For this week’s world-building Critical Play, I played “A Dark Room” by Michael Townsend. This minimalist, reading-based RPG is likely aimed for Middle/High School aged teens bored in class as it is free to access on any web browser.
Though traits of the game were not cultural, there were societal stereotypes and assumptions. The game provides these ills such as the Villagers being solely tools for your success, however this is not uncommon within the genre and is potentially harmful to society.
As the player progresses within the game, they are given increasingly more options than “stoke fire” such as building structures or gathering firewood. Eventually the player encounters villagers, which gather or make new resources with each new structure the player builds. Villagers can be assigned various tasks, like gathering wood or making leather. However, these villagers are devoid of needs or narrative outside of their assigned roles. Apart from the player building more huts to increase the villager cap, the villagers work without need for any upkeep or interaction other than reassigning their jobs. This drastically limits the interaction the player has with the game, leading to long periods devoid of action from the player while waiting for resource gathering to come off cool-down. Not only did I find my mind wandering during these points, but I was also bored for these stretches, and eventually wanted to stop playing the game entirely. (Yes, there is a 2x speed but this barely helped with the lack of interesting things within the world to interact with and discover between cooldowns)
There is a point to be made about the overall lack of complexity of the villagers: that their simplicity streamlines the game and makes resource gathering easier to adjust and develop. However, the lack of interesting choices, discoveries or narratives that can be made with the villagers detracts from the key aesthetic that is the discovery of the enacted narrative of the game. Since this is a world-building game, there are very few other aesthetics which the game leans on, meaning the villagers not having any interesting interactions effectively limits an incredibly large portion of the game; The game also had the potential for some narrative aesthetic but because the villagers are so one-dimensional, there is no deliberation or interesting choices that the player could make regarding them, preventing the discovery and narrative aesthetic from being realized, and making the game boring. (The game does not count as fantasy as your character is not defined, preventing you from playing that character)
^The full extent of interactions with Villagers^
Adding even a small backstory and personality for some of the villagers and requiring more interaction with them than shown above would not only develop the discovery and narrative aesthetics, but give the game more to do and make it incredibly more fun to play.
The ethical/societal issue the villagers reflect (especially in corporate America) is that in order to protect a bottom line, companies (or in this case players) will treat workers (villagers) as a spread sheet for maximum production efficiency. The game forces you to not learn anything about the villagers even on a surface level, and gives you no choice but to treat video game “people” as a spreadsheet to maximize resource production, a vile and horrible way to think, yet completely expected within the magic circle of A Dark Room. Giving even a bare-bones narratives to some of the villagers would increase narrative interest, develop the discovery and narrative aesthetics, protect human ethics and overall make the game more fun.
-Noah Leibert
