Animator Christiaan Moleman submits a series of interactive vignettes to the Call to Arms, a selection of ground-level perspectives on the conflict in Gaza.
Call to Arms 2008 - “Peace”
A game of interactive vignettes set in and around Gaza, showing several different non-chronological perspectives in 1st person, not unlike Call of Duty 4: a Palestinian child throwing rocks at a tank, an Israeli soldier on patrol, a paramedic, a Western journalist, and others…
It begins and ends with a suicide-bombing in a cafe. The first time you are a mother with her daughter. The second time, you are the suicide-bomber. Cut to black at the crucial moment, or fade if you walk away. Open on a crowded cafe. You are sitting in a wooden chair on the far side of the room, sunlight hitting the checkered floor through the door behind you. Still morning. You gently sip your coffee. Next to you is a little girl playing with the ice cubes in her empty glass. With the glass in her hand she looks up and smiles.
You pat her on the head.
There’s a half-eaten sandwich on a plate in front of her, with little teeth-marks.
You gesture towards her to eat the rest of it. Reluctantly she takes a bite.
She freezes. When you turn to follow her gaze and look behind you, you see a man enter the cafe. In his hand is a small device. You turn to your daughter and hold her. The man screams something.
CUT TO BLACK
Putting the player in the shoes of different characters might inspire some empathy for the people actually living through this conflict and reflect on the grief it causes to both sides.
Gameplay varies with each perspective: mother interacts affectionately with her little girl, kid tries to throw as many stones as possible without getting hit by stray bullets, paramedic tries to keep a bombing-victim alive for the duration of an ambulance ride, soldier explores cautiously, journalist tries to get coverage of a shoot-out without getting killed, and so on…
Would be a fairly linear affair, with specific interactions up to the player. There should be choice when it matters, but never transparently so. The player should do what he thinks he has to within the confines of the game mechanics rather than press A for ending 1…
The game should be no more than 30 to 60 minutes long so as not to diminish its impact. The Nintendo Wii could be a good platform as it’s shown itself well-suited to extremely varied interactions, though more conventional control-schemes could also apply and some degree of production value would be necessary to sell the character empathy.
Roberto Quesada submits a Call to Arms entry which challenges the player to balance human relationships and material success in a world over which he in fact has very little control: the monopolistic corporate stage of the 19th century.
Fruit of the Womb concerns itself with raising children purely to carry on a family's legacy. The player is the middle-aged patriarch of an already-established corporate dynasty sometime in the 1800s or early 1900s, and the game begins with the birth of his first child. The ostensible goal of the game is to groom your child or children to seamlessly continue the family business according to aspirations defined by the player at the beginning of the game.
Starting a new game brings the player to a standard character creation screen: The player chooses what the character looks like, and a certain amount of points will be alloted for distribution amongst various attributes (intelligence, charisma, et c.) and skills (dueling, culinary sauces, et c.), with the distribution of points among the former affecting the weight of points distributed among the latter. The actual attributes and skills present in the creation menu are not important; any game play that would ordinarily depend on these variables will be almost exclusively real-time and depend on the player's own skill, but this will not be made apparent in any way.
After the character is created, the player will form a backstory and mission statement of sorts. The formulation of a backstory depends on the player choosing from various items that make up the history of the family business. All elements here will be generic in nature; for instance, instead of choosing “You're the heir to a steel company,” the player chooses from options such as “You're the heir to a knick knack company.” The instruction manual (or contextual pop-ups) will detail certain aspects of “knick knacks” and “doodads” in an effort to mislead the player into thinking there are nuances that do not actually exist in the game (a history of the materials, a technology tree, popularity of certain items among certain demographics); in reality the way certain products behave or perform will be set mathematically by the game as it progresses (see below). The backstory will also consist of how the family came to its position of power, among other such details, leading the player to believe these variables will affect game play (they most certainly will not).
The mission statement will have a “significant” bearing on game play, as it will be the framework by which the player's “success” is calculated. As part of the process, the player will choose what he most wants to accomplish from goals such as influence, wealth, and notoriety. All goals will be interconnected; the player chooses what he cares about more, with a limited number of things-you-care-about points available for distribution, and the scale created will affect a successometer viewable during game play.
