What's Horror Good For?

I dreamed about a video game last night.

It was a puzzle visual novel game I reviewed in 2013 called "The Madness". The puzzles were creative and tricky, the atmosphere ominous, and the ending disturbed me so much that I still think about it from time to time.

Is it "good" - productive, useful, beneficial - to be disturbed by something? Obviously humans like it in some sense because we watch horror, we go to haunted houses, we write fiction that disturbs us. Apart from the obvious thrills, some part of us wants to be unsettled, to rethink what we think we know.

I think this affected me so much for two reasons - one is that the pain of making a mistake and having to live with that is one of the worst things to experience. Even though the mistakes I've made are tiny compared to those of villains and tortured anti-heroes, on some small level, I can still relate. In The Madness you try to recover your memories of having done something truly horrible. While I've never had that experience, my mom tells me I punched a kid in fifth grade... but I have no memory of it. Is it possible I've done other terrible things and simply blocked them out with pride and arrogance? What a fearful idea, indeed.

The other part that disturbs me is the idea that some people are irredeemable, that once you've done certain things you are literally better off dead. As a Christian whose faith centers on the redemptive power of Jesus Christ, this really makes me question how much I believe in forgiveness. It's easy to say "Anyone can repent" or "God loves everyone", but then I have to ask myself "What about someone who has done this horrible thing?" Is it possible to come back from that? Is it fair to the victims?

I don't know the answers to these questions, but if horror media jolts me off my prideful pedestal of placated self-satisfaction, or leads me to wrestle with the the hard questions of humanity and eternity, then I think that's a good thing.

 

The very first game book

 

Consider the Consequences (1930) is considered to be the first game book. It has narrative choices that you make by flipping to a certain page to get multiple endings. I'm often more interested in the concept of a game book than actually reading it, but this one was surprisingly domestic and interesting. The three sections of the book let the reader make choices as first Helen, then Jed, and then Saunders. Each section starts with a node diagram of the available branches in that section. The book is co-written by two women, Doris Webster and Mary Alden Hopkins.

The characters and their situations reflect the cultural values of the 1930s, and it's a fascinating window into the social norms surrounding marriage, child support, investments, and other social topics. I found myself irritated when the book seemed overly concerned that my mother would be left at home with no one to keep her company, which is actually an important consideration, if you think about it. The men's stories similarly have the status of their mother's home to consider when investing or spending.

Helen's first choice is whether to marry the irresponsible son of a rich widow or not; if you marry him, you have a baby right away, but it turns out he's an alcoholic and his mother is emotionally dependent on him. Helen's choices are fairly broad. You can end up as a writer to a fancy magazine who falls in love with your editor, and you can choose whether to pursue an affair and ask him to get a divorce, pursue an affair an not ask him to get a divorce, or not pursue an affair. The results are fairly sensible. If you choose to have the affair without him getting a divorce, you have a little difficulty finding an apartment but have some passionate moments together and can't compete with his love for his children. You can also end up at home keeping your mother company! The book has a wry humor that comes out in the endings, which are a considered opposite to morale fairy tales, but definitely have a practical "morale." For example: "the consequence of Helen's choosing the prudent course was that she was safe." Or "the consequence of denying herself an unpractical romance or a broken heart was the discovery that she could love a second time as heartily as the first time."

The style of the book is matter-of-fact, and time passes rapidly between choice nodes. It was refreshing to be able to play a "romance" game book with such a variety of options, all of which were given due consideration, and the progressed so rapidly. While there were some old-fashioned values in the book, like when your character gets away with murder by revealing that the victim was in a romantic relationship with his wife, the available options and reflections felt surprisingly progressive. I highly recommend this early gamebook if you can borrow a copy.

The legacy of Princess Maker 2

 As someone who helped write a game about parenting, I have opinions about parenting games. It's difficult to combine fiddly statistics with a narrative that gives a good simulation of both the day-to-day parenting decisions and an occasional event that feels like a pivotal moment, like how much dessert to give your child vs, deciding if you're going to force your child to take piano lessons. I'm on a quest to find and review all the parenting games that I can! I want to find the best parenting games and learn from their game design.

