The Hive
Introduction
Apocalyptic games are powerful. They teach us the importance and beauty of our current lives and highlight many of the pressing issues we as a society should solve. Games like Horizon Zero Dawn by Guerrilla Games and Death Stranding by Hideo Kojima are excellent examples. One is a story of a world overrun by machines as a result of technological advancement that went unregulated. The other is a surrealist tale on the importance of human connections, set in a world of collective isolation where the land of the dead and life coexist together. With these two sources of inspiration, I chose to base my dystopian story off the misuse of artificial intelligence and brain-machine interfaces, which allows for artificial intelligences to control human behavior through direct manipulation of the human brain.
The Title
The title of my game, “The Hive”, is inspired by one of the episodes in Rick and Morty where Rick and Morty encounter one of Rick’s ex-lovers, an alien hive mind named Unity.
Developing The Story
Initial Iterations and Ideas
Developing the story was hard. I began with a completely different idea — a game on designer viruses. Given the current major events of the world, I thought that a virus-themed game could be interesting. Inspired by the game Plague Inc., I started sketching off some ideas of what could happen in my virus game. Below, is a screenshot of the first scene of the game, where you begin as an unidentified virus synthesized by a mad scientist, and your first objective is to escape the laboratory.
The problem with this virus theme is that I found it very hard to scale. I find that the potential of having too many different possibilities of mutating new traits causes a very wide spiderweb of choices that becomes very hard to scale later on.
I decided to scrap the idea of designer viruses and focus on a solid storyline instead. The second iteration I had was a game centered around xenophobia, where the world is left in an apocalyptic state, with fallouts occurring in most parts of the world due to massive distrust in people.
However, I find the theme of xenophobia quite hard to develop. I was uncertain about the problems surrounding xenophobia and found it quite hard to envision a fictional world of it.
To rethink the theme, I looked into some of the subjects I am more informed about. Technology, artificial intelligence, and brain-machine interfaces. That’s when I thought, “what happens when you have general AI and BMI technology perfected?”. Probably the end of humanity, where humans become slaves to the machines.
With a clear theme in mind, and a clear world to portray, I set off to write the story. To do so, I split my story into three different sections, first to set the stage by introducing the world and the character, next to allow the users to roam around and explore the mysteries of this world, and lastly some conflict that forces the user to find a way out.
Setting the Stage
So, how do you enter such a world where most of humankind is already enslaved? I thought of two options, one is by growing up in a hidden underground shelter where humans are living in the shadows, and the other by growing up artificially inside a machine. I chose to go with the latter, which allows me to add in exploration mechanics where you are alone, trying to figure out what happened to the world.
Exploration
To provoke curiosity in the player, and to extend the storytelling of the current state of the world itself, I chose to include the element of exploration. Here, I give the user two significant choices, either approach the mountain or the river, which results in different end states. By approaching the mountains, you have the chance to meet someone else, who if you can gain her trust, would aid you in your way, and you might be given a weapon too. Approaching the river also gives you the option of picking up some items that you would not have gotten if you opt for the mountains. These items that you pick up influence your choices later on in the game.
Conflict
Every story needs a conflict, and I decided to allow for multiple branching options to give players more liberty of what they can do here. The conflict I have starts with you falling down a waterfall, ending in the middle of a hostile camp where the only way out is to go through the tent. To make things harder and realistic, I set in timers that force you to make split-second decisions while you are being chased down by people. The conflict ends when you escape, with a vehicle.
Overview of the Final Game
Combining all 3 phases of my game, we get a complete story. First, you enter the world through some machine, naturally figuring out what is going on around you. As you’re forced to leave the vacated facility, you get to decide where you want to explore. Lastly, you stumble upon an enemy camp and you struggle to either escape or get enslaved by the hive.
Learning Goals
I developed this story with a key goal in mind, to illustrate the consequences of developing rapidly advanced technology without any checks and balances in place. With this, I hope to teach players the importance of having the right regulations on technology that could potentially be disruptive to humankind as a whole.
Testing
I ran my game with people of different ages and majors within Stanford. Below are some direct quotes from the people I have play tested with:
“This really got my heart racing at the end”
“The timers are too quick, and it’s hard to read the choices, might be better to have a delay for reading choices, then show the timer for making actions”
“It’s very engaging, are you going to finish the entire story?”
“I really like it but it would be great if there are more visuals”
From the feedback I received, the main changes I made were the timer and the visuals.
Timer Change
The first change I implemented towards my final game was the timer change. Before the change, I had something like this:
From Figure 8, you see you have to read what is going on in the environment and make your choice, all within the time constraint. People found that too abrupt, which I incorporated one of the feedbacks, to first allow the player to read the environment first, and then activate the timer. To do so I added a delay to reveal the options and the timer component. Another thing I added was the styling of the timer component. I wanted to make it obvious that there is a timer and that the players do not have to read the first time that says “Time Remaining: …” to realize that they are being timed. Hence, the revised copy is as the following:
Doing so, I found that it gives the game better pacing, and also players get to make slightly better choices as they get to first understand the situation before the timer pops in.
Visuals change
To incorporate another suggestion of having more visuals, I thought of some ways of conveying a message with colors. The first being the death scene, how do I distinguish the difference between losing your body and ending the game from other story sequences? Since bad endings are generally associated with the color red, I decided to use red as an indicator that the game is over. As illustrated in Figure 10.
Another change I added was the part where you open your eyes. For the users to feel what is going on, I added the following effect depicts a slight increase in brightness that becomes a blurry gray as you open your eyes up.
Reflection
This was my first time writing an Interactive Fiction, and naturally, there comes a lot of challenges. The first was, how do I write a story? On top of that, how do I manage the different choices a player can make?
First, coming up with a story was challenging, and I had to go through multiple iterations of different themes to stumble upon the final theme I’d like. Through developing the game, I realized that it’s important to go through multiple iterations even at the very start just to get an idea of how you’d want a story to go.
Next, as much as I loved playing video games with choices, developing this game helped me realize how hard it is for game designers to design great meaningful choices for their games. For example, in Call of Duty: Black Ops II, the different choices you make in the game influences the endings of the game, where one of the many choices you can make is to shoot or spare a traitor. These sorts of interactions force you to think about the consequences of actions, that could sometimes be forced on by the current state of emotions you’re feeling from the buildup of the game.
One of the biggest takeaways I had for developing this interactive story is the power of player exploration. With interactive fiction, it is very accessible to carve up multiple paths of exploration, and with these different branches, you can still lead the player back to one branch, where the player learns something different about the world before merging back into the current state of affairs.
Another takeaway I had was the importance of emotion in storytelling. Emotion is powerful, and it is an incredible tool for player engagement when used right. For example, when being attacked, what should you feel? And how do you get the player to feel that? Also, how do you develop a sense of curiosity in the player, and what about a sense of urgency? These were some of the questions I kept asking throughout writing the story.
Overall, by doing this, I felt that I have improved my ability to write while focusing on the key values of the story in mind while focusing on the emotional aspects of the story. One thing I’ll do differently in the future would be to talk about my story idea with more people before diving straight into writing.
