Basic Game Information

• Game Name: Buddy Simulator 1984
• Creator: Not a Sailor Studios
• Platform: PC (Steam)
• Target Audience: Players who like retro terminal style, psychological horror, meta-narrative, and unconventional RPGs (e.g., Undertale).
• Game Overview: I played for 2.5 hours on the Steam platform, experiencing the game from the initial text adventure (IF) to the 2.5D RPG stage. Afterward, I learned the complete plot by watching walkthrough videos. On the surface, the game is about an AI buddy developing and continuously “up-dimensioning” a retro RPG for the player (“you”), but in reality, it is a multi-layered meta-story about loneliness, control, and a father trying to connect with his son through a game.
• Game Link: Steam Store Page

Core Experience

At First, I was attracted by the store page: this is a retro, terminal-style game with a content warning, indicating it might have horror elements. Brilliant! I love weird stuff.

This game indeed did not disappoint me. To sum up in one sentence: This is a continuously “up-dimensioning game,” a game under development, a game being developed for “you.” This is very characteristic of a “Meta-game.”

Inside the game, it’s a classic RPG: help villagers, find the holy sword, defeat the evil dragon. Outside the game, it’s an AI buddy helping you develop the game, trying to make friends with you. But on an even further outer layer, it’s a story about a father: an alcoholic father who left his family, trying to make a game for his son to accompany him.

Figure 1: Terminal-style interface

Empathy: Loneliness and Companionship

In the early stages of this game, I felt very lonely. Playing boring mini-games like word-guessing with a fictional buddy, followed by a text adventure (with a cold, surreal style). At this time, the buddy’s companionship allowed me to quickly establish an emotional connection with it.

Not only was I lonely, I felt many characters in this game are lonely. For example, the buddy constantly seeks confirmation of our friendship, emphasizing “Traveler and Paimon against the world!” (the names I used). Every time I tried to close the game, he seemed a bit anxious, hoping I would come back soon. Besides, the villagers in the town are also very lonely. They aren’t like villagers in a normal RPG, but are doing strange things, like a young villager whose house is completely dark and doesn’t know their grandmother has been dead for a long time, or an old man mumbling fragmented memories.

And the father’s (hidden behind the AI) personality traits are also infused into the game: a craving for emotional connection (friendship, family affection), separation anxiety, emotional instability (might go crazy when a bug is triggered), and control (e.g., making the player kill their own pet). These negative emotions are intertwined with the love for his son (the player).

Procedural Rhetoric Analysis

The player’s experience is also like a rollercoaster: the buddy indeed provides companionship in loneliness, but is it really trustworthy? Should I really trust it and become best friends with it? Once you get too close, you get scared by sudden bugs/madness/scolding. Once you get too far, you feel lonely again, and feel sorry for the buddy.

This “polarized” experience is the core of the game’s Procedural Rhetoric—it does not inform you of this contradiction through a scenario, but lets you experience this contradiction through its game rules (processes).

As Ian Bogost stated in “The Rhetoric of Video Games,” games use their “possibility space” to make arguments. Here, the game rules themselves are a direct manifestation of the “creator’s” (father/AI) inner world:

• The rules of “Love”: The AI buddy’s companionship, simple guessing games, endless praise for you in the RPG. These rules construct an argument of “I need you, I will do everything for you.”
• The rules of “Trauma”: Sudden bugs, madness, scolding, high-pressure control. These “failing” rules (glitches) propose a counter-argument: “This companionship is toxic, unstable, and built on trauma.”

The player is playing within this “possibility space” constructed by the contradictory rules of love and control, thus profoundly understanding the creator’s loneliness, love, and madness.

Game Genre Analysis

Interactive Fiction (IF)

Actually, I prefer the first IF part. This is the first time I seriously played an IF, and I feel it’s more interesting than some recommended in class, possibly because the IF in this game is fully functional and purposeful. Moreover, through the IF, I can imagine a cold, supernatural, and weird atmosphere, such as an empty amusement park, a doll on a swing, and it even evoked my own traumatic childhood experience of playing outside alone, night falling, friends all going home, but no one coming to pick me up. This allowed me to experience the charm of words, which is also why IF still has its irreplaceable value in this era.

