Unplugged: An IF Dystopian Adventure (in progress)
Game Link: http://philome.la/fcolomboart/unplugged
The Process
Initial Frustration
When we were first assigned this project, creating our own dystopian IF game, I was paralyzed by all the options. As an avid fiction reader (including any dystopian book/series you can think of), I felt like I knew all of the stories that could be told. Black Mirror also covered some extra, darker ground in the genre. How would I write something new?
I was given some great advice: don’t worry about what’s been done, my version of the matrix would focus on things I find important and end up being unique to me.
I bring up the matrix because my initial idea started to seem very ‘matrix-y’ to me. As a CS major interested in AR/VR and its role in the future, I thought of a world in which humans basically give up on earth and create their own virtual reality to try to fix all of their problems.
My World: the “Net”
But in my world, the “Net”, everyone knows that they’re “plugged in” to this system in the outside world. For some reason everyone seems to buy into the whole thing. Everyone’s happy and healthy and told the worst things about the outside world. If I were in the Net and someone described present day America to me, I know I wouldn’t want to leave paradise to come back.
Sidenote: I have a few general fears about this dystopian future. By creating a new world, instead of confronting issues, people would be giving up and escaping. The idea that everyone’s happy and healthy is also troubling because real human connection depends on deeper emotions and personal struggles. Challenges define who we are and force us to make difficult decisions that reflect our priorities and passions. This is a firm belief I have that’s grown from my experiences and I wanted to communicate it in my story.
Finding Meaning
I needed there to be something wrong with the Net, though, to create some sort of conflict or moral dilemma. As someone with an invisible disability, my first thought was that if everyone’s healthy in the net, where do the unhealthy, ‘imperfect’ people go? Where would I fit in this world? Well, I wouldn’t.
And that’s where “unplugged” was really started: through inspections as kids grew up, if anyone showed signs of disability in the real world, they would be “unplugged” from the Net and left to survive in whatever remained of the real world. A disabled person would be labeled a “Glitch” and out of fear that their disability could be spread somehow or ruin the Net, everyone would be okay with it. For people in the Net, being “unplugged” is supposed to be basically a fate similar to death. That seemed like a big enough moral dilemma.
But then again, a pessimistic voice in my head said, why would people care? If you knew that everyone in the world was healthy, would you really question why? And even if you knew why, who would be motivated to look past their innate fear to try to save a “Glitch”? Introducing Luna, my reluctantly heroic protagonist. I focused on character over plot because, as we learned, people are attached to characters not to plots. I knew if I could really create a real character, his or her actions given a scenario would follow.
It seems like every main character in a fiction novel is “special” or defies the rules of the world somehow. Everyone wants to be that person who receives a letter from Hogwarts (and also happens to be the one person who can defeat Voldemort and speak to snakes and… you get the point). But who wants to be disabled? Anyone? Didn’t think so.
The way I thought about dealing with this is through a secondary character. Maybe it’s too hard to put yourself in those shoes, but everyone knows how far they would go to protect the people they love. Introducing Emma, the best friend.
In Over My Head: Why This is Only a “Slice”
I started writing. At some point I can’t identify, this became more than a game and more of a full novel. Actually, more like a series. By the time I found out that IF narratives are supposed to be more like short stories, it was way too late. I went from having no details to having so many twists and turns on Luna’s quest-like adventure and mysteries I planned on delicately unfolding as the story went on.
It became clear that I couldn’t finish this story before the assignment was due, and not even finish the first ‘book’ in the series. I’d like to call my game slice of the story Chapter 1. However, this caused some problems. I realized I wouldn’t be able to really delve into ableism and develop a player’s understanding of this issue, so I pivoted.
The Slice: Unplugged Chapter 1
In Chapter 1, we play as Luna and discover a different kind of ‘imperfection’ that’s not supposed to exist in the Net: feelings. Before you roll your eyes and mumble to yourself about how this has been done so many times before, I have to argue that my version is at least a bit different. First, ableism still plays a part in the larger picture (although players don’t know this from playing chapter 1), but the main thing that makes Luna’s development of feelings intriguing is the fact that she doesn’t know what they are. The only feeling she’s ever known or heard about is ‘happy’. This means she doesn’t know what sad, angry, scared, etc are. She re-explores her connections to people and her beliefs with these emotions in mind, and her world suddenly becomes more complicated.
I’ll introduce the world of Unplugged, the “Net”, the same way I do for players. From Luna’s point of view (as the game is told from the first person) she describes the Net as follows:
The history files we processed in grade 10 say that the movement started slowly. Not everyone realized the potential of “virtual reality,” as they called it back then.
But as more people plugged into the Net, it became the answer to so many problems our world was facing. In the Net, there’s no war, famine, global warming, or sickness. Everyone is happy and healthy! We all live together peacefully, unlike those ancient arcs.
