Aging in Video Games: Immersive or Immersion Breaking

Aging in video games always seemed like a weird concept to me. Why would you include something so grounded in real life within your digital world that many use partly as an escapist fantasy. So many of us have experienced or observed the heavy toll that getting older has whether it’s just lower energy or a more serious decline in health. My thoughts after our brief conversation about aging in games has led me to rethink some of my thoughts around aging as well as its potential as an in-game mechanic.

A variety of games feature mechanics that suggest the passage of time. Simulation games such as the sims have been aging characters for a while now and while it isn’t exactly aging in real time the time jumps to different life points such as children becoming teens and teens adults offer a sense of immersion that many crave. Fortunately, for those looking for escapism, the aging mechanic can be turned off.

Other non-simulation games feature mechanics that allude to aging without full committing to the effects of it. Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Witcher 3 both feature in game barber shops where the player can choose new hair and beard styles as well as a quick trim. To provide and extra feeling of immersion, the devs for both games implemented mechanics where the players head and facial hair grow overtime. This level of time passage only effects gameplay on an aesthetic level and just adds more customization features for your characters without effecting players looking for a less realistic time mechanic.

Recently I’ve begun playing Sifu, an indie game released in 2022 by Sloclap studios. The game puts you in the role of a young Kung Fu master seeking revenge for the murder of your father. This requires you to clear rooms full of henchmen with complex chains of attacks. What really makes the game unique is its really interesting use of aging within the game. The enemies in Sifu are challenging so it’s expected that you die a fair amount, fortunately your character has a magical pendent that resurrects them. The catch is that each of these deaths causes you character to grow older with the amount you age growing with each consecutive death. Dying to the same opponent repeatedly sees you character go from 22 to 23 to 25 to 28 etc… The aging Is more than just visual flair. As you grow older your character unlocks new powerful techniques due to the wisdom of aging which allows you to do more damage to your opponents. To balance the benefits of experience, your body becomes frailer, and you have a smaller health pool when fighting your enemies. The real kicker is that when your character ages into his 70s and 80s there is a chance he will die permanently, and the level will restart from the age you first began it at. It’s really cool having a permanent death mechanic that is actually reflective of how real aging works.

I find this a fascinating mechanic as it suggests a life outside of what we see in our gameplay. As our character ages they experience numerous trials and train to become stronger, but these experiences are all implied. I also love the lens through which they portray aging, having it be something positive for the player where they learn and grow but also keeping the harsher realities of getting older. Perhaps this proves that even the mundane and often sad parts of being human can inspire innovative and entertaining gameplay mechanics.

I would love to see someone take the concept even further with maybe a time sensitive aging mechanic that encourages you to beat levels as fast as possible while experiencing a variety of aging consequences in real time. Maybe could explore and do puzzles on other planets and have different rates of aging due to how time passes on other planets.

-Henry

Blink and You’ll Miss It: The Era of Alternative Video Game Mechanics

As we as a society become more technologically savvy and in turn more attuned to the joy of games, there is room for an all too often overlooked development. Over the years games have become more and more impressive, not just in their creation but in their approach and mechanics. I believe that this could be an opportunity to learn from ourselves and create games that are more accessible by utilizing alternative game mechanics.

In the game “Before Your Eyes,” you play as a boy relaying the memories of his life to the Ferryman. It is a stylistically simplistic storytelling game with a unique spin: the game progresses every time you blink. The implications of this game mechanic story-wise are quite interesting. At first, you go through the slow story of this young boy’s life, blinking in a usual rhythm because everything seems normal at first. That is until the Ferryman sees the boy’s lies and the player discovers the twist of the game. The scenes suddenly become shorter and quicker and your life passes you by with every blink. The story’s most emotional moments are in the most important scenes which most players don’t get to fully experience because they just can’t keep their eyes open long enough. 

Cover of “Before Your Eyes” on Steam

“Before Your Eyes” was not only a piece of art, but a marking and reminder of what we are capable of. Gaming mechanics typically involve a keyboard or buttons and a joystick or mouse, but “Before Your Eyes” is not the only game to incorporate an alternative mechanic. There is the simplistically designed Flappy-Bird-esque mobile game “Scream Go Hero” where the player must make noise to move the character, most of the time having to scream to save their avatar from falling. There are games we may not think about immediately, such as kinetic games like “Just Dance.” There are alternative game mechanics within regularly played games, such as the “Don’t Move” mechanic in “Until Dawn” where the controller requires the player to be extremely still while their character is hiding. While many of us might see these games as impressive pieces of art, media, or technology, I believe this could be an opportunity to become more accessible. 

