P2: Anchor

Overview:

You are — well, you. Everybody has something that is important to them — something that is so integral to their identity that, without it, they would cease being them. This game centers around the question of who you become when that thing — that piece of you — is extracted from your mind. When your skin is stripped from your body, what is left but raw wounds?

This is how I want to build empathy within my IF. By inviting players to reflect on how they would feel in this situation — if they were to lose what makes them them.

The ideation preceding this game was a rollercoaster — and the beginning looked nothing like this. My original game idea was about a pigeon learning to pass the mirror test. However, the pigeon was killed before it was even born — and my story instead became a noir mystery in which you’re a witness of an abduction/murder and helping investigators locate the victim (plot twist, you might’ve had something to do with the crime). This idea was also, unfortunately, stillborn (though, I may want to revisit it in the future). I pivoted, for an itsy-bitsy smidge of time to making a game about a Russian-roulette clown, but — you guessed it — I did not. Instead, I decided, I wanted to make a game about identity. About the erasure of self that occurs when the world decides it knows you better than you know yourself. The cost of coherence. Of assimilation. Of normalcy.

The original ideation of this narrative branch was a story about a person who could taste colors, but slowly lost the ability to do so. But this felt much too whimsical. Too out there. While I wanted to preserve this theme — of mystery becoming pathologized and disinfected — I wanted to do so in a Fran Bow psychological horror type of way. (I don’t think I quite hit the mark to adequately call the work psychological horror, but shades of it tint the narrative in some way or another).

I’d recently read Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel, Martyr!, and the ending of this book reminded me of my love for poetic yet slightly absurdist descriptions (check out the ending of Martyr! for a better understanding of what I’m saying). I wanted to write a story that would make me (and hopefully the player) feel a bit empty. Beautifully empty. Like a matryoshka doll that knows it once contained multitudes. I wanted to feel how I did after reading Camus’ The Stranger. Or Seng’s If We Dream Too Long.

At this point, I’ll invite you to play the game. To let me know how well I accomplished this goal. Hopefully, you will feel empathy for my unnamed protagonist as they fall apart (or maybe don’t) — after all, that was the goal of this project. Then, afterwards, you may keep reading this longwinded reflection to your heart’s content.

Anchor

(Play the game before reading everything if you want the full experience. Play after reading if you prefer reading Wikipedia summaries of movies before watching them.)

IMPORTANT NOTE: ChatGPT was used to polish the tone and writing of passages, as well as build the UI and text animations.

I presume you played the game? So it won’t be a spoiler to reveal that this is a game about an individual who keeps attempting to reconnect with an entity — and a place — that they believe to be real. A place that only they can visit. That nobody else believes to exist. As the story branches, players are called to examine what it means when identity is reshaped by institutions, personality is molded by medication, and self is erased for others.

The game is written in the second person and allows players to see the character’s innermost thoughts as they deal with the turmoil of therapy, familial pressure, and internal dissolution. Through this internal dialogue, the challenges presented, and the choices the player is forced to make, the player is supposed to build empathy with the protagonist (or simply people who are losing something) and better understand what the experience is like to watch a piece of your identity slip away. Each ending, even the good ones, have a hint of hollowness to them — a feeling that even when they have become fixed, they left something behind. This is written and designed intentionally — from the words used to the formatting and flattening of text to choices provided.

The target audience for this game is enjoyers of long form fiction and psychological horror. However, despite this being a possibly narrowly-defined demographic, I believe my game is open to a multitude of interpretations depending on the individual, their lived experiences, and the routes they pick in the game. For some, it can speak to the experience of mental illness. For others, the imagery of mental illness could act as but a metaphor for assimilation into society. Even more, the game can be viewed as the erasure of self for conformity. It truly depends on the subjective experience of the player.

Given the fantastical and absurd nature of the piece, I decided that a text-based story would be the best delivery for this narrative. Audio effects would cheapen the experience, and visuals — or at least the visuals I am capable of producing — would not add a substantial amount to the narrative or building empathy. Moreover, in a written narrative, the players are more focused on the character’s thoughts and hopefully thus feel more engaged and connected.

