P2: The Wagyu Program
An Interactive Fiction about consumption and the value of life.
Premise
Wagyu is a high quality beef produced by Japanese cattle, which are fed and treated extremely well. The cattle are fed the best grass, occasionally beer to increase their fat content, are given massages to lower stress, and are kept in peaceful conditions to optimize the quality of the meat.
Play
Play first, Plot and Process later…
Plot
The Wagyu Program is a hypothetical scenario that questions the value of life in terms of length and luxury.
I was initially introduced to the hypothetical scenario by a video made by Domics. In this scenario, you have to decide whether you would rather live a normal life or a short life of luxury.
I was also inspired by an amazing anime called The Promised Neverland. Without revealing any spoilers, this anime made me think about the darker connotations of what happens when the short life of luxury ends.
My variation of The Wagyu Program, takes a darker turn from the original scenario, more akin to The Promised Neverland. In my Wagyu Program, children are raised on a peaceful Wagyu farm, where they take care of the cattle that will be sold off as meat. The children are told to play with the cows to keep them happy and initially are not told that the cows will die. This realization is usually told at a much later age, closer to when children graduate the farm and enter the real world. While on the farm, the children are given whatever they want and can do whatever they want as long as they take care of the cows. However, the students don’t realize that they themselves are sold as luxury meat when they “graduate” the farm. My IF takes the player down an immersive journey in the life of a student raised on this hypothetical farm. The goal of this game is to raise questions about the value of life — juxtaposing reality, in which you have to struggle and try hard to attain what you want, with the hypothetical world, in which you have a happy/stress-free albeit short life.
Process
I began by writing the core part of my story, making sure to highlight elements of the narrative that made it distinct compared to Domics video and The Promised Neverland. I then converted the simple narrative into a branching fiction prototype I built with Twine.
As you can see, the storyline was extremely linear and had few branches — primarily because I wanted to focus on a single storyline and get my playtesters’ feel for the narrative. I got great feedback on the storyline, in which all of my playtesters’ agreed that the core story was great in terms of the shock factor, but it lacked complexity and player agency. Given this feedback, I added more context and player decision making. More specifically, I added variables that affected the story slightly based on which branch the player took and included timing to pace the story appropriately.
The modified version gave players more decisions and had 5 alternative endings. Despite adding more player decisions, I kept the majority of the story tied to one major branch by making most of the decision converge. I did this in order to control the flow of the story to reach the same climax, regardless of the action. Additionally, I refined the text of each passage to make the overall story more cohesive. The storyline was divided into 3 arcs — Character Development, Finding the ring, and Giving the ring.
While the next batch of playtesters appreciated the long story line and felt strong player agency, there were two essential problems. The first problem was the text was overwhelming. There was a lot of content to read and the walls of text in each passage made the experience less interesting. The second problem was that most of the multiple endings did not feel complete — there was a lack of closure and understanding of the overall story. Many playtesters said that they were really invested in the story and wanted to find the “real” ending so they would restart the game and play from the beginning — to that end, they complained that this took a long time.
Based on the feedback, I incorporated a timing element that revealed paragraphs over time, and streamlined the wording of the passages. Also, I made the endings loop back within the story at a “checkpoint” so that players could have another chance to find the true ending. The playtesters who reviewed this version gave me the most insight out of all the iterations. The majority sentiment was that the story was very interesting, but the value/lesson of the game was not very clear. The ties to consumption were clear — everyone thought about the implications of eating human in a dystopian future and were not comfortable with it, but they did not see the strong tie to the value of life. In order to raise this question, I needed to juxtapose the game’s world with reality — make the tradeoffs between a short life of luxury more clear. Based on this feedback, I revised the entire introduction and first arc of the story to make it more clear that the player lives a life of luxury. I also modified the remainder of the passages to give hints to dark consequences of graduating. As I made these were made right before submission, I did not get to playtest them, but I am very excited to hear what people think about the changes!
Conclusion
When first tasked with creating an Interactive Fiction, I was very worried about creating and managing multiple branches of a story, but after the rounds of iteration, I realized that my primary focus should have been on a single/main branch that told the story with the values I intended. By constructing a strong first branch, you are able to easily build other branches that give the player more agency, while not taking away from the story’s core values/lessons. Overall, I feel like I improved my ability to write a story that is strong in building empathy and design a game that has strong player agency, while maintaining the core values/lessons.