Top 10 video games for the visually-impaired according to Lenstore

Just as games have become more diverse, accessibility creates many different images in people’s minds. There are visual and mobility impairments, that can even inhibit someone’s ability to sit in a chair for an extended period of time. With this in mind, a factor important in the accessibility of games is not just the ability to play the game, but the options of games that are playable. I believe this has become even more significant as technology makes its way more and more into settings such as the classroom, the workplace, and the social scene. Alternative mechanics that don’t require the use of fine motor skills such as the one in “Before Your Eyes” could potentially be integrated in ways that would assist those who struggle with such mobility issues even outside of gaming. 

– Emily

The World Within, Beyond, and Around the Game

When I was little and had the special treat of visiting my best friend’s house, we would play Wii games late into the night, often foregoing the original narratives the game expected of us and instead attempting to reach the hidden corners of each page. I distinctly remember flying the plane into the Wii Summer Sports volcano and finding a small blurb of information left for us down near the lava. The thrill of discovering something that was left there secretly for a curious player was one I couldn’t get enough of. My friend and I would race off the road of Mario Kart tracks in attempts to find secret passageways and small shortcuts within the walls of whatever dungeon or ski resort we were driving through. Though I loved playing Wii as a child and discovering the worlds within the games I was playing, I haven’t been much of a gamer in the years since, preferring to watch films and read instead of playing games. However, with my recent interaction with class material and the incredible New York Times Op-Doc called Hardly Working, my curiosity in the worlds of video games has been reignited.

Hardly Working follows 4 nonplayer characters (NPCs) around the game Red Dead Redemption 2 for a few days, tracking their movement, narrative arc, and routines. While watching the documentary, I was continuously struck by the momentous effort and attention to detail that the creators dedicated to building the game. These 4 NPCs show a complex side narrative of life in the Wild West that has nothing to do with the linear plot of the game, but who serve to simply further bolster the richness of the experience and world. It reminded me of the in class discussions that we have had about the processes of creating a digital artifact and representation. Specifically, how there are coders who decide the rules of the world and of each character, but it’s the computer that actually turns their efforts into a viewable and playable representation. These players are coded to perform specific actions over and over again in a series of code with some if:then sequences – such as how their behavior changes when it begins to rain – that are supposed to run in the background of the game. These moments prove that each character’s code isn’t just a small amount of movement, they are actual narratives and stories with emotion, choices, consequences, and beyond just that idea, these stories reminded me that there can be multiple forms of rhetoric in any one form of media, and this game had many variations.

The stablehand walks around the farm aimlessly, hammering things, moving hay, making soup, drinking 3 sips of beer, and standing in fields.

Visually, the world is artistically rendered to look like the Wild West, its NPCs dressed as farm and town workers, carpenters, and citizens of the well flushed out and animated town. It’s a persuasive and immersive environment that further supports the characters’ side stories as they wander the hidden alleys at night, ‘build’ things on the dock (that never grow or get smaller), and stumble drunkenly from the bar to the stables. The repetitive audio bits that come from the bar combine with background music and bells to create another persuasive aspect of the immersive world. All of these elements make the NPCs’ storylines more fleshed out, but also highlight the monotony of the work and manage to make subtle comments about the repetitive aspect of working under capitalism. The characters hardly glitch, hardly break their routine, and hardly ever notice the player who is recording them – but in the few small instances they do, it’s as if a lightning rod hits the viewer, pulling them suddenly out of their role as a player and instead into the lives of these NPCs. In glitched moments, like when the carpenter looks directly into our eyes, these characters become rounded, human-esque beings in a display of narrative and storytelling. 

This documentary was deeply intriguing as a study of both impressive video game storytelling design and as a representation of humanity. Each character’s story had some kind of arc or challenge that had nothing to do with the plot of the game, and it is assumed that the many other NPCs in the game all had their own storylines too. This is just one game that balances the very present, but background, animated film media with playable procedures in a game of progression through numerous predetermined storylines. I am really looking forward to continuing my exploration of side characters, places, quests, and the limits of a game when playing LOTRO. The more I learn about games, the more impressed and in awe I become with their complexity and the immensity of creating a playable, immersive world simply from 1s and 0s. 

