Sketchnote of “Working With System Dynamics”:
I played A Dark Room, a digital game created by Doublespeak Games. I think the target audience would be players who do not want a big overload of information or rules to learn at the start of the game, and who enjoy text-based, interactive fiction. In this game, you play as someone who’s stoking the fire in a “dark room” when all of a sudden, a random wanderer stumbles in. From then on, you balance keeping the fire alive in this room, while gathering materials from the forest outside, and eventually expanding from having just two people in one room to establishing an entire village.
I would say this game is a piece of interactive fiction that includes both exploration and survival simulation. I really appreciated the simplicity that the text-based design of this interactive fiction game offered. It made it easy for me to know what actions I could pursue (rather than having to guess these controls myself). I think the exploration part of the game encouraged me to try new actions. Since I could choose if I wanted to be inside the dark room or outside in the forest, the push to explore and switch between these two locations meant new options for actions became available. For example, in the dark room, a stranger appeared offering to bring back more wood if I gave him one hundred pieces to take. If I had not explored the forest section and gathered enough wood, nor decided to take a risk and trust this stranger, then I would not have received the four hundred pieces he later brought back. Finally, I think the survival simulation aspect of the game encouraged me to weigh the risks and benefits of different decisions more heavily. Returning to that example with the stranger, I did seriously consider turning the stranger away. The lack of guarantee that my decision would prove beneficial increased my motivation to then stock up on other materials, in case this decision did not work out.
I was thinking about interaction loops even at the very start of the game because the only action you can take, at first, is “stoke the fire.” I kept repeating this action, and the only thing on the screen that would change is that the text read, “The fire is roaring.” When the text changed to the “room is warm,” signaling that the fire was going out, I knew I needed to “stoke the fire” once more. Yet, this interaction loop only became fulfilling once completing it multiple times finally became an arc, aka, when a random wanderer stumbles in.
This new scene changes the game because it introduces a new relationship between just my avatar, the environment, and this new character, who then offered to help build equipment (e.g., traps, a cart for wood). This equipment offered benefits that slowly stacked on one another (e.g., trapping animals for fur, meat, scales; more wood to build huts and attract more people), until I had a full-on village.
I thought the use of time was leveraged extremely well in this game. I could not always immediately click on actions (e.g., “check on traps,” “gather wood”) and instead had to wait until these options once again became available. This small mechanism of time served to balance the relationship between available resources and my avatar taking them, evening out the advantage I received from gaining more materials with the restriction of having to wait until I had enough to, for example, build a trading post.
I was surprised by how much this game seemed to value strength in numbers, particularly when it came to a community of people. As I progressed through the game, the more huts I built (which turned my singular dark room into “a modest village”) and buildings for social interaction (e.g., the trading post or the lodge) meant more people gathered around me. Yet, as far as I played through the game, these increased numbers were a benefit, rather than a limitation. Each character helped us gather more materials, whether it was through their specialized skillset or with additional time/labor they provided. For a survival game, I thought there would be more emphasis on competition, but I really enjoyed that this game instead seemed to value how collaboration enabled greater chances of survival.
