Interactive Fiction, or Labor of Love
Check out the game “A Southern Apocalypse” and the write-up here!
Twas the best of times, twas the worst of times. This project exudes reclamation, an entry point for the faint of code. It was my chance to shake my fist at the coding abyss and scream proudly into her yonder that I shan’t be overtaken by crossing her. My interactive fiction reflects my introspection. It challenged me beyond my only conceptions of reality and allowed me to flex my skills beyond coding (for once). This process invigorated me and lit a fire under my ass in a really fun way. Is this what exploring CS106A feels like for a future CS major?
Through my process of exploring interactive fiction, I played four really interesting games. Oxenfree and With Those We Love Alive offered experiences that revolutionized how I interacted with the medium. Having also lost my older brother, playing Oxenfree felt like introspecting on what I felt like about a year after he passed. It allowed me to finally connect my personal, real life shit to the video game world. I would have done anything to feel like I could bring him back, and the exercise of playing through bringing Michael (ironically, my brother’s middle name was Michael) back to life profoundly redefined my view on interactive fiction. Why waste my time and energy tackling a huge topic like gender dysphoria, sexism, climate change, or hyperpolarization when ‘accurately’ reflecting them required huge amounts of nuance beyond the scope of the project? Instead, I narrowed in on my specific experience of the politics of inferiority and superiority between the South and the rest of the US through my college experience. I didn’t have to be beholden to the truth, because it was my truth. While the general context of the dystopia could reflect a great variety of experiences that are connected with the systems of power that encompass these politics including code-switching, colorism, migration, it remained small enough to fit in the palm of my hand.
In the future, I would explore how to make the variables I followed impact the game in a more significant way. While I believe that the general thread of the narrative accomplishes the goal of questioning superiority politic on internal migration in the US, the individual choices themselves only minimally impact the flow of the game. If you play it, it’s clear that the NPCs are responding to you contingently, based on your choice selection. It’s there, but perhaps not as effective as an Inform7 game. My game also approaches a blend of spatial and interaction-based exploration, which broadened the scope. I would like to explore a pure spatial and pure interaction game to approach this issue, without throwing the player off by an absence of clarity of what I want from them. However, my playtesters did a great job of offering interesting suggestions, which I tried to incorporate in meaningful ways. How can I work more to reward different types of players? In this game, I hit on explorers and social players but left lots of room to grow for achievers.
Overall, this game gifted me a huge boost of confidence in my own abilities, a taste for success, and an eagerness to learn more. No game is perfect but this game allowed me to hone in on how success and perfection are often measured in my other classes and tear down those notions to let my creativity and curiosity take over.