-Mariah

Sources:

• in class discussions and NYT Op-Doc Hardly Working

To Know But Not Be Known: The Blurred Lines of Parasocial Relationships in Video Games

We’ve probably all over-identified with characters from media. Whether you’ve written fanfiction, scrolled through other’s in-depth analysis of a character’s motivations on Twitter, bought products an influencer recommended, or cried when Jenna Marbles or Mat Pat from Game Theory retired from YouTube, it’s a common hazard of our modern age. These identifications are called parasocial relationships, which are the one-sided ties between individuals who consume media and the characters (or people) they consume. The definition is increasingly growing to encapsulate the blurred lines between knowing and being known in a digital world. Parasocial relationships dominate new technologies and social media and have particular implications for how we should think about characters in video games and ourselves when we play them.

How do Video Games Differ from Other Media?

Video Games, as discussed by Jesper Juul in Half-Real, are “real in that they consist of rules,” and real in that winning and losing the game is a real thing that happens, and “fictional in the actions you do.” Essentially, they are “real rules in a fictional world” (Juul). Video games, especially games with a strong narrative, use many of the same tools as other forms of media — storylines, music, and visual art follow many of the same characteristics you see in movies and TV — but the difference is spoiler alert, they are games. You are put in the middle of the action, in many ways just as immersive or even more immersive than other forms of media, but as a player in a game, you are constrained by its rules. And, even more importantly, your connection to characters in the game and other consumers of the game isn’t relegated to you simply viewing a character and discussing your love of them on a Reddit board; you can interact with characters, be a character, and (depending on the type of game) connect with other fans on the medium itself. 

Getting to Know Your Friendly Neighborhood NPCs 

NPCs, or “non-playable characters,” are the bread and butter of video games. How you interact with NPCs is based on the rules and norms of a particular game; in some, your character can marry NPCs; in some, you can just buy a sword and be on your way. Sometimes they just kill you. NPCs are a hugely important part of our interactions with games and often are part of our attachment to them. 

Animal Crossing: New Horizons by Nintendo

One example is Animal Crossing. In Animal Crossing, you play the only person on an island with cute animal townspeople where you help to build a town for your furry & feathery friends. The newest version, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, came out on March 20th, 2020, and saw incredible popularity among various age groups during the pandemic & beyond. Part of this is inherent to the culture and vibe of the game — people resonated with having domestic goals in a sunny town after weeks at home. I think the other reason it’s so popular is because of parasociality. Connecting with happy and cute NPCs and walking around a little town gave people a taste of what they were missing during lockdown. It’s not just that it gave people a break from the anxiety-inducing news coverage of 2020; it also represented one of the critical aspects of parasocial relationships, especially with NPCs: there are almost no consequences for your social interactions.   

Animal Crossing screenshot of talking with a character. Rosie wants to know how you’re doing – so sweet of her!

So what does that mean? The lack of consequences for interactions with NPCs means you don’t have to worry about the “fall-out” of a social interaction with an NPC. In a game like Animal Crossing, the rules don’t allow anything bad to happen. Even in other games with higher stakes, killing an NPC is unlikely to have any negative consequences. Outside of the fictional world, this had real implications during the pandemic. Especially during the early days of the pandemic, there were real consequences to interacting with others in physical spaces in the form of breaking laws & social norms and spreading disease. Certainly in Animal Crossing, but also with all video games, you don’t really have to worry about that, especially with NPCs! During the pandemic, it allowed people to have a semblance of social interaction without the consequences of doing so. And in Animal Crossing, it’s relaxing, the townspeople are happy to see you, and in March 2020, I was certainly excited to see them!

Why Does it Matter?

A scene in “The Last of Us” TV show (2023), and the game (2013)

Even beyond the pandemic, our connection with video game characters is culturally significant. The popularity of video games like The Witcher and The Last of Us has led to huge TV series following the main characters, where our connection to characters spans not just series but mediums. Video games allow for a blurring of lines between what is known & unknown, who we connect & interact with, and the medium itself has important implications for the meeting spaces of the future (thinking, unfortunately, about the corporate nightmare of the Metaverse, but also video games as places where you can interact with your friends from the real world). Because video games allow for connection with characters in a way no other medium allows, the social interaction feels more real. You can buy the lipstick an influencer tells you to, but you can’t fight a dragon with them. You can write fanfiction about a character from a movie, but can you play the character in their world? I don’t think so.

Sources:

• https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/arts/animal-crossing-covid-coronavirus-popularity-millennials.html
• https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-319-08234-9_463-1
• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9779800/#:~:text=A%20parasocial%20relationship%20is%20a,the%20development%20of%20parasocial%20relationships.
• Juul, Jesper. Half-Real.