The first parenting game I ever played was Princess Maker 2 (1996). It's set in a medieval fantasy world where you become guardian of an 11-year-old orphan. You decide her schedule, where you can pay for her to attend expensive classes or she can make money by working. She can learn etiquette so she can properly greet the king's concubine, or she can work on a farm improving her stamina and earning money. She can study art and enter the yearly art contest, or hone her spiritual sensitivity while work in the graveyard. She can go to church and be pious, or work in a sleazy bar! Your daughter can also go out adventuring and either talk to or beat monsters she encounters in four different areas. I remember trying out lots of different ways of raising my child. Essentially, this game is a stat-cruncher and it's hard to feel connected to your daughter in the game. She seems more like a collection of numbers than a real person. Your choices for her schedule definitely affect her ending occupation and role in society, and there are many, many different endings. I would say that it's a classic that introduced parenting as a worthy game narrative to a western audience. The sequels were only recently localized and made available in the United States, although fans agree that Princess Maker 2 is the best of the series. You can play the original localization that wasn't sold in the US, or you can buy the remake on Steam.

Ciel Fledge: A Daughter Raising Simulator is a direct descendent of the Princess Maker games, but there is a science-fiction setting and more things to fiddle with. You decide what classes your daughter should take and they raise various stats that she needs, and I think they affect the endings. Your daughter can make a lot of friends, and there is a mood system where your daughter will get depressed if she's too stressed out. Unfortunately, I didn't really like this game. Learning about how to battle felt like reading a textbook, and the writing was not compelling. If you've played a lot of Princess Maker 2 and want to see a different take on the stat-raising simulation, you might want to try it. It's on Steam. 

If you prefer an interactive narrative, The Parenting Simulator is a text-based game that allows you to make a few key decisions for each year of your child's life. Instead of just saying you're a permissive parent, like in Ciel, you have to actually role-play being permissive, which in the above scenario would entail letting your child have as much screen time as they want! The writing in this game is good, and if I have any complaints, it's that their pandemic year event was a bit TOO lifelike and brought me out of my games-as-escape reverie. At the same time, I had a hard time believing that letting my child stay up all night at her sleepover made her that unpopular. There are still stats in the background, although some reviewers complained that it's difficult to get different endings. As a game designer, I wonder if it's because you have the option of playing an abbreviated version of the game with only a few random events per year vs. playing every event each playthrough--having fewer events would be less opportunity to affect end-determining stats.

Of course, I'm not going to end a post about parenting without mentioning my own game that I made with my sister and sister-in-law, Space to Grow. Like The Parenting Simulator, we tried to focus on a few key parenting events each year. You also choose how much your daughter should help you with your farm. Your daughter has a definite personality! My family was speculating about how much she was based on my nephews and nieces. The game is set on a foreign planet, and you make decisions that affect your community as well as your family. I think we reached a good balance of realism vs. cool science fiction stuff. Let me know how you like the game if you decide to play it! It's available on Steam, itch.io, and Google Play.

I love parenting games! I'm hoping to make another post that includes Growing Up, Cute Bite, and My Child Lebensborn. 

Princess Maker 2 screenshot by Donald Love 87 on GameFAQs

Why pay for indie games??

 (cross-posted from itch.io)

As we near the end of production on Our Personal Space 2: Space to Grow, we've been talking less about game design and more about user experience, audience, and distribution. One subject that has come up is whether we want to charge money for this game. Our Personal Space was free, mostly because it was our first game and we weren't sure we could actually do it or how good it was. I also felt (and still feel!) that I want people to be able to experience the games I make regardless of financial situation. However, I also want to support game creators financially - I would love for talented designers, artists, and programmers to be able to make a living doing what they love. I also hate ads in games - they take the player out of the experience and feel tacky and, honestly, no one likes them.

Game creators making a living doing what they love will never happen unless it becomes normal to pay creators for their work! When our default response is "I'm not paying money for a GAME", it implies that making games is not worthwhile, and we don't really want people to make games. I feel that games are worthwhile, especially those that give me a chance to hear stories I wouldn't normally hear, or help me practice being a better human, or encourage me to pause after playing it and feel understood or like I understand others in the real world better.

If you've ever made a game, you know that it is a LOT of work! Making a prototype that works is usually not that hard; making a real game that is fun and polished and complete takes much more time. On this game our team kept timecards; we've spent over 1000 hours on this game and we're still not quite finished yet! That's about six months of full time work, though it's actually been five years since we also have day jobs, kids, volunteer work, etc. I hope that we will be able to make enough money that we can pay our programmer, writers, and artist and invest that money into future games!

