Critical Play:
The game I picked for this week’s critical play is A Dark Room. A Dark Room is an indie text-based game published on June 10, 2013 by Canadian studio Doublespeak Games. While originally published only for web browsers, the game was later expanded for iOS, Android, and Nintendo Switch. It is a single-player incremental role-playing game, consisting of simply black text on a blank background.
The game begins without any context. Our only option as the protagonist is to light a fire. As we continue playing, we are able to harvest resources, build huts, grow our village, and delegate tasks to other villagers to continue accumulating resources. After gaining a compass, we are able to explore the world on our own. The minimalistic game choices made by the designers forces us to gather all information from the text itself. As the player, we intrinsically want to gather wood and grow our village.
A Dark Room invites us to care about some of the different layers of word building as described in “The Psychology of World Building” by Gabriela Pereira. For the first layer, the main character, we are urged to care about the protagonist when embarking using the “A Dusty Path” tab. The designers require the player to closely monitor the main character’s water level, HP, cured meat, and medicine stores. If the main character does end up dying, we lose all the supplies we brought. For the second layer, the supporting cast, one way the designers invite the player to care about the world of A Dark Room is by adding elements of trust and chance. Occasionally, the player’s village will be visited by someone offering a trade or deal to the player. Sometimes, the visitor will stay true to their word, rewarding the player. Other times, the visitor will lie and make off with whatever the player gave them. Nobody likes feeling tricked, so gambling on trusting a stranger makes the player feel more involved in the game. There are also occasional fires that kill villagers. The surviving villagers will mourn the dead and the player must rebuild the destroyed huts.
By adding details like the survivors mourning the dead, the designers make the world of the game feel more real. The designer also gives the player authority to determine the fate of the “supporting cast.” When a thief is discovered by the villagers, the player is given the choice of whether to hang him or spare him. By choosing to spare the thief, the player is rewarded. By cementing the main character’s role as an authority figure in the community and giving the player control over the villagers, the designers of A Dark Room make the player feel responsible for the world. This responsibility makes the player more likely to care about the world of the game.
Ethics:
In A Dark Room, there actually is not much of a “body” for the player. As the game is told entirely through text, there is no visible character to identify with. The mechanics of A Dark Room do not show the body, but they do make health stats important when embarking. Some enemies are weather/stronger than the main character; they can vary in attack strength in addition to total HP. Armor, cured meat, and medicine are all used to help protect the player’s health. I would not mod the game’s mechanics to change its depiction of the body because I love the designers’ choice to not have an avatar for the main character. The player is better able to imagine themselves as the main character in the absence of any visual representation of the character.
