This is a short (300-500 word) essay on your experience of the P2 IF game, and what sort of fun/play it afforded. How did the mechanics work together? How was your interactive fiction designed? What did you learn from the experience? What was it like to watch others play it? Explore whatever interested you about the experience.
If stuck, think:
- What did I think before doing an IF game?
- What did I think it would be like?
- What did I do that was interesting during the project?
- What do I think now? How could I use this going forward?
It is definitely an interesting experience to create an interactive fiction from start to finish. Thinking of how to balance embedding the kind of empathy I want the players to develop, helping them comprehend the content/context of the game, and their struggles while playing is quite a complicated task.
The main kinds of play this game affords include: narrative, fantasy, expression and there’s a bit of challenge in there which I will detail later. With a four-year story arc and plots that echo each other, players experience a journey of the protagonist through a crafted narrative. This process also involves fantasy as part of the play because players have to fantasize themselves as an international student going to be a different country with different language to study. Another big part of the play experience is expression. Through the game’s mechanisms and their varying capabilities at different points of the narrative, the players put together their own words to express themselves.
The kind of challenge involved in the game is one that’s uncomfortable in the moment but meaningful afterwards. Most challenges in the game are created to help the players feel a sense of unfairness and even defeat. Though the players couldn’t do much about it in the game, it becomes the point emphasized when they finish the game and reflect afterwards – which hopefully contributes to the purpose of realizing players’ empathy towards the character or the group of people they represent in real life.
I thought of adding mechanisms like time constraints when answering questions to simulate the uneasiness of not speaking fluently in conversations; or adding a scene where the protagonist helps out a first-year international student in a social situation in their Junior year to give players a sense of agency and growth through echoing an earlier plot. These were interesting things I never thought about before coming into designing the game, it is fascinating when I’m in the role of game designer, I can have so many choices to make a player feel and think about certain things, and how removing choices can fulfill that goal better than giving players more options.
Watching others play is also an interesting experience. One of my playtesters (Jessica) very kindly gave me a full thinkaloud unprompted, and that helped me a lot developing insights of how players reason and allocate their attention in the span of the game. It became especially clear to me how important it is to stay silent during play testing so that you can have the players figure out things by themselves and/or exposing some problems of the game you didn’t realize it has.
To summarize – design, get feedback, design more, observe more, reflect more.
