzzles, all while piecing together fragments of the story. The difference is both of these players are on a different screen and have access to different information, causing in-person communication to emerge as the secret core mechanic. Players have to talk to each other – discuss the story, clues, context, theories – to solve the ever-expanding mystery and complete the story. Tick Tock: A Take for Two elegantly to re-introduces the communal in-person experience to the narrative adventure game format, making it feel old and new, simple and complex, all at once.

Mutazione

Hannah Nicklin, Die Gute Fabrik

Game Website

Explaining the charm of Mutazione is not easy – it is best to play it and see for oneself. We do have a soft spot for adventure games – we have featured a lot of them in our showcase over the years. The island of Mutazione is populated by quirky and endearing mutants—everybody has secrets, hopes and traumas, which we can discover as we explore the different locations. The game lets us forge emotional connections with the characters because everybody feels real; there are no stereotypes or cardboard characters here. Its developers define it as a soap-opera, because its cast has a life that is independent from us, they have whole lives and relationships on their own – they’re not there just for the player. The capacity of the game to make us believe that it is a living environment is unusual, and we would love to see more games that explore the emotional connections between their NPCs.

(Full disclosure: I worked on the Spanish version of this game.)

You can watch previous editions of the Narrative Innovation Showcase here: 2016 (YouTube), 2017 (GDC Vault), 2018 (GDC Vault), 2019 (YouTube).

Thoughts

The Music is the Story

Clara Fernandez-VaraLeave a comment

Our lives have a music soundtrack—people often associate songs with specific moments of their existence and create emotional connections with melodies. A few notes can send us spinning to a summer in our childhood, a fun party, or the aftermath of a breakup.

People often refer to film or videogame soundtracks and their capacity to evoke emotions, understanding that the music dictates how the audience has to feel about what is happening on the screen. I find this notion rather limiting, even irritating—think of documentaries or reality TV playing loud soundtracks to indicate that there’s a moment of suspense, or that the scene is sad because people are crying. They want the audience to feel a certain way, as if they couldn’t have their own emotional reactions to the events they’re watching. More often than not, these musical devices are trite because the emotions they evoke have very little subtlety, and they tend to be a stock library that repeats from episode to episode. These music cues can also be intrusive, trying to amplify a mood that is already created visually, verbally, or through camerawork, by playing predictable music in ways that can ruin the scene.

This is a pet peeve of mine because I’m the kind of weirdo who pays attention to music in films and videogames. (And in the muzak in the supermarket and the elevators. It can be torture, really.) And I do pay attention because the music also tells the story—characters, situations, spaces can have their own melodies. The use of leitmotifs is extensive in film—you can recognize the music that identifies James Bond, or the Force in Star Wars. Games also use them a lot in the form of loops that repeat so they can adapt to the length of gameplay. If you’ve played any Final Fantasy game, I’m sure you can recognize the different combat music loops. The loops change their tempo, key, or instrumentation depending on the situation not only to cue different emotional states, but also to give us game information. The soundtracks for the Metal Gear series have always done a great job to create both mood and tell the player what is going on, from loops closer to ambient music for the stealth sections to accelerated and strong beats when Snake is in danger. (These loops never resolve, because that’s what suspense is all about.) The music is also part of the interface, provides feedback about the world.

But there’s another narrative that game music also creates, which relates to what I referred to at the beginning. The music of games is also the soundtrack of our lives, in ways that perhaps – and regretfully – film scores may not always get the chance to do. Those music loops become engraved in our brains and our hearts after listening to them over and over and over again. The first notes of the menu music of an arcade game, the melody of difficult levels in a platformer, also have the power to make us travel back in time. It’s not a matter of nostalgia—it’s connecting those notes with the people we were with, what we were going through when we played those games. The story is not only of the characters on the screen, it’s our own stories; the emotions evoked by the melodies are not what the composition may dictate, but our own personal associations with those leitmotifs. I love to go to videogame score concerts and see the audience cheer and clap when the first notes of their favorite games start playing, celebrating their time spend with them. One of my favorite moments in one of these concerts was seeing several black and latino kids banging their heads to the notes of the Metal Gear Solid 2 Main Theme, in perfect unison, living the music. Videogame scores are part of the soundtrack of our lives in similar ways how pop music marks different periods of our history.

