Punching Nazis
Will Ellwood’s Nazi Punching Simulator 2017
I’ll confess, when Will first mentioned sharing his short Twine game Nazi Punching Simulator 2017, I was a little dubious. Not because I had any qualms about the Nazi-punching part, but because I wondered how much narrative value could be derived from a single brief act, a punchline, if you’ll excuse the pun. Fortunately my concerns were unfounded, and it turned out Will had thought of several ways of spinning out what could have been a one-hit-wonder (sorry!) into different possible outcomes. Some of the choices didn’t lead us quite where we expected, which was fun in a game that appears to give away its denouement in its title.
Will explained that the game was based around Kishōtenketsu , a Chinese four-part narrative structure consisting of an introduction, a development, a twist and a conclusion. We offered various suggestions as to how he might make his conclusions even more powerful, such as deferring one of the endings, or offering more detail as to the impact of the reader-player’s choices.
As usual, our discussion wasn’t limited to the game itself, and we soon found ourselves considering ‘grey’ choices, those where it’s unclear whether you’re about to do something ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or where those binaries can’t be easily applied. We tried to come up with some examples of games that use them (The Witcher 3 and Mass Effect series came up), and could only think of a few, which then led to wondering why games don’t do this more often, and how we might do it effectively in our own work.
Next month we’ll be playing Elizabeth Matter’s Concordia, which was made for the Anything But Human jam and therefore centers around an AI. If you’d like to join us in reviewing Elizabeth’s game and discussing story-games more generally, you can sign up here or on Facebook. We’ll be in the NVA’s Clubroom on Thursday 13th April from 6:30pm as usual (ignore the incorrect time on the Facebook event!)