However, I recognize that not everyone has the money to pay for games. Since we don't have "libraries" like we do for books, we've decided to have a "pay-what-you-want" option here on itch.io. Steam and Google play don't have that option, so we will charge something on those platforms. I hope this compromise will allow us to continue to make games and pay content creators, while also allowing anyone who wants to to be able to play our game.

If we support game creators and respect the time they've put into game creation, we will end up with better games and a better game community!

Thimbleweed Park is very 90s but has an unsatisfying ending.

This year I'm trying to review every game I finish. I've tried to review the game in the store I bought it in, because I think that's more helpful to developers. So far I've reviewed five games on Steam and one in Apple's app store. I recently finished Thumbleweed Park on the Switch and there isn't a way to leave written reviews in the Switch eShop, so it's back to this old blog for this one.

Last year I started watching Twin Peaks because people kept making references to it and I felt left out. I found it weird a compelling. The surreal small-town melodrama, its fantastic soundtrack, and its quirky characters stood out to me. I can see why it has a cult following. A lot of people compared Thimbleweed Park's aesthetic to Twin Peak's, and they both have the surreal, small-town murder in the 1990s going on. Twin Peaks was great at contrasting mundane things that would really happen with surreal ways things could go wrong. It was full of abusive relationships, mental and physical illness, secret illicit relationships, secret communications and liasons, and references to dream symbols.

I didn't make it to the end of Twin Peaks's second season, so I don't have to be unsatisfied with whatever ending they came up with... but I'm sure it was more satisfying than Thimbleweed Park's. Exploring the town and talking to characters in Thimbleweed Park was the best. The art style was so spot-on I just took it for granted. The tones from the phone and the soundtrack really brought me back to the 90s. I also made the mistake of calling a character's home phone instead of their business's phone, forgetting that most people didn't have cell phones back then!

The characters were zany and weird, and I loved Delores's flashback sequence where she applies to work at a videogame studio. I was really impressed with the sheer number of titles in the in-game library, which I guess were part of the Kickstarter rewards and were mostly written by backers, but they made it possible to hide information within the library. I thought this was a good integration of Kickstarter content. Similarly, having an entry in the phone directory was part of a Kickstarter reward, and there were over 3,000 of them. It definitely prevented me from dialing every single number in the phone book just to see what would happen.

Despite these things that I liked, there were quite a few things I disliked. Many, many puzzles were unintuitive. I found myself dialing the hint number many times in the middle of the game. I guess weird puzzle solutions are part of "classic" point-and-click adventure games, but it's not a part I like.

spoilers for Thimbleweed Park follow

The "twist" ending was that the characters discover they are in a videogame and want to delete it to escape the cycle of being characters in a videogame. This is a narrative conceit that has been done a few times before and I don't find it satisfying here. Zero Time Dillema, and Undertale made certain aspects of save games part of their games in brilliant ways that furthered the narrative. Okay, so the characters know it's a videogame... how does that help the narrative in Thimbleweed Park? From the build-up surrounding the mystery of the factory and Chuck's diary entries, I was expecting to engage in dialogue with the rogue AI, a highly traditional scene ripe for subversion. I was also expecting the text adventure to be a LOT longer, considering its build-up. I was hoping for some explanation for Chuck's madness beyond his highly transparent and convenient diary entries. I also expected one of the characters to go on a surreal vision quest and receive divine aid. I thought we were going to find out that some of the small-town residents were complicit in Chuck's crimes or at least that two unlikely people were making out. Instead, computer Chuck gave characters easy ways to fulfill their personal goals and Delores turned off the computer in a more primitive form of the game. It was very disappointing. It made me wonder if the developers were rushed to finish the game's script and came up with that?

I know that it's easy to establish a mood of weirdness and hard to write a satisfying ending. I would have been okay with lots of unanswered questions if the given explanation hadn't been so trite. I wish I had stopped in the middle of the game when I got stuck so I could just imagine the great ending I thought was coming. But since I finished, I get to gripe with everyone else about a genre I love. :-)

How and why to stop buying videogames on sale

Last January I resolved to not buy any games on sale. I mostly stuck to my resolve, although I ended my resolution a bit early. I bought more new games, mostly for consoles, and I did play the games I bought. When I got a PS4, I allowed myself to buy three games on sale, but I've only extensively played one of them. The games I impulse buy are rarely ones I devote much time to playing.

