For this week’s critical play, I played A Dark Room, a minimalist-styled text-based world builder released by the indie game studio Doublespeak Games in 2013. The developer, Amir Ranjan, and designer, Michael Townsend, released it open-source and initially for web browsers, but the game is now available on browser (at https://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com) as well as iOS and Android devices. The game is built with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. According to the App Store, the game is meant for a target audience of ages 12+, and I would agree with this characterization because while the game composed of simple words and self-paced storytelling, there is still a great amount of reasoning and analysis skills needed to understand the game that would make it more suited for those who have a more developed mind like those who are 12+. Players would need to be able to understand and work around the complex resource management and strategic foresight. The entire game is black and white, with narrative snippets being released as text on the top right of the screen. Players get to shape the world by clicking buttons like “Stoke Fire,” “Gather,” and “Explore,” and buying all sorts of resources.
Analysis
I believe A Dark Room is a brilliant system because of how it coalesces minimal narrative fragments and formal elements to ultimately become a complex system that the player really invests in. At it’s earliest “levels” the mechanic is just one button, and then two buttons (one for resource use—”Stoke Fire,” and then one for resource accumulation—”Gather Wood”) and is purely maintenance. The only thing you can do is click “Stoke Fire” for the cost of 1 wood to keep your flame alive. From this first step, you learn how to accumulate and use a economy of just wood resources, and it prepares you for when additional resources and actions become available. For me, the initial slow burn inspired curiosity. I wondered “Who am I? What is happening? Why is this the only thing I can do in this game?” and my questions are quickly answered by cascading responsibilities and resources I have to maintain.
The mechanics become more complex and interconnected as the next button appear on the page. I can start to buy Traps, Huts, Workshop, and there is now an inventory summary on the right side of the page. Every new building unlocks additional buttons through new capabilities like “Gather,” “Trade,” “Forge.” Because the style of the rest of the game is minimal and black-on-white text, the emergent options carry more emotional weight. Since the buttons and guiding phrases on the left are not so explanatory, the imagination that is inspired in the player makes us our own game story teller in a dark world.
In the “Psychology of World Building,” Gabriela Pereira suggests that the best way to create investment in the world of the story is to give readers a character to care about. A Dark Room does this well by casting the player as the protagonist of the story. One example of this is when pop-ups appear on the screen saying something like “A ragged stranger shivers at the edge of your camp” and gives us a couple of options like: give 100 wood, 200 wood, or reject that gives more randomness in how the future of the story goes. Other randomness elements that make the game interesting are “Beast Attacks” or “Strange pounding” that result in a abrupt shift in resources as shown in the images below.
Pereira also says “World building is not about props and backdrops” meaning that the setting actually comes alive as player navigates the space and curate their own story. This happens in A Dark Room because each decision I make affects how the next part of the story plays out. For example, if I never invest in “Torch,” I will never be able to explore dark caves, but maybe it will give me more time to invest resources in “Bone Spear” so that when I go on explorations on “A Dusty Path,” then I can beat more conflicts and continue to grow on the meat accumulation. Here are pictures of me going on an exploration on “A Dusty Path.” I have no idea what is existing in the world, but I just click left, right, up, and down to traverse it and use the resources I brought to explore or fight to accumulate more resources. In this case, I came across “An Old House” and in it, there are a couple of resources I can grab.
One recommendation would be to disable, or at least severely limit, the ability to do passive resource gain offline. I found that by leaving the game running in the background for three days, my wood stockpile swelled to over 40,000 logs, and even after clicking for 5 minutes on the resources and objects that cost at most 800 wood for me now, I have still not finished the amount of wood I have. I believe this kind of offline accumulation undercuts the carefully balanced resource economy and robs the player of the suspense and scarcity that makes the game exciting.
Regarding Ethical Considerations
In A Dark Room, the player is reduced to anonymous cogs in the resource machine. They are at the same time, hunters, gatherers, and builders who arrive are unnamed. Biologically, the game acknowledges a handful of traits: hunger (food consumption), heat (through stoking fire). In the game, as a player and the protagonist, all I know about myself is how much wood I have, how much leather I have, and how much cured meat I have to eat. There is no sense of personhood here – there’s no name, no health, no XP meter, and no hint of my own feelings. This makes it really interesting because I can make up all these personas on my own, but it also kind of depletes my humanity in a way. If I could change the game, I would give the protagonist a small health bar and allow myself to customize my own in-game persona a bit more. That way I’m more inspired to do so for myself instead of not being sure whether or not I have to do it. Culturally, roles are assigned by their function. For example, the game would say “A hunter returns with two rats,” or a “A carpenter erects a hut” on the left panel to help build the story line, but there is no sense of individual identity, background, or agency, and I think this aligns with how the rest of the game is like— the point is that as a player, you have to curate these experiences on your own. I think the game abstracts personhood, but not to the point that it is harmful. I do not believe people are learning these ideas from the game, but are instead more intrigued by it’s innovative game mechanics.
Regarding accessibility, the game has over 20 languages available, which I think is really nice touch. There is also a way to 2x the speed of the game, so there is options to change the game to your pace. It would be better if there is also a way to 0.5x the game speed for those who need it and to accommodate for younger players.
