Overview

“Another Job” is a text-based interactive fiction game about the dreariness of work. The year is 2084, and it’s the first day of your new programmer job. The work day stretches on, and yet it’s a struggle to find time for yourself. Rent and food prices are exorbitant, and money is hard to come by. Work is tedious, but can you afford to step away from your computer?

The game has two core components, the first being resource management. The main resource you must manage is your time. At work, you can spend time “programming” (i.e. mashing buttons on your keyboard) to earn money. Money accrues slowly, and basic goods like food, shelter, and transportation are costly. However, sitting at your desk for the whole workday is mind-numbing. You’re welcome to get up from your desk at any point, but doing so costs time and therefore money.

Stepping away from your desk slots you into hypertext-game-esque dialog and character interaction. This is the game’s second core component. If you get up, you can meet Mateo, your coworker and potential companion. You first encounter Mateo when he bumps into you, spilling your coffee all over the floor and his coffee all over himself. You can choose to be gracious or rude to Mateo, and future interactions with him are shaped by your decision.

The next day, your office shuts down and everyone working there gets fired. If you chose to focus on work and ignored Mateo, you’re left to find a new job alone. If instead you got to know Mateo, you both take comfort in each others’ company in the face of systemic cruelty.

Regardless of the game’s ending, you’re prompted to “look for a new job”. Doing so sends you to the beginning of the game, with you working for a different company each playthrough. This allows you to try spending your day differently or to try out different dialog options with Mateo. I hope this also reinforces the theme that work is constant, uncaring, and interchangeable, but that people are worth your time.

Iteration History

Concept Brainstorming

From the beginning, I knew I wanted to make a game about individuals navigating enormous societal systems. At first, I thought I was going to make a game about disability, ultimately trying to communicate the message that “Who is disabled?” is a question answered by society, not by nature. The game was going to take place in a world where 10% of the population is born with a genetic condition that causes them to die suddenly at a very young age. The protagonist would have been an adolescent girl affected by this genetic condition who breaks into a genetic research lab to find the cure. After the first playtest with this concept, I realized that I was actually much more interested in the story of the genetic researchers. That’s when I decided to pivot my focus from disability to labor.

Initial Prototype

My next idea was to create a game about workplace surveillance. This game would focus on subverting spyware on your work computer. At this stage, I wanted the game to include an entire simulated desktop and OS. Additionally, I wanted to hide an embedded narrative in your computer’s files that revealed something nefarious was going on at your company. The more you dug into the corporate dirt, the more extreme the spyware would get.

This is where the programming and time-management elements entered the game. I needed a relatively simple task the player could perform to satisfy the workplace surveillance software. “Programming” by keyboard mashing seemed like a natural choice. I was particularly inspired by the website https://hackertyper.net/. Additionally, I wanted the player to have to choose to spend their time either working or investigating, and their decision about how much time to dedicate to each task would affect the outcome of the game.

Because it was still early in the development of the project, I wanted a pretty simple prototype that would test my core interaction. I gave playtesters my computer and had them mash the keyboard into a keypress-counter site for a short amount of time (1-3 minutes, depending on the playtest). At the end of that time they received $1/character typed and were allowed to spend it on food or upgrades to their house. However, I also placed a zip file named “DO NOT OPEN” in the center of my desktop. In the zip file was an executable that would print out some mysterious text to the console asking the player to go to https://hackertyper.net/ if they wanted to “fix the way things are”.

From this playtest, I gained a few key insights. First of all, people really liked mashing keys at first, but it eventually got old. Playtesters who had 1-minute-long workdays described the experience of typing as “a nice break, where I know I don’t have to make any decisions”. On the other hand, playtesters who had 3-minute long workdays hated typing by the end of it.

Second of all, players were motivated by money constraints. When I let players type for a long time and earn a lot of money, they felt like spending money was no big deal. They were consequently more willing to split their time between hackertyper and “work” (mashing into the keypress counter). On the other hand, players who could earn less money felt much more stressed about earning money and were much less willing to move away from “work”.