Detectives · Reviews · Thoughts

Mysteries Stuck in a Loop

Clara Fernandez-Vara1 Comment

The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton is the latest example of how time-loops and detective stories are a compelling combination–I hope it becomes one of those “must read” novels for game designers and interactive storytellers soon. Evelyn Hardcastle brings together Agatha Christie and Groundhog Day drizzled with a bit of David Lynch. The protagonist of the novel relives the day a murder takes place in an English manor. He controls one person at a time, and the only way to break the loop is to solve the mystery; to do that, he has 8 days / lives to find the solution. If it sounds like a game, it’s because it is a wickedly complicated story puzzle, delightfully put together.

Coming from narrative games, I particularly enjoyed how the protagonist notices the friction with his hosts–what he wants to do may be at odds with their impulses, while the intelligence or insight of the person he’s controlling allows him to notice certain details or have specific realizations. This is not dissimilar to how the stats of a character in a role-playing game can determine what we can do and what we cannot. Although the author does not list videogames as one of the inspirations for the game (he mentions the TV show Quantum Leap in the Q&A at the end of the book), the storytelling takes advantage literacies that games and complex TV shows foster these days. Audiences can follow stories with multiple points of view, gaps that are steadily filled out (or not), so that as they read / watch / play they’re assembling the story puzzle.

A protagonist stuck in the same sequence of events until they get something right is a story structure recreates how we navigate digital storytelling, where the interactor explores the possibilities of a story until we get the “right” version, as Janet Murray breaks down in her analyses of Groundhog Day or Run Lola Run. The pervasiveness of videogames, which often involve trial and error, has turned this structure into a commonplace in other media. The manga All You Need is Kill, adapted to film as Edge of Tomorrow, both thrive on the tropes of combat videogames, so the journey of the main character depends on him remembering his mistakes and learning from them for the next loop, just like a videogame player would. The structure of the time loop has also been long embraced by videogames, starting with The Last Express (1997) and The Legend of Zelda: Marjora’s Mask (2000), neither of which have got the attention and recognition they deserve. Now there’s a whole slew of games recently released or coming up in the next few months: The Sexy Brutale (2017), Elsinore (2019), Outer Wilds (forthcoming), 12 Minutes (forthcoming). The metalevel of the knowledge of the player now becomes part of the game mechanics. And let’s not forget interactive fiction, where there’s already a sizable collection of examples in the last 20 years.

What interests me of the time loop as a narrative / game structure is how combines with mystery, which is what initially drove me to read Evelyn Hardcastle. In a mystery narrative, the initial goal of the detective is to reconstruct the story of the crime. One of the challenges to design a mystery videogame is figuring out how to let the computer evaluates whether the player got the solution right or not–something that is easier to do in non-digital games. Questionnaires are a common device, while letting the player fail can also be a productive approach–maybe players want to replay the game until they get it right, making the loop something that takes place at a meta-level, in the time and space of the player.

Time loop mysteries make the trial-and-error part and parcel of the world of the story / game. Thanks to Groundhog Day, many storytellers and game designers do not see the need to explain why that loop is happening–Evelyn Hardcastle does, in what seems to be a seed to tell further stories with a similar structure (I hope!). The time loop mystery structure is alluring because each loop allows the player / audience to get more information about what happened, and then use that information to solve the mystery or change the events. Some events take place simultaneously, so they require making choices and revisiting the story over and over in order to reveal each piece of the puzzle–where and when people are at each moment. While traditional media have used the loop as a way to structure the story and keep the audience intrigued until the end, the game player needs to actually solve the puzzle and use as many time loops as necessary to get to the end.

