The game I played is A Dark Room. The creator is Michael Townsend but it was adapted by Amir Rajan. It is available for download on mobile devices on the App Store and also web browsers. The target audience are those who like simple, minimalist games. It also involves a lot of interactive fiction, so people who enjoy story building would also enjoy this game.
The game invites the player to care about the world through its narrative and formal elements by coupling scarcity with curiosity. The game is situated by just throwing players into the game. The opening statement is, “A firelit room is a comforting lie.” This quote explains first hand how the nature of the game is going to proceed. There are no character introductions, tutorials, or backstories. A player opens the game and is in a dark room. A fire is burning, and it is the responsibility of the player to gather wood, attract villagers, construct buildings, and explore a harsh, post-apocalyptic world. This is how the game invited players to invest in it. This is because players are captured by the mystery of discovering the different elements of the game. Unlike many games where the world-building is delivered through cutscenes, A Dark Room slowly gives information through gameplay itself. Each time a player gains a new weapon, they learn both what it enables them to do and what it implies about the world’s collapse. This makes the player even more emotionally invested, as they are directly fighting against world doom.
Using the formal elements that we learned in class, A Dark Room uses time and resource management to mirror psychological themes. This is because when a player first starts playing the game, it can be very repetitive, as they have to spend time getting situated in this new environment. They have to do mundane tasks like collecting wood and maintaining a fire, which gives a false sense of peace. Then, as time goes on, they experience the harsh realities of this world, like hunger, sickness, and death. From the MDA framework’s perspective, the game has a core mechanic of scarcity, time management, and exploration. This builds a continuous cycle of survival instinct and fun. It creates a dynamic by having a very slow narrative build-up, which keeps the player invested and always looking for the next clue as to how the game will proceed. Per aesthetics, it uses tension, where the player is forced to choose between survival and maintaining their morals. When comparing A Dark Room to other narrative games like Candy Box, it differentiates itself by incorporating a more somber tone. It is not always a cheerful game, as one would expect. It forces the player to get out of their comfort zone and really evaluate what is important to them.
From an ethical perspective, A Dark Room definitely struggles with how it created the villagers. The villagers have no autonomy. They no names or voices and simply do whatever the player instructs. One of the quotes I got when playing the game was, “They trusted you.” This shows how villagers are just simply at my disposal. If a player wants to send them on a mission where all the villagers die, then they are allowed to do that. This concept of villagers is similar to the villagers in Minecraft, which is something that we discussed in section. The villagers in both A Dark Room and Minecraft are simply seen as labor units. It would be nice to see them have a character storyline and actually feel like people instead of just subjects at the player’s disposal. Additionally, an issue with the game is how traits like strength seem biologically fixed. This could imply some racial or cultural superiority. If I were to change this aspect of the game, I would give villagers individuality by naming them and giving them personalities. I would also not make villager’s strength be fixed, and they would be able to grow or lose their strength based on the choices they make.