 

Branching:

Image: This is the branching choice map for Anchor. There are 72 nodes and 13 endings (signified by red). For higher resolution, please view through the linked Google Drive.

The ‘Why’d You Even Play This Game if You’re Just Going to Choose to Forget Everything’ Ending: This is the 4-choice speed-run ending, achievable by a single specific route in which you enter the Other Country and proceed to systematically choose to forget everything about the place. You sit with Them, forget about the birds, and decide that fading is maybe okay. If you organically got this ending, I distrust you. (Ending indicated by “Maybe fading is okay. Maybe normal is okay.” above).

The Normal Ending: This is the most likely ending to organically reach. Multiple branches from all over the map converge at this node — the common thread is that the choices you made favored taking the medicine, accepting Dr. Keene’s upped-dosages, and complying with others’ demands. (Ending indicated by “You learn to let go.” above).

The ‘Apple Doesn’t Fall Far From the Tree’  Ending: This ending is the only ending that mentions your father. Ooooh — mystery for P4? Who knows. I surely don’t. I’m writing this at 5AM. But in all seriousness, this ending hints that your father also had something different about him — a form of synesthesia, the ability to see colors in sounds — that was medicated out of him by doctors. This is, in my opinion, the most wholesome of the endings. And one of the only endings where you open up to your mom. Players achieve this ending when they, upon reaching the journal scene, continue to write in it until the spine splits. You leave the pages messy on the ground and derive meaning from the chaos. Fitting, right? (Ending indicated by “Leave it messy” above).

The Pasta Alfredo Ending: Mmmmm. I’m hungry just thinking about it. Pasta. Alfredo. Yummy. This ending is as bland as the pasta alfredo I made last week (ask me about it). You wake up, you medicate, and you exist. Nothing more, nothing less. Players achieve this ending when they, upon reaching the journal scene, continue to write in it until the spine splits. You organize the messy pages from the ground because you desperately seek meaning from order. It’s compulsive. And it’s your undoing. You are left a small, flat, fixed person. (Ending indicated by “Put the pages in the trash” above).

The In-betweener Ending: In this ending, you are caught chasing the high. You cannot get back to the Other Country. And you cannot forget about it. You are caught in the in-between — a functioning person. But one who in the solace of their home seeks for something else. Something more. Something Other. Something missing that would make them whole. There are two paths to get to this ending — by medicating during your desperate last attempt to reach the Other Country or making it to the nebulous session 12/15 with Dr. Keene.

The Slip Away Ending: This is my favorite ending. The ending that I would want to make canon, but won’t because I don’t want there to be a canon ending. It’s the ending that makes me feel most attached to my character. That makes them feel the most human. The most them. There’s one general route to this ending — by reaching your last attempt to pass through to the Other Country and feeling their voice through your mind instead of your body. I want to make more endings like this for future iterations of the game.

The Selfish Ending: This ending has the potential for more. I want to flesh this route out more. This ending witnesses you as you condemn the Other Country to a poisoned unraveling — choosing to selfishly stay in the Other Country, despite Their warnings, instead of return to consensus reality. You reach this ending by passing through to the Other Country on your last desperate attempt and choosing to stay after sitting with Them.

The Departure Ending: You reach this ending by rejecting Their offers of the dark and light anchors, instead opting to leave and return to consensus reality.

The Stay Ending: In this ending, you choose the dark anchor. You choose to stay with Them. With the Other Country. With the place that accepts you for you. You reach this ending, as I said before, by choosing the dark anchor when offered.

The Planeswalker Ending: This ending was inspired by Magic the Gathering’s planeswalkers — powerful beings that can straddle and travel through multiple universes. In this ending, you choose the light anchor. You choose to not relinquish a piece of yourself. You also choose to not abandon your mother and the routine of therapy and medication. You will exist in the in-between space that you have always occupied. Neither Here nor There. You reach this ending, as I said before, by choosing the light anchor when offered.

