Pageant by Autumn Chen, B6 on the grid.
You’re a Chinese-American high school girl whose mother is pressuring you to be perfect at everything so you can get into MIT, the alternative to which is being a complete and total failure. You already have a full slate of AP courses; you’re on the Science Olympiad team; you’re doing extracurricular work on a university research project… and now your mom drops on you that competing in a beauty pageant would really make your college application stand out. It’s a realm you know nothing about. Oh, and she’s already signed you up for it.
From fairly early on, a principle underlying many IF games’ design has been that allowing an unwinnable state should be prevented. The Zarfian Cruelty Scale, revisited provides historical perspective and a modern analysis of the more general topic surrounding this (see also: IntFiction thread discussing The Zarfian Cruelty Scale, revisited).
The motivation behind the principle is sound. Finding out three hours later that you’re screwed because you left the wrench on the Observation Platform that there’s no way to get back to is No Fun. Trying to avoid that outcome by manually saving the game frequently and keeping meticulous notes about the game state of each save-file, one’s best choice in the days before undo was routinely available? Also No Fun.
I’ve complained here and there that pursuit of this principle can give rise to a different problem. If the choices that bring the player closer to victory are the only ones that meaningfully alter the game, it renders all the other choices, most of the choices a player will make during play… inconsequential. No matter how many indignities you visit upon an NPC, they’re still going to provide the crucial help you need when you need it. And this insulation from consequences of their actions can end up undermining a player’s suspension of disbelief. Too much of that can also cross into No Fun.
And, of course, in many contexts, one’s choices involve opportunity cost. Doing one thing unavoidably incurs the consequences of having not done all the other things you could have. I’ve often been a little frustrated when a choice-based game has offered a list of actions to select and it quickly becomes clear that the whole menu is a magician’s choice. If I have to do all of them before advancing to the next scene and the order doesn’t matter, I’m just being forced to repeatedly click for the privilege of being railroaded.[1]
It’s often made me wish for a different game whose author had instead acknowledged opportunity costs and embraced the resulting complexity, a much harder problem.
Pageant gives me what I wished for.
It’s the beginning of the fall semester. The pageant will be just after winter break. The game plays out week-by-week, your choices generally including:
- spending time with your family
- preparing for the Science Olympiad
- working on the university research project
- some form of direct pageant prep
- spending time with one or another of several characters in the game, most of which choices involve preparing for the pageant in some way
…and you get to choose only three things. There’s too much to do and not enough time. The game makes clear that the choices you don’t make are things you’re choosing against, things you’re neglecting. And this neglect will also have consequences.
Pageant’s stakes may be smaller-scale than Social Democracy: Petrograd 1917’s, but it possibly beats it for how much anxiety it provokes. I’m beginning to suspect that this Autumn Chen is into examining high-pressure, seemingly no-win situations.
Another very good game you should play.
Regarding the outcome of my one (so far) game: incredibly, I won the pageant! And was selected as one of the co-captains of the Science Olympiad team!
I’ll note an important distinction here: the problem here is the frustration, not the railroading, per se. A player being aware they’re being railroaded isn’t even a problem, necessarily, so long as what’s happening is so damn interesting that the player remains enthusiastic about being there for it. That’s the crux. ↩︎