The Council exists to travel between the Net (where we live) and the Outside (where the arcs lived) — they’re the only people who leave the Net at all. Well… every once in awhile a Glitch, a person with something so wrong that not even the Net can fix it, is born in Verta.
Anyone who is a threat to the Net is *unplugged*, forced to leave the Net permanently, by the Council before they can destroy the paradise built for us here.
But I’ve heard people say that some Glitches can pass and that they’re among us.*shivers* My dad works at the Center, though, and says that Glitches are no more than urban myths. But if they’re real…and if a few… “people” need to be unplugged to save the rest of us, their sacrifice is more than worth it.
Anyone who has read a dystopia already knows the Net can’t be as perfect as it seems, and hopefully the fact that I mention “Glitches” makes it clear that they will have a place in this story. Note that Luna doesn’t seem too concerned that people (or “people” as she calls Glitches) are being unplugged, as long as she’s safe.
Some other featured roles:
Luna’s dad: A researcher at the “Center” (ominous place) where everyone is inspected every year up until they turn 18 — aka where Emma is labeled a Glitch.
Luna’s grandpa: A late addition, my favorite-yet-least-discussed character, Luna’s grandpa was once a member of the “Council” (ominous ruling body) but decided to leave it and for reasons unknown to Luna recently disappeared. Oh, and no one else in Luna’s family seems concerned about it. He is also one of the few people who experienced life in the real world before the Net.
I wasn’t able to keep the story small, but I restricted the number of characters that I wanted to develop and weave into the story.
The Story
“Today” is Emma’s 18th birthday, but when she doesn’t return from the Center after her inspection, Luna starts to worry and tries to find her. What she doesn’t know is that Emma has been labeled a Glitch and the Council plans to unplug her in the next 24 hours. Luna’s love for her friend slowly helps her to overcome her fear of glitches as she races to find Emma and plead on her behalf so that she can remain in the Net before she’s unplugged. However, with everything Luna discovers on her journey to save her friend, she starts to wonder if being unplugged is really such a bad thing.
Players start in Luna’s room, waking up in the morning. Through some exploration, they discover that something weird is going on with Emma’s inspection and start the journey to find her. Through this plot-line, Luna repeatedly is confronted by her own feelings and struggles to understand what they are.
Let’s Talk About Our Feelings
The writing challenge here was to describe feelings without any of the labels we’re so used to. How do you describe sadness from the view of someone who’s never experienced it before?
One example is this odd memory of crying:
There was this weird feeling in my chest, almost like I was wearing my age 10 Net-clothing long after it fit. It was too tight… and it… hurt? And something was wrong with my eyes, they were… leaking.
Or betrayal:
My eyebrows knit together. His voice sounds shaky and although no one feels pain in the Net, his lie stings like I imagine a slap to the face would.
Hopefully these descriptions help players understand what it’s like to be Luna and eventually come to the conclusion that ‘happiness’ is only real when there’s something to compare it to. One of my favorite sayings is “There’s a certain darkness needed to see the light.”
I want players to experience Luna’s new feelings during her journey: suspicion, doubt, curiosity, sadness, betrayal, fear, shock. Much of this first slice of the story is Luna pushing through doubts and gaining a new, somewhat unwanted, perspective on life.
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IF YOU HAVEN’T PLAYED YET: now’s the time.
Game:http://philome.la/fcolomboart/unplugged
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Playtesting
I was able to play test this game with 7 people who gave me feedback of varying helpfulness. Some commented on the not-so-great default stylesheet that I used for my story or specific bugs while others had questions about the plot and characters.
Feedback
Bellow are the main feedback points I focused on.
I don’t really care about this text I just revealed!
One request I received multiple times was to make it so that you could hide text that you had just revealed after clicking a word. The text that was added made the passage long and users wanted to be able to hide it. For example, when you click “Emma” from Luna’s room, a sentence is shown (content depends on status in the game). I fixed this in two ways: for some pieces of information like the line after clicking “Emma”, I thought it was only necessary to view the information once, as it was intended as a sort of hint for the player. When a player clicks the line, the text will go back to just “Emma” which will no longer be clickable. I used lots of Twine wizardry to make this happen, mostly the click-replace macro. My more advanced solution for information I wanted players to be able to repeatedly toggle was using a “cycling-link” which would toggle the text on click. More wizardry here including a separate passage. Some other text reveals I left as-is because I wanted that information to always be present on the page.
It’s ugly.
Luckily, this is a very fixable problem. In terms of the “beauty” (or lack thereof) of my game, I did some research and changed the stylesheet to have an ombre turquoise background with black text and specific colors for links (including after they’ve been clicked, hover, during click) and other text throughout the story.
I can’t get back!