The Amnesiac Ending: In this ending, you choose to stay in the Other Country — but for a price. Names. You reach this ending by paying the cost when asked to after breaching the Other Country on your last desperate attempt.

The Institutionalized Ending: This ending occurs after you have been institutionalized. You just can’t seem to let go of Them, can you? You keep searching for them, even in the hospital, under the eyes of the doctors. They keep you there — indefinitely. Who knows how long you will stay before you get better. Before you forget. This ending is reached by attempting to find your way back to Them while in the ward.

The Rehabilitation Ending: This ending also occurs after you’ve been institutionalized. Your stay in the ward is extended due to your recalcitrance. However, despite your stubbornness and refusal to participate in groups, you find yourself forgetting why you ever refused. You start attending the meetings. Talking to doctors. Doing everything right. You get discharged — a rehabilitated, better, functional member of society with no memory of what they have forgotten. You reach this ending by withdrawing and refusing to participate in ward activities.

Iterations:

The most bare iteration of my game began as a Google Doc. A couple passages were written out with choices below, and playtesters could navigate through the play space by bolding their choices, then finding the corresponding passage further down in the document.

Image: Julia F., one of my playtesters, playing Version 1 of ‘Anchor’.

Julia F. is a large fan of comic books and comic-related media. Despite my game not being comic related, I felt as though this was an important demographic to test with given my foray into alternate realities and universes. The direction of my story (with entering the Other Country) felt not completely dissimilar to the multiverses introduced in Invincible, Peacemaker, and the MCU — all of which Julia is a fan. After playing through the initial iteration of my game, she provided helpful feedback on the narrative, advising me to make the transition between worlds a more physical action than mental one. Up until this point, I was making it very clear that the narrator traveled to the Other Country by dreaming. However, by making this process a physical action, she said it would feel more real and engage the reader more as I could introduce higher stakes. Her other advice was to simply write more and add more choices, since I did not yet have many meaningful choices nor multiple endings.

For a wide breadth of opinions, I also got Barnibus D. Cottontail, the rex rabbit, to playtest for me! He didn’t have much input, though.

Image: My most high-stakes, important playtest to date.

Following these playtests, I began writing everything in Paper (a writing app). I chose to use Paper as this is my go-to writing app for creative fiction with its minimalist UI and clean distraction-less interface, allowing me to focus purely on writing and nothing else. By shifting over to this platform, I was able to write a large swath of passages with more meaningful choices for my next playtest.

Image: Example of an unpolished passage and the choice system.

As the choices got more complex and I began to branch out, I had to move over to my whiteboard to begin deciding how I wanted my story to play out, what choices I wanted, and what choices currently existed.

Image: (Left) One of my first whiteboard branches. (Right) One of my other incomplete whiteboard branches.

Following this work, I finally had a branching narrative with real choices and a sizable story. I began moving the game over to Twine to digitize it and give it more personality.

Image: One of my earlier Twine graphs before inpatient care and other passages were added.

In class, I playtested with Krystal. Krystal is not a fan of long form fiction. However, I still believe the narrative achieved its intended goal of slight absurdism, controlled confusion, and curiosity (per the huh, oooh, and aaahs of Krystal reading at @2:49-57 and @3:10-25). However, at 3:10 and 5:28, I got valuable insight into the state of my game as Krystal announced “I’m not reading this” and “I need paragraphs. I’m just getting lost.” There was simply too much text for players — particularly those that do not enjoy long form fiction. She also expressed interest in the design of the game (3:35 — though the part she oooh’d at was actually a mistake), but this experience reinforced my idea to play around with different fonts to add an extra dimension to the game. Specifically (13:17), she suggested that I use different fonts/formats to characterize the Other Country and consensus reality, saying that fonts for the Other Country could be “weird and flowey”. Overall, I received good feedback surrounding the game (7:33) as she noted, “I like it, I think the story is really cool.”