Remediation of Dungeons & Dragons

With nearly fifty years since the initial publishing of the first official Dungeons & Dragons game, there are now countless ways to play and consume D&D. Players may opt for classic tabletop roleplaying, or virtual sessions with assistive websites such as Roll20 or D&D Beyond. There are also countless Dungeons & Dragons podcasts such as Critical Role or Not Another D&D Podcast where comedians and voice actors will record their sessions for public consumption. With its widespread popularity, Dungeons & Dragons has been remediated into a 1983 animated series, and most recently the 2023 film Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.

I personally had my first exposure to D&D from the 1983 animated television series, which built my foundation of knowledge surrounding the game. The show follows a young group of friends who are transported into a fantasy world and must find their way home under the cryptic guidance of their Dungeon Master. In the actual tabletop game, the term ‘Dungeon Master’ refers to the person in charge of directing the narrative of the game, voicing all the NPCs and adversaries.

Scene from the 1983 Dungeons & Dragons television show

Remediating Dungeons & Dragons is a unique and complex challenge, as each game can have an entirely different narrative based on the plot created by the Dungeon Master and influenced by the improvisation of the players, and it doesn’t necessarily translate directly to a film or television adaptation. The animated show aimed to create a lighthearted story that captured the essence of playing a game of D&D with your friends, and though I haven’t watched it in at least 10 years, I believe it succeeds in this ambition. Their choice to have a group of normal youths inserted into a fantastical setting was a great way to represent the feeling of immersing yourself in a magical D&D world while sitting at a table with your friends.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves took a different route in their remediation of the tabletop game by establishing a purely fantasy setting based on the typical rules and elements of the game, as opposed to the parallel universe structure of the animated show. While the show used the element of unmagical people gaining new skills and abilities when they entered the Dungeons & Dragons world to represent the ‘game’ aspect, Honor Among Thieves was able to establish a world that truly felt like a D&D game without quite as literal of a translation.

The primary way the movie achieved this representation of D&D was with its usage of archetypal characters. The main party of adventurers behaved in such specific ways that a viewer could likely create the ‘character sheets’ for each protagonist. Character sheets contain the primary stats and traits of a character such as their race and class, as well as varying scores for charisma, strength, constitution, dexterity, wisdom, and intelligence. Because of this structured method of character design, D&D characters are often quite trope-y and possess simple defining traits. However, over the course of a campaign, characters still grow and experience changes to their stats, and thus the characters in the movie could still be considered ’round’ due to their dynamic nature. The movie featured the over-the-top and silly characters that you often see in a campaign, but still provided them with depth and development.

Another fun element that allowed the movie to truly feel like a Dungeons & Dragons campaign were the seemingly random or unexpected events and outcomes. It was truly entertaining to see the unconventional solutions the characters would come up with to get out of tricky situations, and it reminded me of some of the insane ideas my D&D group has come up with in our games. Sometimes, an action in the movie that seemed completely idiotic would end up successful, and I could imagine that the ‘player’ must have rolled a natural 20 in order to get their crazy move to succeed.

The main party members in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

Overall, Honor Among Thieves was an enjoyable and entertaining watch for fans of the role-playing game. The writers managed to remediate a complex game in a way that felt realistic and true to the source material without being too cheesy. Consuming Dungeons & Dragons content like the movie, show, or podcasts provides me with inspiration for how to develop my own D&D characters and enriches my overall experience with the game, and I look forward to more adaptations!

Morality: A Human Experience in the Realm of Video Games

“What are you doing? You can’t do that to the poor animals, Diego!” my sister would yell as I hunted livestock for food on Minecraft. In my eyes, I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong. I was simply surviving the harshest winter known to a pixelated game (yes, I ALWAYS played survival mode). 

As a young kid, Minecraft shaped my gaming addiction. The combination of creativity and adventure packed into an open-world sandbox was a breath of fresh air. You could build whatever your heart desired. From residential neighborhoods and farms to Yankee Stadium and Hogwarts. But what one doesn’t realize at such a young age is games indirectly immerse themselves in human experiences. One of the most frequent human experiences seen in video games is morality. Games like Minecraft, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Fallout 4 are excellent examples of games that implement morality. Each game uniquely approaches morality, providing players with a rich moral landscape to explore.

Minecraft gameplay shot

In Minecraft, players are free to create, explore, and build their own world. While the game has no explicit moral system, it provides players with the tools to shape their own morality. For example, I would either collaborate with my friends to build cities or simply use TNT to blow up their prized creations out of spite. This freedom of choice makes Minecraft fascinating as players can explore their moral bounds through interactions with nature, animals, and other people.

