Papillon's LOTECH game, One Week, fills a peculiar niche in the world of IF
classification. In form, it's a choose-your-own-adventure, as required by the
terms of the competition. At each stage, you're left to make up your mind about
what you'd like to do out of a range of two or three choices, instead of being
able to act on a coherent model with a range of dozens of verbs, as we've come
to expect from IF.
Unlike much other choose-your-own-adventure, however, Papillon's game seems
to have been informed by interactive fiction. One of the things I found
frustrating about CYOA books as a child (or at least not entirely satisfying) is
how drastically the paths could diverge. Do one thing and you wind up being
killed in Mongolia; do another, and you journey to the center of the Earth...
the paths branch and branch, rarely recombining at any point, and what you get
is not a coherent plot or even a coherent world model, but something vast and
intractable. Fun, yes, but not-- ultimately-- something in which the decisions
you'd made along the way could be assessed in a pragmatic or moral light. It was
hard to look back on what you'd done and say, "gee, that was a stupid move", or
"gosh, that was a virtuous thing for my character to have done". The branches
seemed, for the most part, arbitrary. And that arbitrariness is more or less
what I reproduced in my own CYOA game for LOTECH comp: there's never any clear
telling where a given choice will lead you, or what your scope of action is
likely to be, a little way down the road.
One Week, by contrast, sticks to a consistent storyline. You have a certain
number of choices about what to do each day in your life as a high school
senior; no matter what you pick in day one, you will go on to day two,
and so on. The game keeps to a much more compact and consistent structure than
the average CYOA (at least as I am used to thinking about CYOAs). It becomes
more like a multiple-choice test -- except that the answers you can choose later
are affected by what you've done before. If you didn't earn the money, you can't
spend it on an expensive dress; if you've agreed to go out with one guy, you
can't choose to go out with someone else. At the end of the week, the game
assesses your various choices and assigns an ending.
There are a few flaws: it's particularly easy to get a certain ending, and
one feels that more variation might be in order. Other outcomes are pretty
obscure and hard to reach. Some of the outcomes are based (apparently) on a
randomizing factor, which means that you can do the same things in two play
sessions and get slightly different results. (Personally, I find this slightly
annoying; other people might find it a bonus. To each his own.)
What results, though, is a game in which you are allowed to take complex
actions of a kind not normally representable in IF, or presented at a scale that
ordinary IF does not normally cope with. (Even one scene of being asked out by
someone would usually take many turns of conventional IF, unless the author were
deliberately compressing the action and railroading the player. The full weeks'
worth of activity, with all its work, study, shopping, and so on, would be a
mammoth game, and not that much fun to play, necessarily.)
The obvious corollary in recent IF is J. D. Berry's When Help Collides. WHC
consists of a frame story and several subsections, one of which is a
multiple-choice geisha-simulator. You get to assert some control over how you
spend your time, and it is very much (like One Week) a resource-management sort
of game. There are more variables facing you at once in the geisha simulator
than there are in One Week, and (for some reason that probably has more to do
with the writing than with anything else) I found it subtly less engaging.
Possibly because the complexity of what one had to keep track of at any one time
made it feel more like a word problem and less like a decision point in an
on-going plot. I also found When Help Collides quite difficult: it was harder
for me to anticipate what the results of my actions were going to be, and I had
to play through a number of times in order to get a good handle on this.
Despite their various limitations, however, these games fall in an
interesting border territory between what I think of as 'pure' CYOA -- the
completely branching tree where the branches never reconvene, where the only
state information worth preserving is the number of the node you're currently on
-- and what I think of as 'pure' IF, where there is a modeled world with
numerous objects all with various states of being, but where the range of action
is restricted to what you can express to a fairly simple and literal-minded
parser. Fairly clearly, One Week is tracking some variables of a simulated world
-- wealth, one's interactions with other people, and so on; they just don't
happen to be the same states that the average IF game attends to.
I enjoyed One Week quite a lot. I find myself going back to it in my mind
now, partly because I'm reminded of it by resource management games like the
geisha simulator (or like the Hell simulator game that also appeared in the most
recent comp, which combined elements of resource management with elements of
traditional IF). One design challenge that seems particular to these games is
the challenge of conveying to the player what the effects of their actions are
likely to be without forcing them to play through the entire simulation to find
out; this is especially important when the system is complex and has numerous
variables, as in the case of the Geisha simulator. One Week deals with fewer
variables, and gives the player a running count of information about how much
money has accumulated (though other things, like what one's spiritual and
emotional state are, don't get fully revealed until the end game).
These games also suggest some interesting ways in which our definition of IF
might be expanded, or a new genre developed, adjacent to IF. The possibility of
being able to act on a macroscopic level -- not by manipulating single objects,
open and close doors, and speak single lines to NPCs, but by choosing
larger-scale acts like >STUDY, >BRIBE, >INTERROGATE, etc -- suggests entirely
new kinds of story-telling possibility, especially when it comes to stories rich
in character interaction and social dynamics. I am eager to see where this might
lead.