If you have the luxurious problem of having too many games to play, and you find yourself impulse-buying a lot of games, I recommend not buying games on sale. When you invest more money in a game, you feel more obligation to actually play it, and hopefully have fun and feel some fleeting sense of  "accomplishment". But if you don't have a lot of money to spend on videogames, definitely shop the sales (and remember that Nintendo rarely puts Pokemon/Mario/Kirby games on sale)! I didn't buy any humble videogames bundles this year and at first it felt like I was missing out, but I actually didn't miss out on much.

Here's some helpful self-talk for talking yourself out of buying more videogames:
"If it turns out I really want that game later, I can buy it at full price."
"It's not saving money if I don't play any of the games I buy."
"When will I play this game?"

I pretty much stopped buying games in genres I don't actually play. As interesting as the FPS genre may be, I don't like the gameplay. I also tend not to get into strategy videogames. I like visual novels, but I only like to play one at a time. I think I have way more platformers than I'll ever play. Basically, I have enough videogames, and the main reason I buy more is to feel like I'm a part of the gaming community at large. But that also means that the games I do play tend to be things like Pokemon or Final Fantasy XV. I like the idea of playing hipster videogames, but I'm such a snob that the only things that draw me to indie games are really cute art or unusual storytelling mechanics--like Pony Island.

I also think a helpful rule for me would be to play games within a week of buying them. When I can still remember what the game was about and why I bought it, I feel more excited to play the game. There is a certain charm to "discovering" a game you've owned for a while though! I know I'm not the only one with this problem. Do you consider spending $8-$15 a month on games you won't play to be useful for the thrill of shopping? Or is it more efficient to spend $40 every few months on a title you're hyped for? My rate of videogame consumption is pretty low, so I think my current system is working well for me.

Undertale and determination, power, and passivity

SPOILERS for Undertale

I was pumped to beat Undertale. I had given up on learning how to dodge all of Asgore's attacks and I decided to go back and get the Temy armor. I farmed glasses for gold and sent Tem to college for 1000 G, and then farmed some more to get the armor. And... I was able to beat the boss this time! Except he wasn't the final boss! I died a few times to Photoshop Flowey, but I soon gave up. I watched the endings on YouTube. I might not have beaten the game but I enjoyed the time I spent playing it, and it made me reflect on the nature of determination, power, and mercy in games. I wish I had time to make these thoughts longer and more organized, but I don't, so I'll consider myself lucky to just get them down. Also I LOVE the soundtrack.

Undertale is a game about determination--the determination to forgive or kill everyone. By giving up, did I lose the game? In a normal RPG, if I had lost to the boss, I could go level up some more, or make some cooler armor, or possibly go do some sidequests and just forget about the final boss. But since Flowey takes away your ability to save (the game goes straight into his fight, and there's no option to run away or defer the fight), it makes the game more frustrating. And while the game's bullet-hell-based combat system is innovative, I suck at it. I don't have the patience or determination to play those kinds of games, so I didn't get to officially exercise mercy or "get" to the end. I think game-wise, I'm okay with that, because boss fights have never been my favorite part of a game.  

Control and power and major themes of Undertale. I didn't like the parts where I lost control over what happened to my save file, but it was necessary for the plot. And the best, pacifist ending doesn't give you any levels, which is a way for the player to say, "hey, I care more about seeing what happens if I don't kill anyone than feeling powerful right now." Undertale without leveling is kind of an anti-rpg because there's no satisfaction from seeing arbitrary numbers climb up (so by necessity, combat must be skill-based). The idea that you'll be happiest if you give up power and control over the world is a very religious one (and one that many religions share--Christianity, Zen Buddhism, and Taoism at least). The way the game lets you choose between fighting and "action"ing an enemy feels like the difference between choosing "fight" and "skill" in a JRPG. It doesn't even feel like it will be relevant later on, but it definitely is. Oh, and the way you could actually "flee" the boss fight with Undyne was genius, even though I felt stupid when I had to look it up.

The idea that you have to get to know someone before they'll stop fighting you is an interesting metaphor for relationships--are there some people that you have to put up with some quirks or even abuse before you can really forgive them? The protagonist's passivity in the pacifist route is admirable, but in real life not everyone will change if they encounter someone who is nice to them. But I think the charming and heartfelt part of Undertale is that everyone can and does change in the pacifist route.