Thomas Was Alone: a gaming masterpiece

In 2010, I played a strange indie game created with Adobe Flash, in which you command a group of squares with special powers, trying to solve puzzles with these pieces. In that occasion, I played the game a few times and never remembered the name of it.



Five years later, during a board game session, a friend of mine evoked this game again: Thomas Was Alone. I downloaded it for PS4 and now I’m experiencing the game in a whole new scenario of interactive possibilities.

Thomas Was Alone is an indie puzzle platform video game created by Mike Bithell and nowadays it’s possible to play it also in Android, PlayStation 3, iOS and other platforms. The idea is simple: you command squares with “special powers” (one with high level jump, other with swimming abilities etc.) and, level by level, you need to fit the characters in their correspondent slots.

Wait. Did you say characters? Yes. Thomas Was Alone, besides its abstract conception, has an incredible narrative focus. There’s a very interesting storytelling behind the simple square forms, talking about technology, freedom, ideology and relationship.

Check the trailer and the gameplay:



This kind of game teaches us how to balance mechanics and simple graphics with immersive story. Thomas Was Alone is a class of elegant game design. If you have never played it, I strongly recommend it.

Interactive fiction

Right now, I’m re-reading the excellent book Emergence in Games, written by Penny Sweetser. The author masterfully created a comparison table between some different kinds of games, like interactive fiction, linear gameplay, sandbox games and emergent gameplay. In this post, I want to focus on the first type of game in this group, to discuss some nuclear features about the category.

Sweetser (2008, p.54) defines interactive fiction in a clear way - the author says that interactive fiction “was the first step away from passive media, such as movies and books”, and remembers us that in interactive fiction, “the players are still very much the receivers of information, rather than active agents in the game world”. Here, player interaction is in the form of limited choices between transmissions of a linear story.



In interactive fiction games, “players have no real choices, impact, or control of the game world” and they “simply act out a pre-scripted path, playing a slightly more active role than if they were to simply observe the story from the outside” (SWEETSER, 2008, p.55). This kind of narrative is, in a certain way, very similar to the old RPG books with multiple (and delimited) choices.

Finally, this author (2008, p.56) presents us the idea that the “gameplay in interactive fiction can be characterized by the discrete nature of its interactions” and players “can only ever choose from a specific list of interactions in any one scene, such as typing a keyword, clicking on an object, or choosing an option from a list”.

To illustrate an example let’s take a look in the past to one of the earliest interactive fiction computer games: ZORK. Check out the video below:



In due course, I want to discuss in another post some other genres explained by Sweetser, to deepen these concepts.

Go gamers!

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Reference:

SWEETSER, Penny. Emergence in Games. Boston: Cengage Learning, 2008.

Playful mindset X serious mindset

Today I want to share one important idea from the book Pervasive Games;  the authors cite the work of psychologist Michael J. Apter about the differences between the serious and the playful mindsets.

“Michael J. Apter (1991) discusses pleasure and arousal in the context of playful and serious mindsets, claiming that people in a playful mindset seek pleasurable, aroused excitement and avoid boredom, whereas people in a serious mindset seek pleasurable, non aroused relaxation and avoid unpleasant, aroused anxiety. Basically, this means that being worked up while working in a serious mindset leads to anxiety, whereas being worked up while playing a game in a playful mindset is experienced as exciting” (MONTOLA; STENROS; WAERN, 2008, p.106)


Michael J. Apter’s (1991) visualization of how telic (serious) and paratelic (playful) mindsets operate differently.

This type of graph helps us visualize some interesting directions for creating games and how to observe player's behavior. I strongly recommend the full book. Check the references below.

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Reference:

Apter, M.J. (1991). A structural-phenomenology of play. In J.H. Kerr & M.J. Apter (Eds.), Adult play: A reversal theory approach. Amsterdam: Swets & Zeitlinger.

MONTOLA, Markus; STENROS, Jaakko; WAERN, Annika. Pervasive Games: Theory and Design. New York: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2009.

The Swapper: a good game to observe puzzle mechanics

The Swapper is my new favourite entertainment. The game is a puzzle-platformer developed in 2014 by Facepalm Games, a small Finnish independent studio.

The game has awesome features allied to the puzzle mechanics and it's possible to see a perfect balance between narrative, scenario, mechanics and interface. Let's talk about each one of them.



The narrative is about a space traveller trying to get out of a mysterious abandoned space station. The dark scenario is perfect and there's an aura of fear and anxiety all the time.

The game operates in a side scrolling 2D and this choice of interface is determinant for the puzzle development.

The game mechanics is very clever. Your space explorer has a clone weapon and it's possible to "launch" a clone of your character in an unachievable part of the scenario to complete a puzzle. Check a video below:



Another weapon allows transferring your conscience to the clone to finish the puzzles. The Swapper is a good exercise of level and puzzle design to observe.