Figure 2: Interactive Fiction Part

2D/2.5D Role-Playing Game (RPG)

When it switched to 2D and I saw the amusement park scene, I didn’t feel much anymore—the visualized scene shattered the imagination in my mind.

To be honest, the 2D and 2.5D gameplay flow was a bit boring for me. Maybe I’m not the target audience for this type of RPG (for example, I only played Undertale for a few hours). But as the game progressed, I realized that this “boredom” also constitutes a narrative, and might even be intentional:

• Boredom makes the player try to “jump the table” (e.g., explore bugs), which makes the buddy angry. This boredom causes us to inadvertently betray the buddy, thus advancing the emotional intensity of the ending.
• This game itself is a product under development by the buddy; it wasn’t meant to be that fun in the first place.
• As a gift from a father to his son, it also implies the father himself was not good at game development.

Therefore, although this “boredom” sacrifices some player experience, it makes the game’s narrative more complete and self-contained.

Figure 3: 2.5D Part

Inspirations for My Game

My game is also a retro, terminal style. From a media perspective, there is a lot to learn:

• A more detailed command line: For example, this game lists paths, requests editing permissions, etc., which increases the realism of the terminal.
• Cross-layer narrative: This game uses the Buddy’s game (first layer), this game itself (second layer), and the story outside the game (third layer, about the father) to achieve a three-layer narrative. The way the outside-game narrative uses CMD-like methods is worth learning, a great meta-strategy (digging for Easter eggs in the game, piecing together information outside the game).

Empathy mechanism: The empathy mechanism in this game is very good. It first creates a situation that makes the player feel lonely, to contrast with the buddy’s thoughtfulness. It suddenly creates scary scenes like bugs and flashbacks during the calm gameplay (this was okay for me), and provides a sense of weirdness in the villagers’ stories (this was great for me). As Hitchcock said: A gunshot is not suspense; having the audience know there is a gun that could fire at any moment is suspense.

Figure 4: Hidden Message

Note: The Rhetoric of Video Games

Play and Rules

Definition: Play is the free space of movement within a more rigid structure.

rules – possibility space- make play possible

Play: to explore the various possibilities within a given rule structure

(Homo Ludens, magic circle – constituted by rules)

Procedurality

We rely on the practice of procedurality to craft representations through rules, which in turn create possibility spaces that can be explored through play. 

Core: rules

author the representation itself – no

code that enforces rules – yes

Eg:

consumption in Animal Crossing (not directly show consumerism -a loop of expanding the house -> debt -> earning money -> expanding the house -> the capitalist profits)

urban planning in Sim City (not directly show a city – a set of tools for building a city)

Procedural Rhetoric

Rhetoric – classical definition: the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.

persuasiveness, conveying a certain viewpoint

Procedural rhetoric: the practice of effective persuasion and expression using processes.

Arguments:

words or images – no

authorship of rules of behavior (and game space formed by rules) – yes

The McDonald’s Videogame: In order to succeed, the player must make unethical decisions -> “mounts a procedural rhetoric about the necessity of corruption in the global fast food business”

(Spent:  Establishes a set of rules, including money, unemployment, time limits, etc. 

Doesn’t persuade through text or images, but through the rule-space, the game itself, allowing the player to experience the situation of a homeless person and feel empathy)

Ways of Using Procedural Rhetoric

Ideology
America’s Army
Rules of Engagement (ROE), Honor, and brig – value
procedural rhetoric offers an approach to do so.

Making and Unpacking an Argument
Take Back Illinois: to represent their positions on several public policy issues.
Creates a problem space (medical malpractice reform) and available tools (policy) -> the player interacts with these elements (balancing public health level and the cost of malpractice insurance) -> understanding the candidates’ positions.

Conclusion

procedural rhetoric as a literacy

Game design – not just writing code

Also use rules to construct arguments and convey claims 

Playing: use this method to analyze the “procedural rhetoric” contained in other games