The first draft of my game only had the built in Twine back button (which is hard to notice unless you know it’s there). I added a “Back to previous page” button to the footer for every passage so that players could always return to whatever page they’d just come from. I also made sure that there was no place where a player could get “trapped”. Part of the player frustration, however, was just due to the format of IF games — I don’t always want to give people the option to go back. Once you’ve made a decision or entered a place, sometimes you just have to live with the consequences — this adds to a player’s agency because their choices drive what happens to them.
What does this word mean again?
In creating a new world, I also created some new lingo that rooted characters in the Net. I didn’t want to repeat the meaning every time a word was shown, but this meant if someone missed the first definition, they might be taken out of the story by confusion over a word they don’t understand. Listening to “Writing Excuses” helped me create a system where I used context clues with my new words and often offered ‘hints’ in the form of clickable words if a player got confused. The intended effect is that players understand what these words mean, but don’t feel like they’re getting the same information over and over again.
Wait, so how does Luna feel about the Net?
Although I was happy people were curious about Luna’s developing perspective, due to my variations of clues you could reveal throughout the journey, some transitions seemed like bigger leaps. I got ahead of myself in how suspicious Luna was about the Net — I included a passage that said she gives her best ‘happy citizen’ smile, which was pushing it too far for someone who was pretty recently saying everything was perfect. I toned some parts down and added other transitions to explain her changes more clearly or only include certain phrases if her level of suspicion was past a certain point.
I want to see what happens next!
This was probably the most exciting feedback. I created a small slice of a much larger story for my game, and when players expressed interest in what happens next or the status of a character, it was validation that my idea as a whole was at least interesting and that people were connecting to it in a meaningful way.
Learning and Results
Technical Learning
I took advantage of most of the functionality of Twine and Harlowe (the story format I used within Twine). Below I show the graph of my passages created and connections between them. The basics include moving between passages and setting variables, but I was able to go beyond this in several aspects. I used an “Inventory” which kept track of items in Luna’s possession and could always be checked on the Footer of each passage. Within the Inventory, a player could click on an item to reveal the full description. I also added a “Back” button within the Footer that used the (history:) macro to return the player to the previous passage. If/else-if/else statements were crucial to gameplay because I could test item possession, emotion levels, and other conditions to reveal different text and different options. This helped create consequences from user choices. I briefly mentioned earlier that I used macros like (click-replace:) to toggle text and used cycling links to cycle between options. I also used (mouseover-append:) so that a curious player could reveal a secret clue by hovering over text in the passage, allowing fun easter eggs. Macros (link:), (click-replace:), (display:), and more helped pace the amount of information players would get in one page.
Learning from Sources
The process describes how I arrived at this game, but I’ll briefly describe how our assigned materials helped me along the way. I already mentioned how Writing Excuses helped me with my world building and how to naturally introduce new terms to players without hitting them over the head with it.
From Jon Ingold’s talk on IF, I used the concept of character tracking. Luna has several variables to keep track of her status in the game, including level of suspicion of the Net, rebellion, and feelings experienced. I used these to create consequences from choices. For example, if you call Emma and listen to her voicemail, your suspicion is raised and then when you call your dad instead of the normal conversation, you ask him about Emma. Also, his advice on making branching manageable by having several choices lead to the same result was helpful. For example, when you go to the Center for the first time, if you talk to the front desk lady, you’re given an option of asking about Emma *again* or making an excuse to visit your dad’s office. If you ask about Emma again, she signals security and you’re forced to run. Ideally, a player is now thinking — why did I push it by asking again? If I’d just made an excuse, I could’ve gotten in without alerting the guards. However, sadly, if you make an excuse about visiting your dad to bring him his lunch, the front desk lady gets suspicious because food isn’t allowed in the labs and still ends up alerting the guards.
From the “One kind of experience is the story” reading, I incorporated the hero’s journey (or at least part of it for my shortened game) and emphasized consistency in my story. I spent a good deal of time exploring different scenarios and what results they would have in the Net. I made several decisions that aren’t even in the story or are optional reveals to make sure I had a “real place” for my story.
The talk on “Sophia” helped me focus on the clarity of different emotions, which was difficult given that each emotion was “new” to Luna.
Also, from compiled resources and discussions during class I built my story arc and plot development with obstacles and actions interspersed. Pacing for Twine is important and I learned how to use the amount of text and options to control the player’s pace, which for the beginning of my game is slow as you’re allowed to explore the room and call different people. I created the map below during the initial assignment for this project and it helped me focus on movement.
Conclusion
Through this process, I created a world and a story I hope to explore more in the future (Chapter 2 is actually in progress). I used the knowledge I gained from assignment sources and from lots of google-ing to build a story and make it functional in Twine with some extra snazzy features. Play as Luna and experience this small step in her journey — explore the areas of this world that are open to you and hopefully learn something along the way. Feel things. Understand what you’re feeling in a way deeper than one word emotions. Question the world around you. Decide who and what you trust. As much as I’ve just ranted about all the iterations I went through and the long development of the game with certain intentions, I want you to go play the game and make your own conclusions!
