A Dark Room is a minimalist, text-based survival game developed by Michael Townsend and adapted for web and mobile by Amir Rajan. The game seems to be aimed at young adult to adult audiences – people who would be young enough to want to engage in an online world building game but mature enough to be interested in a solely text-based game and to have the patience for the pace of the game.
I believe that A Dark Room invites players to care about the narrative of the world through a combination of its minimalism, forcing players to fill in the gaps of what isn’t told with their own imagination, and time-based actions, forcing players to constantly interact with this environment and world by doing something.
A Dark Room slowly introduces a player to the world through a simple task: light a fire. There is no synopsis of what is happening and what has taken place, but rather implies a simple goal: survival. This leads the player to fill in the blanks – I assumed I was in the forest, maybe lost. This curiosity, as well as the constant action of feeding the fire, and then gathering wood, kept me interested in the game, adding small pieces of context to my impression of the world. As a stranger, who ended up being a builder, entered the scene, the world in my head started to develop, as I look to figure out what has happened and what I will do. I ended up settling on an apocalyptic-like scenario. Every piece of new information uncovered is exciting, telling me more about what happened, and keeping me curious.
Part of what keeps a player engaged in a worldbuilding game is exploring and understanding the world, which is accomplished well by A Dark Room through the above. The other piece of a worldbuilding game that keeps a player engaged is through influencing and engaging with that world through action. A Dark Room provides the mechanisms for actions through buttons, where you can build different types of structures that will lead to different outcomes – building huts to increase the number of people in your ‘village’, building traps to catch bits of meat and fur, and, as the game progresses, building larger things such as tanneries and markets. This resource management, player choice, and constant action to achieve some short term goal (ex gathering wood and fur in order to build a hut) keeps the player engaged and interacting with the game and its environment between events. It also allows the player to have a sense of responsibility and influence in what happens in the world and their role in it.
The mechanics are primarily what’s talked about above, with timed resource collection, management, and building, with all of the interaction happening through text and clicking buttons. The resources, boundaries, and objectives of the game carefully fit the larger story of the world, in order to increase the realism that allows the player to understand and connect with that world. Outside of the
Throughout this storytelling, the mechanic of the timed resources and having to wait in order to be able to perform actions are really critical both to reflecting the storyline and also to increasing players’ anticipation for what will happen next. I know that when I was playing, I didn’t switch tabs at all. I didn’t even know if it would affect the game if I just let it run in the background for a bit, gathering wood overtime and coming back to check on it, but it didn’t matter – I was constantly tapped in because I wanted to catch when things were available immediately.
The dynamics of the game shift, interestingly, from survival to expansion – running and growing a village. This is reflected in the actions available to you, the variety of your choices, and the focus of the story and game. Also, due to way the game is set up, with the player as the ‘village master’, and villagers as faceless, unnamed characters, the game naturally creates a world-focused narrative as opposed to a player or interaction-focused dynamic. This feeling is also furthered by the second-person perspective – “You light the fire”, for example – which treats the player like the protagonist of a novel.
Finally, the simple, bare aesthetics of the game create the sense of survival, with an empty world the character slowly develops and adds text to. The text is black-and-white, and the game is creepily silent outside of the sound of the fire crackling and occasional moments of wood breaking, traps, etc. These all add to the isolation and uneasiness feel of the game and influence the world I imagine as the player.
Ethics: I think A Dark Room does a great job of putting the player in the position of the protagonist. This naturally creates an environment where anyone can picture themselves in that role, regardless of what they look like and do. However, the villagers in the game are simply work units, used to do whatever the player wishes. They are just more resources, as far as the game is concerned, with no personal interaction or character beyond their arrival, which create that same sense of a feeling for the player. This dehumanization of workers is something that is a problem in our society at large, and I believe could be improved in the gameplay. Even adding a little narrative or interaction tied to the villagers, reword phrasing (Instead of just moving people to working on making bait, can instead say “Ask people to work on making bait” or “Increase two job openings in bait production”), or allow for some other methods of seeing they are human (someone is hurt and needs a day off, for example). I also think it could actually be an extremely interesting addition to the game, balancing morale – which is absolutely realistic to survival – alongside resources, with high morale increasing production and vice versa.
Overall, I thought A Dark Room was extremely well done, and much more captivating to play than I ever would have guessed before I played it. I think a ton of this enjoyment was due to its thought-out use of MDA to create a sense of players being invested in their environment and discovery of the world. I look forward to playing more of it.
