“It’s a UNIX system! I know this!” (Ariana Richards in Jurassic Park)
Some random thoughts about how whoami came to be.
2015-2017: The quest for a Twine parser
When I started using Twine around 2015 I was impressed, realizing it’s like a self-contained model-view-controller framework and you can build pretty much any kind of web app on it. In the parser-centered Spanish community it had somewhat of a bad rep back then, so I tried writing a couple of experiments to bridge traditional adventure game mechanics with point-and-click UI.
The first of these was a port of Vampiro (Spanish equivalent to Cloak of Darkness) with basic world model (locations inventory, droppable objects). At that time Harlowe had no loop macro, so the object lists were rendered as a recursively nested passages and performance was not exactly great.
After that I started tinkering with Sugarcube, and noticed it had a text input macro. If you can input text, then you can build a parser game with it, so I had this idea of a hybrid choice-parser game where you find a parser section that opens the possibility space (or at least presents the illusion of doing so).
Around 2017 I built a Sugarcube prototype with a passage that mocks an Inform game with the Parchment look. It accepted the basic set of parser game options, but they didn’t really do anything (more implementation details here).
I first put this in practice in a Spanish game, MetaComp, released in 2019. It went mostly unnoticed, which allows me to keep recycling parts of it in newer games.
IFComp 2020
During the 2020 COVID lockdown I translated my first Inform game (BYOD) to English. It’s a very small game with hacking mechanics that present computer devices as a parallel game map, with remote file reading and writing operations implementing as a sort of magic system.
As the game is quite short, I had a tested and proofread version of the game a few weeks before the deadline, so I went all out on a set of feelies. I created a DOS-themed homepage and some warez-themed ephemera. The presentation got very positive feedback, and some reviewers pointed that they’d have liked to poke around the homepage disk beyond the provided bunch of files. This idea crept into my brain and stayed there for almost 2 years.
Q: Do I only write games about computer files?
A: No. It happens that this type of writing that simulates some technical device is easier to write and translate, as the mimetic elements can carry part of the narrative weight. So when I have to translate a game to submit to an English language event, it’s easier if I can use the techy boilerplate as a crutch. As I really can’t produce what I’d consider good literary writing, I like to follow a toy or puzzlebox approach to game writing, where players can freely explore some possibility space and engage with the mechanics without having to necessarily enjoy the writing.
Rayuela de Arena 2022
In April 2022 my energy levels were high after a very successful Spanish ECTOCOMP 2021; there was a high turnout and a renewed author and player community with great dynamics. So I started to write an entry for the Spanish jam Rayuela de Arena (open for narrative games, not only IF). Without having the concept I started building a prototype of the UNIX file navigation UI and the Twine parser. During a very slow day in early April I wrote the Towers of Hanoi puzzle, to pad things a little bit. I still didn’t have a plot, only a haphazard collection of UI elements I found to be cool.
The plot thickens
I brainstormed a little bit and I got the idea for the simulation and the mind scan from some scattered sci-fi influences like the Devs series, the “San Junipero” Black Mirror episode and the novel Permutation City by Greg Egan.
While thinking about the way to visualize this, I was using docker at work a lot. In docker you package applications by first having a base operating system image and then stacking new files and apps on it in an incremental fashion. So “what if you could create docker-like images of the world and the human consciousness” became my premise.
After the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022 nuclear anxiety is back, so I built the story backdrop on it. When the bombs start to drop on the PC’s country, they can take refuge uploading their mind to a quantum simulation and stay there forever. At the moment of writing the game, the bit about the seceded red American States was supposed to be ucronic speculation after the Trump bullet had been seemingly dodged. Unfortunately it seems to be more on-topic now.
The Rayuela de Arena theme was “100 years after”, so I had the full mind scan to take 100 years. As the game has a date command it runs an internal clock, and all dates are relative to the system real time clock. To implement the encoding countdown and to simplify the handling of dates I embedded a copy of MomentJS with the game’s Javascript content.
