Writing Journal: Still progressing on The Adjusters #57. The Holidays will give me enough time to finish it off, hopefully.
A few links that I've been meaning to share with you all.
A TADS3 game by Lost Trout, Office Harassment: “Your co-worker Heather is so kind-hearted and meek that everyone takes advantage of her. You want to protect her, but maybe you are the one she needs to be protected from.” You can find interpreters here. The story reminds me very much of In The News, one of my favorite Pamela stories.
A Twine game that was posted in the 2014 AIF Minicomp, also by Lost Trout: Amy the Slut. Can you help Lance score with Amy? To do that, you'll need to break her. Very sparse, but effective, at least on an intellectual level. It helps if you have the imagination to fill in the blanks.
There's another game that I've greatly enjoyed, by GoblinBoy, called Tesliss Equation, which you can find here. You're in high school, and you get up to rather wacky adventures. The game is definitely not what it seems, and exceedingly well done narratively.
Have you ever considered writing any AIFs, Bulgroz? I don't know how many AIF games you've tried or how long you've been playing, and there's been fewer and fewer games made in recent years and it'd always be nice to have some fresh works. :)
ReplyDeleteFunny you should mention, because yes, I've been thinking on and off about AIF for a long while now.
ReplyDeleteI think I last spoke of it here:
http://smuttyfootnotes.blogspot.com/2011/11/adult-interactive-fiction.html
I have bits and pieces of AIF (mostly in Inform 7, I love that system) lying about my hard drives like bodies after a Trojan War battle.
My problem is not technical, it's process. I'm not sure how to approach the design in a way that scales. I can design a scene, but a whole story is another story. (Ah!) The other problem is that I haven't quite nailed down what I find most arousing in the interactiveness of the medium. I have some thoughts about it, and I'll save them for a longer post.
But I've been laying out the groundwork for a piece of interactive storytelling in Twine that I'm hoping to push out in 2015. Twine will keep me from getting distracted by the programming. We'll see how fast I can write...
Twine is a really good engine. The way it lays out all of your passages and shows all the connections lets you easily make flowcharts and visually see how your story progresses and where your choices branch.
ReplyDeleteThat said though, as good as Twine is for writers I do find it misses out on some of the interactivity that TADs or Inform can accomplish. The more traditional IF engine tends to be better at giving players immersion, as well as at least the illusion of having a lot of freedom and choices, even if the actual game ends up being linear. Where as Twine games very explicitly show players "I have a choice of these 2 or 4 options on this page", traditional IF makes it feel like "I can go anywhere and do anything" even though that's not true, since you can only use commands the writer programmed in.
One thing that I always thought would be great in an Tads or Inform IF game... mind control, in which the player is the controller. After all, players are literally issuing commands to the game characters, who must do everything they're instructed to. It would be interesting to frame the whole process of playing the game as someone having command a completely obedient slave.
And speaking of mind control IFs, I have two good recommendations for you that I think you'd enjoy. First is Entrancing Sin, also by Lost Trout. You play as a female character who is slowly and subtle being hypnotized by her boss. I really enjoy the slow build and gradual personality changes.
Next is the woefully unfinished "Breaking Me" by jsrf, which can be found on over at the hypnopics-collective. Also playing as a female character, who gets kidnapped from her college by a mysterious figure, who announces his intention to break and mold the PC to fit his own purposes. The interesting thing about this game is being able to define your character's personality at the start of the game, which in turn effects how effective certain means of persuasion are and how quickly your stats change in response to the discipline being applied by your captor. Sadly while the game has just enough to really show promise, it only lasts for the first day, and is currently unfinished.
Bottom line: I completely agree with you about Twine and the lack of interactivity compared to TADS/Inform.
ReplyDeleteWhile searching for "Breaking Me" I came across this paragraph basically positing that Twine was good for passive play, where as you say the choices are explicitly given to you, while TADS/Inform was good for active play, where you explore and find the choices during the exploration. And I think that reflects itself in the terminology that I like to use, which is that the former is an interactive story, while the latter is more a game. It is much more difficult I find to impose a natural narrative on a game, because the player has so many options. And that's where I'm having my biggest difficulties: because I like narratives, I want to layer one on the story. And that's tough, at least for me, at least right now. I just don't see how to do it well.
So my plan is to start with Twine just so that I can remain in a setting where I can control the narrative, and in the mean time keep on cogitating on what a fully interactive AIF piece might look like for me. I have some ideas, but they're still in their infancy.
AIF and MC seems like a natural combo, but how to do it well without falling into a game equivalent of the "guy with superpowers can turn any girl he wants into one of his harem girls" story trope is challenging. Because that would lead to something boring fast.
Thanks for the game pointers. I actually played "Entrancing Sin" over Christmas, funnily enough, and I liked it. But it did show the problems with narrative that I mentioned. You have to play it with a particular vision in mind (that you as the player want this character to be used and abused) but there's nothing in the game that forces you to play to that narrative. Once you follow it, though, it's quite fun. "Breaking me" I have downloaded but haven't tried yet.
To avoid the "guy with superpowers can turn any girl he wants into one of his harem girls" trope isn't too hard, you'd just need story justifications as to why the PC can't use their abilities all the time. Then you impose certain conditions that are required before their abilities work in line with the story reasons.
ReplyDeleteFor example, borrowing ideas you've used in the Adjusters, the PC could accidentally discover the code phrases to activate a girl who's being mind controlled by a malicious third party. They then has to decide where to take advantage of the girl or to try and do the moral thing and free her from control. Or do both.
Mechanically then the restrictions would be a) discovering the code words in the first place, then b) finding a time/place to use them where the actual mind control won't discover them. Each of those would be a puzzle or challenge for the player to overcome while still being in service to the overall narrative.
AH! Don't think I don't know what you're doing: you're trying to get me to think about this deeply and seriously, thereby getting me enthusiastic and engaged about the idea. I'm onto you :)
ReplyDeleteAs to your suggestion: yes, that's pretty much also where my mind went the first time I did that. The girls originally programmed by a third-party is the most plausible route to avoid the "guy with superpowers" scenario. The problem I personally have is whenever I think of an interesting plot line along those lines, I tend to get back to the idea that instead of being MCed, it'd be so much more interesting if the women were blackmailed into it. It's a well-throdden path in my mind with which I lined up almost automatically. (Though I do have ideas how to turn that into an interactive 'game'.)
No, I'm lying. There was one storyline that I dreamed up once that did revolve around a guy discovering women that were mind controlled, and taking advantage of them little by little, mimicking levels in a game. It's in my notes as "The Corruption of Harry K." In retrospect, it might be possible to turn that into a piece of AIF. It's super plot heavy, though, so the game play would have to be almost (almost) linear. But still, maybe I should think about that a bit more. Mmm...
I can't make any progress in Office Harassment. I looked at everything, found the printer, I took some reports. Now I don't even know the verbs that are available....
ReplyDelete