Krystal Playtest Audio:

That class, Christina also playtested my game. Christina has played a significant amount of games, including IFs, so she was a very good playtester to have critique my project. Christina helpfully pointed out that I was missing capitalization for certain words (specifically the Wall), which was something I had definitely overlooked and went over later (1:16). She also pointed out some odd phrasing for clarity that I then changed in future iterations (5:18). Christina also mentioned that she liked the font changes (8:26) and encouraged experimentation with different fonts, which I also did in future iterations. In the final deliverable, I also removed the “clinical” font and switched it out for the “prescription” font, making it more interesting as the script typewriters across the screen upon loading.

Christina Playtest Audio (1);

Christina also expressed that the game definitely made her feel empathy and resonated with loved ones’ personal experiences (0:11).

Christina Playtest Audio (2):

Later that night, I made Julia Kao-Sowa my next playtester. Julia has limited (but non-zero experience) with playing interactive fiction, most of which comes from Choose Your Own Adventure books in elementary school; she’s titularly familiar with interactive fiction video games such as Doki Doki Literature Club, To The Moon and Undertale, but has never played them herself. She considers herself a fan of the genre, from what she knows of it. Julia is also an avid long fiction enjoyer and regularly reads novels. As such, I believed it would be beneficial to test with her as she is within my target demographic (of longer fiction consumers).

Julia’s insights were very helpful for the direction of my game. Particularly, after finishing the game (and ending up severely medicated in consensus reality), she exclaimed, “Is there an ending where you stay in the Other Country?” When I told her that there was, she found the ending within two minutes by her own volition (the speed at which she did it honestly astounded me. Actually.). Up until this point, only one of my endings resulted in you staying in the Other Country. Julia wanted more. She said that these were the endings that were more engaging — that she wanted to see more of the Other Country. Not just at the beginning. That she wanted more paths that led There. Julia also mentioned that the game had large blocks of text (as pictured above), mirroring what Krystal said in class. Though an avid reader herself, she cautioned against this for other people as she said it may seem daunting and just an overload of information at once. Unlike the first game she’d playtested for me (the mystery noir game), she said that these choices felt like they actually mattered. That the choices had an impact on the character and their well being. She also wondered whether there would be visuals or audial components of the game (there would not be).

Image: Julia K.S. playtesting the first Twine version of my game. 

As a result of Julia’s feedback, I began fleshing out a cluster of nodes that revolved around receiving an anchor stone from Them which allowed the protagonist to remember more of the Other Country and combat the medicine. However, as this project progressed, these nodes were ultimately sidelined and a number were removed from the P2 final submission as the branching and passage writing that would’ve been required would have been too much to complete by the P2 deadline. These nodes are something I hope to revisit for P4. Moreover, after Julia’s playtest, I began adding more endings to allow the player to explore/encounter more of the Other Country. Lastly, I began breaking up the walls of text into manageable paragraphs on the page, making text not just an amalgamated block of verbosity. Though I’d originally intended written this game in the style of a novel/book — I realized that I this mass text was neither achieving that goal nor helping with legibility.

Image: Comparison of the blocks of text prior to break up vs after break up.

The following day, I playtested with Naomi and Madi at office hours. Naomi is another fan of long-form fiction and recently finished reading The Vegetarian, which she likened to my IF (which is good!) (9:50-57). As a member of my target demographic, it was valuable to hear her thoughts on my project. I received similar feedback from both playtesters, in that the text was still a bit overwhelming, but the overall story was strong. As a result, my final submission now has the text fade in upon scroll, hiding the immensity of the text and making the experience a bit more manageable for players. At one point, Naomi also tried to click on the shimmering text. As such, I realized that the text could easily be confused for interactive options. As such, in my final deliverable, I introduced pill boxes around the choices so players can better differentiate between interactive and non-interactive elements.

Image: The first iteration of my pill boxes for choices.

Naomi Playtest Video is visible here.

Future playtests also included Brydie, Jess, Butch, and Winnie.

Jess is a current undergraduate student pursuing an AI game engine startup, so she offered unique insight into the state of my game and was an interesting demographic (of game engine developer) that I had not accounted for. Overall, Jess enjoyed my story and complimented its writing. Her primary critiques revolved around changing the wording of certain passages for enhanced clarity and tone concision.