So I had a plot. Thinking what I can do with the parser section I mixed two ideas I had:
- Floating in the sea during one vacation, I came up with the idea of it being a virtual reality environment, with controllable parameters like waves, wind and so on. I liked the idea of having a kind of primitive VR aesthetics described with text, computer graphics jargon to describe the lighting, terrain, clouds, etc. My concept here was “textmode VistaPro”.
- After COVID there was a lot of talk about modelling society on something other than neoliberalism. It seemed the world was at a historical crossroads. I remembered books like Four Futures by Peter Frase and the ideas by sociologist Talcott Parsons, according to whom society develops subsystems to perform different functions.
Resulting in: what if some guy in the lab had created a virtual reality environment where you could set a social pattern by picking a style of interaction? (I’m keeping the weather control feature for some future project).
The possible scenarios I came up with were:
- altruist: an sustainable ecosocialist society influenced by degrowth ideas,
- authoritarian: fascist spectacle society, inspired by dystopian sci-fi like The Running Man.
- capitalist: a high tech capitalist bubble in a spoiled planet.
- extractive: I wanted to have a suboptimal low-tech scenario, too. After releasing the game @Ruber_Eaglenest pointed me to the Station Eleven series, where I could see some of these ideas beautifully put on screen (specifically the caravan of motor vehicles repurposed to be drawn by horses was very close to what I had envisioned, I loved it).
Looking into the four Parsons AGIL subsystems, I found they mapped nicely with the disks of the Towers of Hanoi puzzle. Having a final process of linking of the simulation model would wrap things up nicely. It’d tie the representation of an executable computer file and the sociological concepts into a tactile game mechanics. On top of that the Towers is a classic recursive programming exercise, so it would serve as a nod to comp-sci types. Perfect. What I didn’t know is that mainstream gamers are fed up with this puzzle, and it turned out that everyone has hated it. Still, I like it and think it belongs in the game.
Polishing things up
After I built the main structure of the game I added some visual touches like the glitch effect when the main character subjects themselves to the hard mind scan, the static background for the camera passage and the fractal landscape visualization I had ported from a BASIC type-in program in an 80s computer magazine. All the visuals in the game are procedurally generated. I wanted a single HTML file without external assets.
To fill in more story details I implemented a web page with 90s aesthetics and Windows 95 window embossing, and an email UI based on Pine. With these (including text shadow and what is supposed to be a CRT reflection in the console view) I strived for a retro-futuristic aesthetics that recall a time when technology had an utopian edge to it. A time where the idea that technology could uplift consciousness still floated around, and there were artifacts like Jaron Lanier’s writings on early virtual reality or Timothy Leary’s Mind Mirror.
When writing the email timeline I thought the idea of having a love interest that had sent the PC a mind scan of her own, so she could be imported into the simulation too. I think the whole backstory of the game is nicely condensed in the bounced email with the PC declaring themselves to the real Mia, it’s powerful and very aligned with the game’s gimmicks.
IFComp 2025
When IFComp is announced in 2025 I decided to enter it again. Checking my backcatalogue I think whoami is a good candidate to submit, as it has little text it has not lost too much of the technical edge.
I completed a draft of the English version in about a week, and I got some kind people volunteering to proof read the game. This game has had the most thorough proofreading of any of my games. I think the testers did the best possible job with the original (written in somewhat oblique gender-neutral Spanish), so I want to thank all of them, but especially @pieartsy, who took the time to provide many alternative phrasings to the weakest bits. As an example, I bothered several testers for days over the translation of a coffee recipe (café de puchero).
The reception of the game has been overwhelmingly positive, even the reviewers that acknowledged its shortcomings had good things to say about it. Even if since the original was released there have been other games released in English tapping into similar sources of inspiration (the amazing DOL-OS, Computerfriend and ConfigurationUploader come to mind) I think the game still packs a punch and is a good addition to that group.
Thanks to everyone who tested the game, played it or is just reading this!