In terms of actual game play, Fruit of the Womb is more or less a sandbox game. It can be first- or third-person, the player interacting with the environment by means of a hand cursor, à la Black & White or that one game that's very dark and requires you to walk around with a flashlight and search through desks. The player has a job as the head of his company, but can delegate nearly all related tasks due to seniority. On the other hand, he has a son or daughter who can be similarly micromanaged or ignored. There is a base level of wealth below which a player can never fall; insuring the funds necessary to delegate the raising of his son: private/boarding school, au pair, military school, whatever. The son's regard for the player/father depends largely on how he is raised, but it is not mechanical or predictable (see below). The player can also directly raise the son by taking time off from work and interacting directly. Via the cursor, the player can smack around or reward his son as he sees fit. He can take his son hunting, or to the zoo, or to a prison for a Scared Straight!, 19th Century Edition-style education. The idea is to give the player ultimate freedom, the likes of which it would be burdensome to describe here, without straying too far from the son/business focus of the game; i.e., the player can somehow be artificially bound to these aspects of game play, but within them he is totally free: if he wants to go downstairs while at work and shoot his accountant in the face, such is his prerogative, though realistic consequences would follow. The player's actions in life will also affect how he is perceived by his son.
In addition to misleading the player with regard to basic gaming conventions, the way the business world and the player's children behave are somewhat randomly determined at the start of the game, with smaller variations occurring as the game progresses. Business trends will follow random occurrences in the game's history, but in an unpredictable way. And when the player's wife pops out a child, the child's personality is randomly defined within the bounds of a loose algorithm created to keep the child's behavior within the realm of reality. The personality will determine how the child responds to being sent to a military academy as opposed to being coddled: will he resent his father more for perceived neglect or for being raised as a nancy boy without the skills necessary for running the family business with an iron fist? There is no way of knowing anything until a route is tried.
The player can also have daughters. Daughters may be groomed in the exact same fashion as sons, but are much more difficult to maneuver into a position of respect within the company as per the societal norms of the proposed historical period. The more children the player has, which is mainly limited by a nine-month gestation period, the more people are vying for power within the company (or not giving a shit, depending on their personalities); this can lead to anything from productivity among the more sycophantic children to patricide. If a player has too many children (the cap is random, within a realistic range), his wife will die, and he will have to engage in a courtship mini game to find a new wife. The wife is little more than a child factory for the player, in an effort to focus the player's affections on his children and business; some wives are stronger factories than others. It's likely that the maximum-children-possible route would never be followed, except for a hearty laugh.
Players' characters grow old and die. The player can then watch time unravel either in real or accelerated fashion. This will allow one to see how things play out indefinitely; though the era never actually changes, the children eventually have their own children, grow old, and die; the player can see how his family and business change. The player is not allowed to continue (“reincarnated” into one of his children, for example) in order to give his actions more weight. He can only start over.
The reasons for the game's unpredictability and sociopathic treatment of the player with regard to his expectations are: 1) To mimic real life and 2) To jar the player. Ideally a game like this would be extremely complicated (on the level of a detailed MMORPG's mechanics, for example, if not greater) in an effort to dissuade the player from attempting to play the game how it “ought” to be played by attempting to max out the successometer, but not so complicated that the player couldn't come up with methods for “success.” This is probably unachievable, but the idea would be to give the game a level of complexity that would require the player to play constantly and attentively (taking his own notes, as the game will not have an automatic notepad or “journal” feature) if he wanted to have success in the manner that the game apparently requires; the game would be tedious and life-ruining but “winnable,” or interesting/entertaining (hopefully) but rewarding on a different level. Note that disregard for the successometer does not mean complete disregard for the business; the player can still groom his son to take over, but just not worry about whether the son will preserve the family legacy to a T. The successometer does not punish, but merely exists. The player can follow his initial expectations or eschew them.
The main theme being explored here is how one's sense of duty forms. The player is deliberately put into a game with certain expectations in an effort to mimic the social stressors that existed in the era; does the player comply merely because there exists an order that the game wants him to follow, or does he ignore the game and form a bond with his child(ren)? Following what's expected is tedious (though maybe not for all people) and results in a gauge filling up; the player can be rewarded with some sort of tokens or with the unlocking of business opportunities the more he keeps his “success” level high. Or does the player pursue a familial relationship with no apparent reward save the relationship itself? Characters would have to be realistically rendered, or at least have realistic responses/emotions, in order for the player to feel some sort of empathy, but pursuing this route, which again would not be presented overtly by the game as a possibility, could unlock more depth to the relationship aspect of the game, making the bond more meaningful as the player pursues this route.
Concerns:
1. Perhaps only a small set of people could actually empathize with the characters of a video game.
2. If this game were made, the concept would eventually be leaked (possibly before the game is even released), in effect making the game meaningless.
Quite a while back, I was turned on to Haunting Ground by Leigh Alexander's writeup of it for her Aberrant Gamer column on GameSetWatch. Her insightful critical read of the title made me want to see it for myself, but the disturbing subject matter she described kept me from diving in for a long time. And now that I've played through it, I've been taking even longer to write up my experience.