Butch’s Playtest Audio:

That same class, I also playtested with Butch. Butch is the TA of the class, and has played and watched a number of games, including many IFs, so his insight was also valuable as it carries a breadth of game knowledge and experience. The feedback that particularly stood out to me from this playtest was his recommendation to widen the text on the screen (11:43). With the text smooshed and compressed, it could feel constricting. He recommended that the width of the text could also be a useful visual and narrative component, widening the screen when in the Other Country and narrowing it when you return to consensus reality or take your medications. Though this was unfortunately hard to implement due to time constraints, I hope to add this in for P4.

Winnie’s Playtest Audio:

In contrast to Butch’s opinion, Winnie — who focused on critiquing my game’s UI and design due to not being a native English speaker — enjoyed the compression of the text (7:57). Both playtesters noted their propensity for my use of changing fonts and said it added to the game. However, due to the conflicting feedback from playtesters regarding the screen width, I decided to compromise and widen the text slightly, but also leave it narrow enough that it didn’t fill the entire screen.

Playing Winnie’s game in class — which was built from scratch using HTML — coupled with advice that Brydie gave during one of her out-of-class playtests, also made me realize the importance of having a starting screen for the game. Beyond adding a an extra layer of polish, a starting screen would also let me add a Content Warning screen, which seems important for these assignments. As a result, I created my own Anchor starting screen and Content Warning page.

Image: Anchor start screen / Content Warning page. Also, not the finalized pill boxes and the incorporation of a back arrow in the bottom left corner!

Reflection:

Overall, creating my first interactive fiction — beyond a choose your own adventure in the margins of a third grade notebook — was a very enlightening and fulfilling experience. Though I’ve made some rudimentary games before (just dropping assets into Unreal Engine and some other game engines when I attended some game-design camps in my youth), I’ve never had the opportunity to truly create a real game from scratch before. Though the branching narrative choice genre is home to some of my favorite games (such as LiS, TWD, etc.), working through the process of creating a branching narrative is significantly more difficult than I anticipated. It’s also a lot of writing and resulted in over seven back-to-back nights of 5-6am grind sessions.

I never thought about how hard it would be to account for everything and ensure that continuity exists within every route. This process takes a significant amount of time. A lot of playtesting. And a lot of fixing. At one point, I realized that one of my paths was able to recurse — that if the player took a very specific path, that they could continue going in circles. Forever and ever. In another passage, I realized I needed to change the passage choice language since it did not make sense with the multiple contexts of all converging nodes. Catching these errors required a fine tooth comb. And from this experience, I learned that I definitely should find a topic to settle on sooner. Though it all worked out in the end, it cost me numerous nights of sleep.

Image: I used tags to help track passages that should have altered states. Red indicated passages that should mention/incorporate the anchor/stone.

Moreover, I learned from this experience to truly rely on ChatGPT for assistance where my knowledge falls short. Particularly, working with Twine, I wasn’t familiar with how the engine works or how to create complex graphics and animations in the medium, so using ChatGPT for these elements saved a significant amount of time and produced a narratively cohesive result.

Through both personal fiddling and Chat’s advice, I’ve now learned a significant amount about how to use Twine, model a style sheet, and create an interactive fiction. I have a wide swath of ideas I’m eager to pursue, so I can’t wait to continue using Twine outside of class to keep creating. Genuinely, I can’t believe this engine is free.

Image: One of my near-final Twine maps. Debugging and checking for concision was a pain.

If I were to do this assignment again, I would definitely employ the “Proof” tool much earlier — this tool prints out all of the passages, their text, and their HTML embeds. I didn’t find this tool until relatively late in the process — and using it to Command + F to find batch mistakes or passages that I needed to change was a lifesaver. It genuinely saved hours of scouring through individual Twine nodes to find out where fixes needed to be made. Similarly, the “Test” tool was also very useful as it allowed me to iterated from beginning to end to ensure that no passages had any missing </div> elements or mismatched HTML tags. Had I more time, I would’ve enjoyed fleshing out a lot more endings and making each playthrough as unique as I could.