Red Dead Redemption 2, on the other hand, takes a more narrative-driven approach to morality. The game takes place in the Wild West, where players control an outlaw named Arthur Morgan. Throughout the game, players are faced with moral decisions that impact the story and the relationships they have with other characters. The game’s morality system is nuanced, with choices that are not always black and white. With Red Dead’s honor system, when players do good deeds, their honor level goes up as they are well respected. When players do bad things, their honor level goes down and they are seen as outlaws. Needless to say, my version of Arthur Morgan was always seen as an outlaw (stealing the train was too much fun). 

Red Dead Redemption 2 gameplay shot

Finally, Fallout 4 takes a post-apocalyptic approach to morality. The game is set in a world that has been devastated by a nuclear war, and players must navigate a world filled with moral dilemmas and ethical quandaries. The game’s moral system is based on a reputation system, where players’ actions impact their reputation with different factions. This reputation system creates a unique moral landscape, as players must consider not only their own ethical principles, but also the consequences of their actions for the wider community. 

Fallout 4 gameplay shot

Going back and playing each of these games made me question whether the moral choices we make in video games are aligned with the moral choices we make in life. Each of these games, to an extent, enters you into different realms of human existence with varying plots and roles. Everything that is experienced through the game, like farming in Minecraft or trading goods in Fallout 4, can be experienced in real life. Does that mean our morals influence how we play or does the digital escape into the Wild West alleviate us of our moral bounds? I believe both can be true at the same time.

These large games intentionally allow you the freedom of choice to explore not just the depths of the game but also the depths of the human experience. No matter how noble or how horrid your actions may be, in the world of video games, they are welcomed and accepted (to an extent). Each scenario presents an opportunity to either mirror your morals or do something out of your comfort zone. Hence, while I would never steal a train in real life, I damn sure will in Red Dead 2.

Additionally, the added freedoms of such games allow each player to experience every possible outcome associated with their moral choices. Just like in life, your choices have consequences. Through these experiences, players are more likely to connect with a game and uncover the unique details and side stories that would not be apparent if they stuck with the main storyline.

So, if you ever panic and question your morals when it comes to gaming, realize games like Minecraft, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Fallout 4 were built for you to experience both the moral and immoral implications of your choices. As much as I love animals, I had to survive the Minecraft winters somehow. Sorry vegans!

-Diego Gomez Lopez

STAND BY ME

A player and their companion in battle.

Despite games being an interactive and community creating medium, with multiplayer games dominating the industry, it is surprising to see that solo adventures are increasingly becoming more popular with their focus on storytelling and character development. Although these types of games hone in on the epic shouldering of a near impossible task by the main hero, they don’t always tell of a journey being taken alone.

Companions in games are NPCs (Non-player characters) who accompany the player through their multitude of quests. They serve to lighten the load, both literally and figuratively. In 2011’s Skyrim, companions you find and befriend along the way are able to literally lighten your load by a feature that allows them to have an inventory you can access. Within this inventory, you can store any item of your choosing, preventing your own character from being over-encumbered.

Lydia, one of your earliest companions, allows her inventory to be stored.

Figuratively, they lighten your load by fighting for you. Questing alone in Skyrim is a dangerous feat accomplished by only daring fans. Dungeon diving is one of the main ways quests force you to explore Skyrim, but are also one of the most unforgiving areas for novice players. Luckily, companions are readily available to give you a helping hand, with every companion having some sort of combat sense.

Although these are obvious positives for having companions while questing, there is another not so apparent from the get-go: emotional investment. In a virtual world so demanding, it sometimes feels like you have to carry the weight of the world all by yourself. With so much at stake, it becomes easy to compartmentalize your task and emotionally disconnect from the story. One of the only things anchoring you to this pseudo world is its characters, most notably the companions that accompany you.

In a lonely, single-player game, it is the bond you share with this company that makes missions/quests worthwhile. They begin to make you care about their world, what’s at stake and what is the morally right decision. Companions share their experiences with you, fully immersing you in their lives and the memories they’ve had in their past. It grounds you, allowing you to grow with these characters and closer feel what it means to be alive in their world. Their constant presence helps you understand the ramifications of your actions as their reactions to them reveal the morality of their world and what is commonplace.

In essence, they are quintessential chunks of the world they inhabit. Their desires and willingness to help you in your quest solidifies your stance in the relative conflict; what you do and whose side you’re on matters. By having a native of the land by your side, it becomes readily apparent that your decisions will have lasting consequences on the world they’ve known their whole lives.