Bonus: If you’re into time loop mysteries and science fiction, you may want to listen to the Doctor Who audio story The Chimes of Midnight.

Puzzles · Thoughts

Crosswords and Culture

Clara Fernandez-VaraLeave a comment

Apart from being one of the most brilliant music composers and lyricists of the 20th century, Stephen Sondheim is also a game geek and a puzzle lover. Makes sense that someone who marries music and lyrics for a living would also have a penchant for fitting words into grids. Back in the day, he also wrote an article outlining the difference between crosswords in the US and the UK–while American crosswords appeal to an encyclopedic knowledge of trivia, what he calls “British-style” crosswords thrive in being cryptic and challenge the puzzle-solver to understand what the clue is pointing to. He expresses a preference for the British type which should not be a surprise either–cryptic crosswords are more poetic, since they are basically posing riddles for each entry.

Sondheim’s article is a beautiful example of how game design and culture go hand in hand; it also becomes richer the moment that we start looking at crosswords in other languages. Although I can  play words games both in English and Spanish, I prefer crosswords in Spanish to the famous series of The New York Times. First, because the kind of encyclopedic knowledge needed to solve the NYT crossword requires being steeped in American culture and history in a way that is not accessible to a foreigner. Second, the phonotactics of Spanish allow many ways to make words cross in interesting ways. Opening some of the crossword magazines in Spain is a joy – some crosswords don’t tell you how many letters each word has (crucigrama blanco), some puzzles use words broken down in their syllables (crucigrama silábico), some have themes that many of the clues refer to.

My favorite type of crossword is the autodefinido (arroword in English) where the clues of each entry are written in the cell that separates each word. Some cells need to display two clues (one for a horizontal word, one for a vertical), so they need to be extremely brief, two or three words maximum. The clues in this type of crossword usually thrive on vocabulary knowledge, since most of them are synonyms, as well as cultural knowledge, most often geography, with toponyms and demonyms being some of the most common.

Autodefinidos are fast and easy – after all, crosswords were casual games before we invented such term. Although autodefinidos are based on linguistic and cultural knowledge, they become accessible relatively fast. Each crossword book publisher has a certain preference for specific knowledge domains and vocabulary – the first time a puzzle asks you for three-letter words in Spanish that mean “Turkish officer” or “River of Switzerland”, the reference seems ridiculously obscure. But as you continue solving puzzles, you keep coming across these riddles, and you learn that the answers are “AGA” and “AAR” respectively.  For the designers, these words become little stitches to hold the crossword together, and the puzzle solver learns to identify them over time. Each magazine publisher has a set of esoteric words that characterize them.

Autodefinidos also have a surprising variety – apart from having the same typology as regular crosswords (figure out where the blank cells are, divide the words in syllables, thematic riddles), they also do wonders with their layout – some of them have honeycomb layouts where words can be spelled in lines or around a cell. Others combine the crossword with the cryptogram, so the cells for each word in the crossword follow serpentine patterns, and when you find all the definitions, the square displays a literary quote. Everything falls into place and it’s beautiful.

Designing crosswords requires a level of craft computers can facilitate; in the end, it is up to the ingenuity of the designers, who often go uncredited, to create a challenge to one’s knowledge and wits. Some designers like challenging players with hair-pulling riddles, while others provide enough scaffolding so they can complete the puzzle. The NYT crosswords are all about proving the solver is “smart”, and has access to a certain knowledge and education that is highly situated in American culture – and, more often than not, New York City culture. If the puzzle-solver is stuck, they had to buy the newspaper of the following day to find the answer, though these days it’s a matter of having a subscription to the crosswords themselves. In contrast, collections of autodefinidos help the solver expand their vocabulary and trivia knowledge by repeating definitions from puzzle to puzzle, and magazine to magazine; the answers are in the same issue, so that knowledge is accessible immediately. Thus crosswords and their design also partake of different social conventions and levels of privilege.