It's because Haunting Ground is a tough game to write about. Half of it's brilliant, the other nearly unplayable; it treads patently unpleasant and distressing territory, but features clever, enjoyable design that can be great fun to play. It uses exploitation and objectification to challenge audience identity and gender expectations in ways that only a game could, but feels simultaneously pandering and puerile. It's a great success, and a great failure. It's a weird game. Haunting Ground is a Capcom survival horror title of 2005, following in the tradition of the Clock Tower series. The player is cast in the role of Fiona Belli, a young woman who wakes up in a strange castle with vague memories of a car wreck floating in her head. Fiona soon befriends a helpful German Shepherd named Hewie, and with his assistance must navigate through a convoluted series of puzzle rooms while evading the depraved denizens of the castle.
The first half of the game is an incredibly well-crafted example of classic survival horror design. The castle itself has a creepy-but-plausible layout which includes bedrooms, sitting rooms, bathrooms, gardens, studies, a kitchen and dining room, along with a number of stranger, more baroque locations such as alchemy labs, a gallery filled with dolls staked to the walls, and a demented merry-go-round. The dense puzzles filling the castle hinge on a distorted abstract logic, and beg the question of just what kind of madman would construct such a lair. The setting layers surreality on top of mundanity with aplomb. Mechanically, the clues and solutions to the first half of the game's tightly-knotted puzzles are wonderfully decentralized and satisfying to solve. Much like the dreamworld of Silent Hill 2, Haunting Ground's early puzzles operate on an otherworldly but readable ruleset which begs nonlinear thinking from the player.
The gameworld's structure and puzzles encourage the player to constantly make connections between distant points, while providing just enough direction to keep the player from getting completely lost: the clue to any given puzzle always lies in one room, while a pertinent object lies in another, and the place the puzzle must be completed in another still, resulting in puzzle solutions that sketch complex webs across the playable space.
The castle is divided into distinct chunks composed of a dozen or so rooms apiece, each chunk initially blocked off from the other by doors "locked from the other side." As the player enters a new chunk, he builds a mental map of that isolated physical space, then by clearing obstructions unlocks the blocked doors to prior sections, gradually building out the full map of the castle as a whole. From the nonlinear objectives to the physical shape of the gameworld and the player's course of progression through it, the first half of Haunting Ground presents a wonderful mechanical experience centered on completing circuits within a system driven by interconnectivity.
The character dynamics and narrative frame that buoy the gameplay in the first half of Haunting Ground are equally compelling and challenging, in totally different ways. Filling the role of Fiona Belli places the player in limbo between voyeur and subject, exploiter and exploited, violator and violable, and for most players, between masculine and feminine. It's a distinctly tense space to occupy, and can only arise from the play of a video game, as opposed to passively observing other entertainment media.
We first see Fiona in Haunting Ground's attract screen movie, padding down a long, red corridor wrapped in a translucent bedsheet, intercut with footage from a camera that follows a blooddrop trickle down the contour of her nude body:
The symbolism makes itself clear here, and colors the game's ongoing depiction of Fiona, which emphasizes her femininity, vitality and vulnerability. These aspects of the protagonist drive all of the ongoing narrative and secondary character motivation in the first half of Haunting Ground, which finds a pitiable rogue's gallery chasing lustily and relentlessly after Fiona. She is expressly designed as an object of desire.
In an early scene, Fiona trades in her wispy bedsheet for a set of clothes she finds disconcertingly laid out on a bed as if for an expected guest, and which furthermore seem to be tailored just for her. As she dresses, we observe the scene through the eyes of an unseen figure watching from behind a painting hung on the wall; we are momentarily put in the shoes of someone preying on Fiona, while simultaneously charged with keeping her from harm's way. The clothes she's been given are exploitative and degrading: a skirt much too short for decency, a bodice cut too tight for modesty, bringing into question the motives of her gracious host. But meanwhile, the game's developers also intentionally invested in a system for simulating breast-bounce as Fiona moves about the castle. The revealing costume serves a fictional purpose as an outfit orchestrated by Fiona's perverse captors, but the computational power poured into depicting boob jiggle can serve no one but the (predominantly male) developers and players of the video game. The overall effect is to reinforce Fiona's vulnerability as a captive subject within the gameworld, while also indicting the player as a voyeur in league with the story's antagonists.
Fiona is hereafter imperiled by the ongoing threat not just of death, but of vague and looming bodily violation. Her first pursuer is a hulking manchild referred to as "Debilitas," seen in the attract screen movie above. When he initially encounters Fiona, he glances from a filthy ragdoll he's holding, to our protagonist and back, then tosses the doll aside and lurches after his new object of desire. As Fiona progresses from room to room, Debilitas will attempt to chase her down when their paths cross. During the pursuit he'll shout out "Dolly!" giggling and stomping with child-like delight, but also sometimes stop to paw at the crotch of his pants in frustration. The implication is that his adult body and stunted mind may be in conflict: the player gets the feeling that Debilitas wants to rape Fiona when he catches her, without even understanding his own actions. The dissonance between physical and mental intent places the ongoing cat-and-mouse game between the threatening-but-blameless Debilitas and the helpless Fiona in an exceedingly uncomfortable frame.
