For this assignment I chose to play Virginia. It is a game that was published in 2016, developed by Variable State in England and published by 505 Games. Its target audience is 17+ (the game includes drug use) players who enjoy solving puzzles to uncover the whole story and enjoying a simple, nimble game without dialogue or many side branches. You can play Virginia on macOS, PlayStation 4, Windows & Xbox One.
The game is a “progression-based” game, which means it progresses along a fixed path, and every scene happens in one set order. This is very important, as this is the “backbone” design of this game. Also, this game cannot go back to the previous scene once you push forward. If you miss something during one scene (like gathering a feather or a flower), you have to replay the whole game to get it. So it is very important to make sure you get the stuff you need to unlock the achievements you want at each setting.
Virginia is a narrative walking sim about an FBI agent, Anne Tarver, investigating the disappearance of a teenage boy in a small Southern town. However, Anne is also secretly surveilling her own partner, Maria Halperin, during this investigation, as it is directed by her boss, the head of the FBI. The story uses the protagonist Anne’s main perspective to unfold. As I played along with this game, I realized that the interesting thing about this game is that it has no dialogue or subtitles for speech. The story unravels based on plenty of jump cuts and movie-style editing.
As a result, unlike traditional gameplay systems, Virginia’s core mechanic is about walking and looking around to discover clues/things that she can collect. The game’s narrative is about environmental storytelling. More specifically, it includes evocative spaces, enacted narrative and embedded narratives for the story. You find all the clues, facial expressions, interactions between characters, and different place settings all through the game’s environment. The game uses a simple mechanic to control exactly what the player sees and when, then cuts away from it. For example, the jump cut of Anne lying in bed/driving, then seeing the buffalo, is a quick narrative transition that moves the story forward.
The buffalo that appears multiple times in the story (only appear during dreaming/imaginary scenes)
The cut can often seem sudden without any prior notice. So this can become a mystery-solving process for players – what did it jump to this scene? Often, the jump cuts occur after Anne lies on the bed. So I deduced the jumpcuts were telling stories about Anne’s DREAMS, not in real-life.
Evocative spaces are everywhere in Virginia, for example the small-town diner, the FBI office etc. These places are familiar to a lot of the players. The dream sequences with red curtains and unsettling domestic interiors don’t need to explain themselves because players who recognize the genre already bring the emotional register with them.
Small town diner
FBI Office
Enacted narrative plays the main role in Virginia’s game design. Because the only real mechanic is walking, the plot is quite literally structured around Anne’s movement through space. There’s no dialogue tree or cutscene interrupting this; the story is enacted by footsteps.
“Footsteps” – taking a taxi to the Cave
Embedded narrative is where Virginia does its most interesting work. The darkroom photograph in “The Halperin Dossier” is a clean example: it’s not a puzzle piece to solve, it’s a fact embedded in the environment that the player must actively decode to understand what Anne now knows about Maria’s family.
Recurring objects work the same way. For example, the red Robin bird is an animal that appears pretty often in the game. When I played the game, I started to wonder: What does this bird represent? Is it something related to Anne or Maria’s past? When I play the game, I can often interact with these items and see what it will trigger in the following scenes. The puzzle of the game is the story it is trying to tell. Virginia uses a lot of symbolic interpretation: For example, Maria’s Pendant appeared several times in the game, each time with different purposes.
Recurring item – Anne’s FBI badge
Recurring item – the bird’s feather
Recurring item – Maria’s pendant
The UI of the game is very simple; I would say almost non-existent. The game is designed to have the character: walk, look, and a single contextual “examine/interact” prompt that appears on the one or two objects in a scene that matter. For example, the bird pin Anne inherited from her father, or the peach she eats at a diner. Because of this design, the first-order optimal strategy is obvious as the character can walk toward an ideal highlighted object and interact with it. Here, the optimal play is “keep moving forward,” which sounds like a criticism but is the actual design intent because the game wants your attention on composition instead of solving things.
Aesthetics-wise, I enjoy how the game’s music can replace the dialogue itself to give players what they should be feeling in a setting.
In terms of ethics, I feel like the game has done a pretty good job. Deleting the dialogues can help disabled players, especially those who are deaf or have a hard time hearing. There’s no speech to miss, and most sound cues have a visual match on screen. However, if the player has a disability with eyesight, this game can be a bit frustrating, as the story is told purely through visual composition and there’s no audio description to fix that. Also, the game’s setting is pretty dark from time to time. There’s no colorblind mode and no way to adjust the game’s brightness, so a lot of times if you don’t see it hard enough, it’s easy to miss the cues.
A dark scene with very few visual hints