Taking the Video Out of the Game

Looking through the historical progression of games, there seems to be a fairly smooth path that points towards video games being the current end point. This makes sense considering that video games and VR are the peak of gaming technology, but what about the games that go back in time? As an avid board game player, I wanted to take a look at some of the great video games that have expanded their reach into the realm of tabletop play. Are the games any good and why are they made?

Let’s start off with what is arguably the most popular video game-board game transition, which is Dark Souls The Board Game. Initially a Kickstarter project, the game hit its target in 3 minutes and ultimately raised over $4,000,000. For those of you who don’t know much about Dark Souls (the actual video game) it was released in 2011 to much critical acclaim and commercial success. While it could be frustratingly difficult for players, there is an intricate lore, great mechanics, and an open world platform that allows for so many different strategic maneuvers. Turning back to the board game, it actually held up pretty well against the original video game. There were interestingly layered game mechanics, high end design, and of course mercilessly unforgiving combat.

Where things get interesting is how this game helps Dark Souls make the transition from spiteful multiplayer video game to a collaborative and hopefully fun for all video game. In the video game the player-relationship is complex as everyone has similar common goals, but they can also take over another player’s human form by killing them. By changing the board game to be completely collaborative Dark Souls developers FromSoftware are potentially trying to take away some of the negative impressions players are left with after playing Dark Souls. The board game serves as an avenue to build a stronger community around Dark Souls, which would ultimately lead to more players and game play.

While it’s nice to think about a lot of the community and “for the sake of the game” aspects of expansion into board games, the bottomline is of course going to be money. Particularly with games that achieve massive success, a board game is a quick way to make some easy cash. For this we turn to the lamest of all video game iterations, the Monopoly edition. Don’t take this as a sign of me bashing Monopoly, it’s probably the first game I really loved playing and I still playing with some regularity even today. The point I am trying to make is that some game companies simply opt to get lazy when making the transition to board games and that’s not at all exciting for fans of the game. Just to name a few there is Zelda Monopoly, Fallout Monopoly, and Mass Effect Monopoly. While I am sure that these all sold a few copies, none brought another dimension to the original video game, doing little if anything to make the experience worthwhile for fans of the original game.

At the end of the day it’s easy to tell, which game companies are really looking to provide something new and exciting for their fan base. Some video games such as BioShock, Assassin’s Creed, and Dark Souls have provided an opportunity to expand upon gameplay and grow the fandom and community. On the other hand countless video game makers have come out with board games that provide little other than funding, or just simply aren’t good games. So before making that transition from the screen to your kitchen table be sure to do a little bit of research as a great video game doesn’t always translate to a great board game.

• Sam Grossman

Seveneves: The Role-Playing Game!

 

[featured image taken from https://www.nealstephenson.com/news/2015/05/26/seveneves-site/%5D

When you were a kid, did you ever play those games where you would look up to the sky and imagine the clouds as bunnies, dragons, or anything in between? Did you ever play the ever-popular “the floor is lava” game? If so, fantastic, because as a kid you’re sort of expected to have an active imagination. But why does this expectation fade over time? What about “growing up” means that you have to lose your creativity? Well, we believe there is absolutely no reason for that imagination to wane, and in this blog post we’d like to suggest a fun way to keep your inner kid alive and well.

It’s called a role-playing game (RPG for short), and you may have heard about more popular ones, like Dungeons & Dragons, as there has been a resurgence of interest following the use of this particular RPG in popular culture (think Stranger Things). We made an RPG that was a combination of Dungeons & Dragons, Stars Without Number (a sci-fi RPG), and Seveneves (a science fiction book by Neal Stephenson). Ours may not be the best RPG out there, but if anything we hope this blog post shows you how, without enough time and thinking, anybody can have a great time making and playing an RPG.

The idea of the RPG is one that has been solely rooted in the fantasy genre, and by association, the wider genre of romance, something that we have discussed at length in this class. The RPG brings together a group of people, often with varying skills and interests that offset each other, with a shared goal. There is usually some form of quest, self-redemption, or self-revelation that occurs, and because RPGs are more focused on player character development than most other forms of interactive media that we discussed, we thought it best to use to remediate a science fiction novel. Additionally, we both have years of experience playing role-playing games such as D&D and Pathfinder, and have planned our own campaigns before as well as played personal characters in others. All of those campaigns were solely in the fantasy genre, however, so if we were going to make a science fiction RPG, we would have to do a little research.

The first order of business was understanding the book in which we were basing our RPG. Internet synopses can tell you more than we can here, but this is the gist: the moon was destroyed by an unknown “Agent,” and in the two years before the moon rocks crash to Earth and destroy everything, humanity stashes itself in space to return thousands of years later as collection of seven races, stemming from the seven fertile women who survived in space. You can see more contextual information later in the post and in our notes, or if you’re really invested you can even read the book. The point is this book was perfect for creating a sci-fi RPG.

