The human species has this insatiable urge to create much from little. We see a blank page as the doorway to new worlds, a cotton plant as a new spring dress, and can build kingdoms out of thousands of grains of sand.
And then we share — we show others what we have accomplished and created. We rejoice in our collective imagination because it takes us places we can’t go. Games are proof of our conviction — we take a couple pieces of cardboard or a few pieces of code and turn it into the universes we dream about.
The innovation doesn’t stop when the paint brush dries or the last game piece is 3D printed, though. And we don’t just do it all alone — we collaborate. We come up with bigger and better ways to show our art, our knowledge, our passion.
Jill Morris, a Purdue professor, worked with a team of instructors to bring games, collaboration, and design to their classrooms. Students created an alternate reality taking place in this world. They designed personas and characters that could pass as real people using social media and designed companies and an entire world tucked into our own [1].
They used props — profiles, letters, files, and videos — to make the game world look, feel, and ultimately be real to the players. To invest the players in what was going on in that world. Games don’t have to live and die in one mode of media; they can blend and blur between the traditional lines of hand-made and digitally-crafted.
But what are games? Of course they are meant to be entertainment. They have players, offer some sort of control (or illusion of control [2]), and they have some sort of goal, a point. The particulars of games depend on the chosen flavor — but most games have a narrative, a story, a plot.
It would be ridiculous to say [3] that a game doesn’t have the same potential to engage consumers at the same level that film or print can. One simply needs to look at the thousands upon thousands of choice-centric games available on the market like Life is Strange, The Walking Dead, Minecraft Storymode, and many others.
Some might argue [3] that while more and more digital games are emerging that cater to those looking for interactive story (like those mentioned above or newer games like What Remains of Edith Finch), it is nearly impossible to create a narrative with a plot that truly develops and adapts to player choices.
The best example of an attempt at this is the simple game Moirai, named after the Greek Fates, which was originally released in November of 2013 by developers Chris Johnson, Brad Barrett and John Oestman [4]. The game follows the main character as they search for a missing woman.
The quest leads them to find the woman and another man — the twist [SPOILERS] is that at a certain point the player realizes that answers they entered to questions posed in the game will be used for the next person playing the game — and answers they received were from previous players. The game’s twists, then, is cleverly propagated by the very people playing the game.
A design like this, though more in depth, could create a game that really adapts to players by taking some of the labor out of the hands of small teams of designers and spreading the labor amongst real players. The only issue with this is Internet Trolls.
Though most trolls are relatively harmless, some have the skills and motivation to really ruin things for other people. Moirai met its fate in 2016 when a hacker or hackers decided to play upon the games typing mechanic and producing vast amounts of spam/inappropriate content, forcing the developers to shut the whole thing down.
[To Be Continued]
References [Will be edited]
[1] Play/Write
[2] http://gamestudies.org/0701/articles/simons
[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/video-games-stories/524148/
[4] http://cjohnson.id.au/games/full-games/moirai/
[5] https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/07/09/hackers-put-an-end-to-experimental-story-game-moirai/
