Anchorhead has many endings. Only one is ‘good’, though. Which one you get - and the path you take to it - is your choice.
Linus Åkesson: I don’t see how it would change anything. We’d still need to distinguish between works with multiple possible stories and works with only one possible story.
It’s not my choice! Anchorhead is a game of skill. I was trying hard not to die; the game killed me when I didn’t want it to.
Although there are a few places where survival in Anchorhead is due to chance, they’re all easily avoidable, with an alternate solution that is not chance-based. And the few places where it was possible to render the game unwinnable by making a not-obviously-wrong choice were removed in the game’s re-release.
To quote Mr. Spock: “What you want is irrelevant. What you’ve chosen is at hand.”
Hmm, there is a possible source of confusion here. I was referring to Anchorhead 1998, not the remake.
I feel like there’s a lot of ‘death of the author’ going on. Our interaction with a game is directly informed by our own experiences.
Some examples
-I have a son. Playing Eat Me, I found eating the dead children perhaps more disturbing than I otherwise would have. Warbler’s Nest has a similar effect.
-I had an extremely stressful experience in my first academic postdoc. I had an extreme distaste for playing Violet at the time. Now I have quit academia, it’s much more enjoyable.
-I love Dungeons and Dragons, and found Into the Lair to be, I believe, slightly more enjoyable than someone who dislikes Dungeons and Dragons.
I think value-laden labels like ‘game’ and ‘literature’ don’t apply to individual works of interactive fiction, but to our own experiences with them. To me, Baby Tree is literature. Zozzled is literature. Even > by @ is literature to me, because with all three I experienced the same feelings I associate with Shakespeare or Melville: discovery, connection, understanding, etc.
I experience Polish the Glass as a game, since I felt tension and anticipation in my clicking actions while playing, which are emotions I associate with gameplaying. The visual effects also were game-like to me, especially as I play some games that are very text-heavy.
In this view, ‘game’ and ‘literature’ exist as possibilities in everything, and cannot be applied as objective labels.
I agree with Mathbrush. We can create as many labels as we like (though I tend to like not to) but we’ll never, ever get everyone to agree on which label applies to which game (or ‘work’ or ‘story’).
I agree that such labels are subjective. But that doesn’t mean we should stop talking about them. By discussing various ways of categorizing works, we emphasize different aspects of them, and learn to appreciate them in new ways. Assigning labels isn’t right or wrong, it’s just a way of saying that through a particular lens, these works have something in common, that these other works don’t have (or have to a lesser degree). Others will join the discussion and point out that through another lens, things look differently.
This thread is interesting precisely because it brings out many different opinions. Labels like “games” and “literature” may be blunt, but when you throw a blunt object into a lake, the ripples can be beautiful and fascinating. If everybody agrees, there is no discussion, and without discussion there is no progress.
My reason for thinking that it’s fruitless to talk about what a game is is inductive: I’ve seen lots of these discussions, and they’ve never been fruitful. “Literature” ditto.
Graham Nelson’s comment about tying the player to a chair to shout the plot at him was about freedom of action, which is something that is orthogonal to the puzzly/non-puzzly continuum IMO–I take this to be Linus’s point too. There are extremely puzzly games where pretty much everything has to be done in a certain order, for instance Gun Mute, Earl Grey, Lurid Dreams (OK nobody is going to remember that)–the player is on rails, with the successive scenes being gated by puzzles. There are puzzleless games that are all about letting the player explore and do things in different orders even though they land you in the same place, Solarium is one that springs to mind, also Unit 322 (Disambiguation).
I think debating on whether something is literature or not is kind of meaningless because it’s like debating on whether something is art or not. It’s pretty subjective. Or at least that’s what I think. But if you replace “literature” with “non-game”, then this discussion is a lot more straightforward.
I’m not sure if any of you play/read visual novels or not, but there’s a similar issue in that field as well. You may have gathered as much from the fact that I’m not even sure which verb to use for consuming said media. But basically, most visual novels have something game-like to them, whether it’s a CYOA multi-path narrative, or RPG battle sytems, etc. What defines them as a visual novel is their heavy focus on story. Like, a good majority of the games are 50 - 60 hours of reading and voice acting.
I bring all of this up because in that field they also came across this problem when VisualArts started creating what they called “KineticNovels” that had no choices whatsoever (or if they did, they were just flavor text that didn’t alter the outcome of events in any way). VN readers have now come to call all linear games “kinetic novels”. Some people don’t care if a VN has choices in it or not, and others refuse to play if they don’t have any influence on the story. And so it’s been very useful when a sales page of the game lets you know that the game is completely linear or not.
Anyway, that’s my input on the matter. I thought it might be a useful comparison.
