“How does the game invite the player to care about the world through its narrative and/or formal elements?”
For this critical play, I played the game A Dark Room an open-source text-based role-playing game that was originally published for web browsers by Canadian indie studio Doublespeak Games and designed by Michael Townsend. This game is intended for audiences that are 12+ years old. A Dark Room uses vague narrative and the objective of building a large village to keep you interested in the world despite it being very simple without any visual stimulation. This game is very minimalistic: it is just text based and has no visual design. The only thing a player can rely on is the text they read on the side of the screen and the random pop-ups of opportunities that they can choose to partake in or not. As seen in the images below, the design is very simple, however I, as a player, was still very invested in the game, especially the more I played.
What draws a player to continue playing is how the simple and “vague” the narrative on the side is. However, the more you build, the more variety you get in the narrative. It keeps you updated on how your village is doing, so you feel motivated to keep your village healthy. For example, you want to keep your village warm so you have to stroke a fire. When your fire is dying out, it will tell you the fire is flickering, so you would then stroke the fire to make the room mild. However, if you want to keep your fire from dying out fast, you can stroke it again to make it hot. One does not know exactly how this helps, but you develop the mental model (like talked about in our last sketchnote reading of loops and arcs) of stroking the fire because you believe it will help keep the villagers warm. The language used in the narrative also makes players more sympathetic toward the people that inhabit the village. Words like “weathered” used to describe family and describing some villagers as “dust and bones” makes you feel like there is a need to keep them warm, give them shelter, and give them food. As a result, a player keeps building huts and making cured meat to feed the villagers.
As for the formal elements, the game has certain implicit objectives: build a large village to attract more villagers and have them build more materials so you can hunt and explore the world more. This main goal is broken into smaller goals that helps keeps villagers alive. As you complete these goals, you get to unlock more in the game. For example, as you make the village large and create a lodge and trading post, you can then by a compass. With that compass, you can then set out to explore and kill beasts. This allows you to gather more materials and food for the villagers when they are facing starvation. In addition, it makes a player so much more invested in trying to see how these small goals can lead to new levels in the game that the did not know about. I unlocked the “A Dusty Path” screen when I bought a compass as seen below.
Ethically, I think this game is not biased at all. It actually does not depend on player characteristics at all. It uses the words “wanderer,” “mage,” and “beast” (as shown above) to refer to characters you might encounter, but none degrade other beings. Since the game itself is already so vague, it is hard to find a place where they would be creating some sort of hierarchy of characters. You don’t even know who you are playing as. The only thing one knows is that they can build stuff using wood and catch dangerous beasts that try to attack them. In that case, one could make the argument that the beings denoted as beasts are heavily antagonized, but there really isn’t that much of a description to them anyway.