I felt that players were appropriately engaged/bored by typing. Furthermore, it was clear that players were responding to how much money they were earning. This gave me confidence in the mock-programming concept. However, as I tried to flesh out the embedded narrative, I kept coming up short. Ideas I was generating for the overarching plot either didn’t feel right or were way too much to accomplish in the amount of time I had. This is when I decide to scope down from a grand narrative about intrigue and corporate espionage, to a smaller narrative about mundane office life.

Building in Twine

At this point, I started building my game in Twine. Because I had abandoned the embedded narrative concept, I decided that the game would be suited for a text-based platform. That would also allow me to accomplish much more story-wise than I’d be able to if I went with a full visual interface.

My first step was to build the mock-programming interface. I used chatGPT to generate 10 pages of code gibberish, then set up a text input that revealed the code gibberish as the player typed. I added a money display to the interface and had it increment as the player typed. Additionally, I created a meter that displayed the player’s typing speed as “$/s”. I spent a good amount of time tuning its parameters to make the player feel powerlessness at how slow they were earning, but simultaneously motivated to try as hard as they could to fill the meter. This involved a lot of playtesting to get right. One difficulty was that each playtester had a unique strategy for keyboard-mashing, resulting in a wide range of typing speeds I had to account for. Some players used their fist, some players used all of their fingers, some players used just their index fingers. One player tried typing a few characters, saw that the meter was barely budging, said “Well, that’s clearly useless”, and clocked out of their in-game job. I wasn’t sure how to proceed at first, but the teaching team had some good advice: Plan for high-speed typers. Slower typers will probably get discouraged,but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Making it a challenge to earn money aligns with the game’s themes.

As I continued to develop the game in twine, I added more monetary pressures to the game. Initially, players felt little motivation to actually show up to work and type. Therefore, I made money more scarce. I made taking a cab to the office cost money. I made food and drinks cost more money. I charge the player rent at the beginning of the game, which immediately drains most of their bank account. After these changes, I was surprised by how much players were STRESSED OUT by making enough money. They still felt like work was a tedious slog, but it was a tedious slog they were willing to get through. This was the exact balance I was hoping for, and it was really exciting to actually achieve that outcome.

After I was satisfied with the programming/money interactions, I started filling out the story. At first, I was really struggling to come up with directions, but some more advice from the teaching team got me on track: develop your characters. I brainstormed a ton of character traits, then mixed and matched them until I had character concepts that interested me. Then, I picked one and started writing them into the game. I named them Mateo. I chose a hispanic name because he reminded me of myself, or at least the really energetic and driven part of myself. It felt important to me to connect him to my own experience.

I was really happy to see that players found Mateo to be a compelling character. One playtester yelled at the computer screen in anger when Mateo bumped into them and spilled their coffee. Multiple playtesters made flirtatious comments out loud as they were clicking through Mateo’s dialogue. Mateo also offered players motivation to explore game interactions that they hadn’t cared about before, like attending the after-work social.

All-in-all, I feel that the final build of the game accomplishes two major things: (1) making players feel like they have to balance earning money against their boredom and (2) giving players a character to care about.

Reflection

I do see tons of room for improvement. Developing this game, I felt very much like I created an idea for a core interaction (“programming”), then thought “How can I design a story around this interaction?” I feel this resulted in a relatively under-developed story that feels quite disjoint from the game’s core. Next time, I think I’ll flesh out the story first, then create a core interaction to support it. Additionally, as this game is my first stab in a long time at creating fiction, it’s clear to me that my writing can be improved. I’m sure it’ll improve with time, and this experience has made me feel really inspired to keep writing interactive fiction.

Despite my criticism of the game, I’m really quite proud of what I was able to create in just two weeks.

In retrospect, I think this game is a letter to myself. I’ve always been very focused on productivity and academic performance. My life has always been about working hard to make sure I have opportunities in the future. Very recently I’ve realized that being so fixated on the future has meant I haven’t really been living my present life. I think this game is a reminder that what really matters is connecting with yourself and connecting with the people around you. That’s what makes the work worth doing.

P2 Reflection

Play Another Job