Like I said, or tried to say, at the beginning: you can trip over a lot of feet trying to say what a game is. Talk about what the game does and what it contains.
Yeah, it seems like there are a lot of aspects you could discuss relating to how much freedom or agency there is in a given game, or how linear it is:
At any given opportunity for interaction, how much choice do players have about what to do right now? (I think this is what matt w was referring to as “freedom of action.”) Do we have basically only one option? (For example, “Press a key to continue”?) Do we have several explicit choices listed and we must choose one of them? Is there a seemingly-infinite possibility space where we can type in anything we want? Is there an illusion of many choices, but in practice the game rejects all but one or two?
Is it possible to experience the major events of the story in a different sequence from one playthrough to another, depending on our actions/choices?
Is it possible to experience entirely different major events in the story, depending on our actions/choices?
Are there multiple endings? Is there more than one desirable ending, or is it basically one winning ending versus losing endings?
Is it possible to experience the environment in a different order, depending on our actions or choices (for example, can we visit the library before the garden shed, or vice versa?)
How much of the text available on any given playthrough is opt-in, rather than required? (For example, if there’s a portrait on the wall, is it described no matter what, or is it described only if we decide to to click on it or “EXAMINE” it?)
And then there are “games” that give no freedom of action at all. But I argue that many of them are excellent works of art that focus on creating an experience rather than creating a simulated world or letting people strive for a victory - the latter of which is the essential mark of a game.
A work of IF that provides no choices is radically different (to my mind) in comparison with one that does.
I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said here, except possibly on this point: whether something is successful at being art may be subjective, and difficult to argue about, but whether it something was trying to be art, and how it was trying to do so, is obvious much of the time.
No it isn’t. Lots of games don’t have concepts of victory, including catch, tag, house, ring-around-the-roses, Dungeons and Dragons (non-munchkin version), and Tetris. I refer you again to the relevant Wittgenstein passages!
Now all the various discussions of how these works have challenge/provide for victory/etc. can be interesting, but jamming them into the “What is a game?” framework makes them less interesting!
I am specifically NOT using Wittgenstein’s definition, because if we did, everything would be included in it. Far too broad.
If I had to give a definition, I’d say a game is a system of rules in which certain outcomes are judged more valuable than others, and we must select strategies to act within the rules to reach those preferred outcomes.
That excludes things like ring-around-the-rosy, and ‘games’ of pure chance.
The solution might be a Myers-Briggs-style assignment for a game. To my mind, the advantage of such a system is that every IF/game has the same number of digits in its signifier. Let me fling out some ideas:
Is there a Map the player can wander on, or are we moving between story Junctions instead?
Are individual outcomes guided by principles of Character stats or of a Narrative reality?
Are the moves made on a Freeform command line, or is it a list of Options?
Is the action built like a repeating Game cycle, or Unbounded turns? Is there a central loop that keeps repeating, or is the player able to move around at will?
Are the obstacles based on Puzzles, Story, Tactical choices, or Resource management? What is the player up against?
Is the game Linear or Branching? Is there only one good ending (with varying degrees of success), or are there multiple good endings?
A game like Zork is therefore MNFUPL. Map-based narrative action (not stat-based), free-form command line, unbounded turns (no game cycle), puzzles, and largely non-branching (there is only one good ending).
Yes, you could get into some unholy squabbles about how a game is rated on the particulars. Peoples’ opinions will differ. You could always use lower-case letters to indicate the distinction isn’t particularly strong in favor of one or the other choice; or use X when there is a complete balance between them.
The point being, a system like that leaves room for many varieties of IF games to be assigned an indicator that better describes its working mechanisms.
That would work wonderfully for most works I can think of, even those that are just stories iterated by player prompts. I’m not sure that games like Zork can be called non-branching, though.
Sure, you can do a lot of things in any order, and skip others entirely, but in the end it is one basic end game: get as much stuff as you can, go to the final place, whatever.
If it causes confusion or dispute that category could be 1 for one “good” ending and + for many. It’s a difference in terminology for the same thing.
A story with “Continue” would be JNxxS1. Story junctions, narrative logic, no commands, no defined turns, Story-based conflicts, 1 ending.
I have an eclectic background and recently retired from my third career. Throughout my life I have been an avid reader. I read much more than the average individual. If Amazon and Books A Million gave out awards, I would be a frequent flyer.
As an avid reader, I have tried a number of book clubs, beyond my life long learning adventures as an undergrad and a graduate student.
Poking, prodding, and critiquing any type of “literature” make my eyes bleed. I just enjoy the experience which is almost always positive anywhere on the “literature/artistic” spectrum.
Interactive fiction just happens to be one of my favorite forms of art.
fos1
I think we can agree that games like Zork converge on an ideal ending.