The main idea of the game is to collect some orbs to open panels and try to runaway from the space station.

Fullerton says (2008, p.324) that puzzles are also a key element in creating conflict in almost all single player games. There is an innate tension in solving the puzzle. They can contextualize the choices that players make by valuing them as they move toward or away from the solution.

The Swapper is my most played game of this year. Waiting for new content from Facepalm.

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Reference:

FULLERTON, Tracy; SWAIN, Christopher; HOFFMAN, Steven. Game design workshop: a playcentric approach to creating innovative games. Burlington: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2008.

Crossy Road: using a game to promote other games

Crossy Road (2014) is a casual mobile game created by Hipster Whale Studio. It’s a tribute to the classic game Frogger (Atari, 1981), this time constructed in an isometric perspective, full of new possibilities. Check the comparison below:





You start the game with a chicken trying to cross the cars, rivers and other dangerous obstacles but, by earning some special points it’s possible to acquire new characters like the duck, the goat, the zombie, the mage, the monster of Frankenstein and many others (even the internet meme DOGE gained its digital version in this game). There’s a clever business model inside the interface and players are able to buy (with real money) new characters or watch advertising videos to earn new points, at anytime.



There’s another smart point inside the game: sometimes the system gives out some special characters to play. These characters are from other games and an invite to download a new experience appears on the screen. In the example below, the player earned the main character from the game named Epoch; few seconds after receiving the prize, an ad with the message “EPOCH – download at App Store” appears to the player. There are many characters to achieve in Crossy Road, lots of them from other games.



This kind of communication structure refers to Davis’s ideas about promotional culture; this author (2013, p.191) says, “Promotional culture has become a more central, influential part of communication and social relations, just as financialization, globalization and new communication technologies have”. In the contemporary times, a good mediatic product never comes without a promotional strategy embedded inside its essence.

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Reference:

DAVIS, A. Promotional culture: the rise and spread of advertising, public relations, marketing and branding. Bristol, UK: Polity, 2013.

Narrative and games

Some posts in the past, I’ve talked about the games I’ve created. I explained some approaches and creativity process to the games YN, Álmok, Dominaedro and others. All these games have something in common: they are abstract games, more focused on mechanics and less in narrative.

But, at this moment, I’m developing with some friends a new mobile game named: MIND ALONE. I’ll talk more about this game later, but it’s basically an interactive narrative for mobile platforms. So, what is it we actually mean by interactive narrative? Ince (2006, p.48) defines very well the term, saying, “In a broad sense it is simply that the experience of the unfolding story responds to the actions of the participant. In terms of games, those actions are the gameplay choices the player makes. At any one time, the way the narrative responds could be character-related, plot-related, story-related, or a combination of these”. I’m studying a lot of books to give the right tune to this ludic interface.



The game I’m creating is more based on plot/story-related. I intend to put some dark atmosphere with an intense narrative in it, and the gameplay will be created using some clever puzzles in the background. The idea here is to follow the concept that “story, dialogue, character profiles, etc., should all be created in a way that add to the design of the gameplay” (INCE, 2006, p.36).

So, wait for news about my new game. It’s a new creative experience for me and I hope for it to be a good journey for the players. The previous image is part of the game’s opening. Curious? Keep track here for more information.

Make games not war! =)

Go gamers!

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Reference:

INCE, Steve. Writing for video games. London: A & C Black Publishers Limited, 2006.

The experience of IRON FROM ICE

Telltale Games is an American independent digital publisher, founded in June of 2004. The company has in its portfolio games like The Walking Dead, Tales From The Borderlands and The Wolf Among Us. Few days ago, the studio launched the first of six chapters of The Game of Thrones new game, entitled Iron from Ice.

With a gameplay based on decision trees, Iron from Ice offers an experience of narrative construction to the player. The game adapts the choices you make and the story is tailored by how you play. Even simple dialogues are constructed to give to the player the sensation of meaning choices, like in the example below:



As its predecessor – The Walking Dead – the game is not 100% based on dialogues, it also offers some ability tests and moral choices to the player. It’s interesting to play it more than one time, trying to choose different options to watch different outcomes in the narrative.

This kind of experience shows us a new way to read a story, and Gee (2003, p.13) remembers us that “when people learn to play video games, they are learning a new literacy”. This author (2003, p.14) also emphasizes that there are different ways to read different types of texts; in this context, literacy is multiple, then, in the sense that the legal literacy needed for reading law books is not the same as the literacy needed for reading physics texts or superhero comic books. This game idea is not new, and we have some old examples from the 80’s that share the same game mechanics. The point is: with the new generation of consoles, a game like this one becomes exponentially full of possibilities for experimental narratives.

Check the trailer below:



And the gameplay:

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Reference:

GEE, James Paul. What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.