For this critical play, I chose to play A Dark Room by Doublespeak Games, a web browser resource and adventure game. Its audience is people who are interested in pushing the game medium in terms of narrative.
A Dark Room invites the player to care about its world through its minimal elements that ensure a focus on narrative–particularly because it is a resource management game. For this game, the worldbuilding is the narrative and the game itself.
Mechanics and Dynamics
The user interface of A Dark Room is supremely minimal, only serif text on a blank background and simple buttons and tabs to navigate menus. Even once you get to explore “A Dusty Path,” the graphics are pixel hypertext. Its opening, being placed in “a dark room,” is similarly simplistic. The game does not give you an origin as a character or a preamble about any grand narrative taking place. When you encounter these elements together, you are simply an inhabitant of this world, and you grow hungry to get as much information about this world as you can due to the lack of it.
Every new stimuli draws a greater reaction. When I first encountered the Penrose choice event, the mechanical sound effect paired with its eerie description, clued me into the apocalyptic nature of the world and made me more cautious with my proceedings in it. Obtaining a charm item made me excited about when it would be used. The audio progression where more and more sounds of people are added as your village grows filled me with a sense of pride and loyalty to this community I was building.
Since game’s primary mechanics are obtaining and managing resources from the world. As you progress through the game, the user interface and soundscape grow fuller. You are building out the world of the game. Playing the game and caring about its world are the same thing. Exploration is the core motivation to play A Dark Room.
Ethics
Since there is very little information on the world given, particularly on the origins of yourself and the people who settle with you, there isn’t a prescribed morality to your expansion and/or survival. Unlike other games like Minecraft, where there are colonial undertones from the potential of extorting villagers who were visually marked with geographical-based culture, A Dark Room lacks enough information to carry such strong undertones. At most, it is said that “Nomads” have settled and made shop near your settlement.
However, that does not mean the game is completely morally clear. It can be argued that the core mechanics of resource management are catered to morally dubious cultures of expansion. Although I felt bad that my villagers would occasionally die from beast attacks, there were never individuals for me to get attached to. Everything was only numbers, and the player character is always safe from the threats anyways. (You don’t permanently die when embarking either). Additionally, there is a sense of infinite resources from the land since there is always wood in the forest. You passively receive them from a settlement as you personally embark on expeditions to seek more resources–it’s a bit colonial.
Although I raise these issues, I determine that A Dark Room is aware of them. You cannot infinitely craft traps or huts. The game prescribes a hard limit on these expansions. Additionally, the game’s narration of your actions are quite neutral. This, added with the apocalyptic setting, creates the tone that you are performing these actions for survival first and foremost. When your villagers die from a beast attack and so does the beast, the game says that “Predator becomes prey. It is unfair.” Who is who is left up to interpretation. The game invites you survive in this harsh world and calls attention to the unfair reality of that survival.