Furthermore, we scoured the Internet for tips and resources on how to make a sci-fi RPG. From Googling those exact words to thumbing through Reddit threads, we took a few days to amass as many ideas as possible. We settled on the system Stars Without Number, as this RPG system was freely available and seemed to be quite well developed for our purposes. Specifically, this system did a great job at reframing D&D classes into various jobs and skills that were more suitable for life in space, rather than a fantasy world, and the system itself was flexible enough to modify.

Why would we need to modify the system? Well, our goal for this project was to develop a “one-shot” game, or an RPG that is meant to be played in a single session rather than in a multiple-session campaign. With this in mind, our primary concern was providing the players enough time to explore the world we were creating. We easily adjusted the mechanics for making skill checks to be less based on players stats and more based on intent and narration. In more practical terms, players could essentially do whatever they wished without all the role-playing and messing about that takes time, so the Game Master (GM) could provide more narration about the environment. It worked out pretty well, as you can see in the videos we’ve placed here and throughout the post.

There are many other mechanical considerations you have to make when planning an RPG. Where is the game set? What is the history of this setting? What is society like? What maps do you need to make? Who might the players encounter, and what will that encounter look like? Is there a point system? Since we based our game on the world of Seveneves, we had a lot of the contextual questions taken care of already. We answered the RPG-specific questions, and you can see our notes in the Google document link in this post later on. The doc can speak for itself, but we’d like to briefly elaborate on the point system, which we developed from the ground up. Normally “points” in the RPG world are experience points that accumulate to level up the player. However, we used “assets” as a way of measuring how well the players were forming bonds with the species on Old Earth, and so whichever team (Red or Blue) had the most assets by identifying and succeeding in more opportunities by the end of the session won.

We gathered up some of our friends to play a short one-shot on a Monday. In RPG terms, a “one-shot” is usually a game or storyline that takes one or two sessions to finish (as opposed to usual longer story arcs in regular play). We planned on filming the session to use in our presentation, so we wanted to have every possible race represented. Our friend Penn played an Ivyn engineer, Jacob played a Camite priest, Nick played a Julian aspiring politician, Jamz played a Moiran biologist, Ethan played a Teklan transport specialist, Jordan played a Dinan astronavigator, or “astrogator,” and Matthew played an Aïdan technician. Torie acted as the “GM,” or the Game Master, who essentially narrates the campaign and prompts the players to make various “checks” in order to see if they successfully complete the actions they wish to perform.

The plot itself was simple: each of the player characters had been gathered as part of a co-racial mission from an orbiting space station around the Earth to explore a newly terraformed surface and investigate for human life. You can read more about it here. You can also see the racial traits and backgrounds we provided for our player characters to choose from. In our game, which lasted about three hours (typical for a standard RPG session, at least for us), our group encountered a race of humans that had adapted to living underwater for over 5,000 years that the orbiting population nicknamed the “Pingers,” after the sonar-esque transmissions they intercepted from their society. While at first a little hostile, our group managed to curtail the growing violence and managed to establish good terms with a group of Pingers. (Here is a video of their “first contact”). They shared technological knowledge and made some vague promises at treaties with military leaders, and were pointed to the underground race of humans (“Diggers”) to assist them in repairing their broken communications device.  

As a player character, or PC, I found the sci-fi context fascinating. Personally, I’ve always loved engaging with any media from this genre; though everything is scientific and futuristic, it’s still all imagined and possible, so it makes me feel optimistically youthful. For this game, we had a mix of rambunctious and withdrawn players, so that made the three hours we played pass with much entertainment. I was in the unusual position of being a quasi-GM, meaning that I was privy to everything that might happen in the game, but I still had to engage as a player who did not know these things. Thus, I found myself motivating the players to pursue various paths that I knew would keep the action in the game flowing. I wish we had had more time to thoroughly explore the world that we had created, but that’s just the nature of a one-shot game.

As a GM, Torie found that there was a lot of the story that she did not prepare for. Unfortunately, only one member of the group besides us had actually read Seveneves ( a couple of them did read it after the session, though!), and this proved to be a bit of a problem when Torie ended up killing a lot of game time explaining background situations and mechanics of the players’ society and objects to them. Both of us (Torie and Matthew) have been Game Masters for our own games before, and while Torie had over twenty pages of GM notes, we both knew that planning a successful campaign and story took a much longer amount of time than a single month. Even with the most careful planning, though, the fun of RPGs is that the players make their own decisions, which means that there is always something happening that the GM has zero plans for. Torie expected this, and because of it, was able to work mostly successfully with the players’ wishes as they went. We were hoping to have contact with both the Diggers and the Pingers in this, but, after three hours, the group had only made it to the Pingers, and we decided to call it a night. (This is common with our experience as GMs and players, stories always take a little longer to tell/roleplay than you think they will). 

In conclusion, we loved the opportunity to take something we both love to do as a hobby and integrating it with the themes that we have learned in ENGL 3726 with Professor Clayton at Vanderbilt. We have both grown up with these “new” forms of media that we have discussed in class, and have been fans of the fantasy and sci-fi genres since childhood. Being able to put those together in this new creation was a really satisfying culmination of these themes for us, and we know that our friends enjoyed playing through the story with us as well.

Learning to Play

For full effect, please play this.

A lot of people have games that they consider integral parts of their childhood.  As we have discussed in class, for a lot of people this game was Pokemon.  For others, Super Mario Bros or the Zelda series were the cornerstones in their gaming careers.  For me, that game was Morrowind.

For those who are not familiar with Morrowind, it is the third game in The Elder Scrolls series, and the first that was (and still is) widely discussed online.  The Elder Scrolls games are a set of fantasy RPG’s with immersive lore, a fully fleshed out game world, and multiple races (based on, but not copying, standard RPG races) you could play as.  Released by Bethesda in 2002, Morrowind served as a bridge between the first two games, which were both incredibly hard and not very user friendly, and the last two games, which, while still occasionally challenging, adopted standard RPG aids like a compass and quest markers.  Instead of these, Morrowind had a quest journal the player can consult, but besides that must find their way to quests through good old directions given by NPC’s.  As such, this seems like a very odd game for a young teenager like myself, especially one not well versed in games, to choose.

An example of the stunning graphics Morrowind had to offer.  Source

I think the reason Morrowind, and for that matter gaming in general, ended up being so important to me was because it represented time I got to spend with my father.  My dad was in the military, so he was sometimes deployed for months at a time and frequently called away to meetings for a few days at a time.  As such, I didn’t really get to spend as much time with him as I would have liked.  However, when he was home, one of the things we loved to do together was for him to play a game and for me and my twin sister to watch him play it.  I know it sounds like kind of a weird thing to do, but since he loved lore-heavy RPGs like Morrowind it was kind of like watching a really, really long movie where you could kind of, sort of convince the main character to do what you wanted him to do.

I’m sure we made quite the picture: a gruff army man sitting in his chair, staring intently at the computer he was playing on, with two excitable children bouncing around behind him, telling him to go do this quest or go talk to this person.  Eventually, however, just watching my dad play these games wasn’t really enough for me.  I wanted to play these games for myself.

Ironically, as a kid I wasn’t really allowed to play too many video games, and my parents (mainly my mom) weren’t about to support a possible gaming habit by buying me a console (Luckily, they later changed their minds).  As such, instead of the child-friendly Nintendo games many grew up with, I ended up mostly playing old PC games that my dad was done with on our family computer.  This is where I truly fell in love with Morrowind.

The beautiful character creation screen found in Morrowind. Source

When I first started playing Morrowind, I had absolutely no clue what I was doing.  The good thing was I didn’t need to. Vvardenfell, an island that makes up the majority of the province of Morrowind and the main setting of the game, was so immersive that I was simply content to wander around, talking to literally everyone I saw and generally getting nothing done. In all honesty, I had probably created at least two or three characters, starting over the game each time, before I even left the starting city of Seyda Neen.

Seyda Neen wasn’t exactly a big town… Source

Once I got into it, though, I really got into it.  Because even my tiny child self was a completionist, I tried to get every single side quest in the game done, ignoring the main quest in the process.  I wandered from town to town, joining all of the guilds and collecting all of the quests, dying frequently and leveling up in a way that hardcore gamers would probably have cringed at.  I never did finish the main quest line, but that didn’t really matter to me.  What mattered was that my character, and by extension me, really felt like a part of that world, a world that was shared by both me and my father.

Morrowind is still one of my favorite games, and I feel like I would not have developed as much as a love for RPG’s as I have without it.  In all honesty, writing this while listening to its awesome soundtrack has made me really want to play it again, but this time actually try to beat it.  What about you guys-what games would you consider to be an integral part of your childhood?  Why do you think that is?  Thank you for reading and I look forward to reading your comments below!