If Debilitas embodies the conflict between male and female, lust and innocence, brawn and intellect, Fiona's second pursuer, Daniella, explores a range of conflict between two female forces: sensation and function, humanity and inhumanity, servitude and dominance.
Daniella is the maid of the castle, and takes over as Fiona's pursuer when Debilitas steps down. She reinforces one of the ongoing themes of the narrative frame, which deals with alchemy and reanimation. As the game progresses, it becomes clear that Daniella is an automaton: she has a body and sentience, but no humanity. As she says, she is "not complete," and can't "experience pleasure or taste." Daniella's turning point from observer to pursuer comes when we find her running her hand over Fiona's body as the girl sleeps, her palm coming to rest over the womb. As Fiona awakes, Daniella goes on to study her own reflection in a window, then bash her head against it in disgust until it shatters, from which point forward she mechanically follows Fiona around the castle, wielding a huge shard of glass as a blade.
Unlike Debilitas, Daniella isn't after Fiona due to any physical urge, but out of jealousy, confusion and contempt. Daniella covets everything Fiona represents: her vitality, her fertility, which spring from her femininity and youth. Daniella has no youth because she has no age; she's an empty shell and she knows it: simply being reminded of such by her own reflection drives her over the edge. When her polar opposite arrives in the form of Fiona, she simply can't process the contrast. Daniella is associated with dolls and puppets via mise en scene throughout the castle, and is just that: a body without a soul, a tinman without a heart. She is broken, pitiful, and terrifying.
The most unsettling aspect of Fiona's predicament is the vagueness of the threat that looms over her. If she's caught by Debilitas, what is he capable of? What is Daniella's true nature? And who is the madman orchestrating all the events in this demented castle anyway? Dolls, mannequins, puppets, earthen golems, mummified girls and even partially reanimated corpses occupy room after room; what is the obsession with life from death?
At one point, Fiona's unseen host, a mysterious hooded figure known as "Riccardo," tells Fiona to remove the tarp from a form sitting on a couch in the study. Upon pulling back the sheet, Fiona finds a clay replica of herself in a state of full pregnancy. Just what the hell are these people's intentions? Overtones of Rosemary's Baby intensify. While the player wraps his head around the castle's abstract puzzles and flees from an array of freaks, an abiding, oppressive fear of the unknown always looms large over the proceedings. It's the opposite of the explicit threat of having Leon's head chainsawed off in Resident Evil 4. Does Fiona face a fate worse than death? Not to know is to dread it all the more.
Haunting Ground chooses a female protagonist deliberately, almost perversely. Unlike many games that put an attractive female shell on an otherwise genderless protagonist, Haunting Ground exploits the trope of the woman imperiled in a way only video games can, twisting it to overlap with the player, resulting in a strange duality that requires the player to really delve in and inhabit the role, to identify with the uniquely female aspects of the character and be driven by her fear and vulnerability, as opposed to observing from a detached viewpoint. The player of the game is charged with protecting Fiona, but also with being Fiona, a character who is different from the player in much more psychologically significant ways than your standard video game protagonist. It's a unique experience for a male player, and uncomfortably so, but one worth braving for its truly alien qualities. Both as a set of engaging game mechanics and as a novel and affecting transportive experience, the first half of Haunting Ground is an overwhelming success.
But here's the thing though:
The second half of Haunting Ground takes every aspect that made the first half interesting or enjoyable and turns it absolutely on its head. Once the third of four acts begins, puzzle design devolves almost instantly into a linear set of rote objectives, with no thought or deduction required. The areas thin out and transition from unsettlingly surreal to simply goofy and implausible. While the early acts had me making interesting mental connections and criss-crossing the map to clear obstructions, successive acts had me simply walking from room to room pressing the buttons in the order I was instructed, or worse yet participating in terribly-designed boss fights.
Player feedback, which was a point of emphasis in the first half of the game, takes a nosedive: I banged my head against one bossfight for the longest time because using the "come here" command on Hewie seemed to be resulting in an aggressive attack that I was just mistargeting, while in fact a FAQ revealed that I had to use the "attack" command explicitly to achieve my goal, while nothing in the game even pointed out that I was making a mistake in the first place. I solved another puzzle by sheer coincidence: one progression gate requires you to simply have a candle in your inventory while your pursuer follows you into a room which also contains some dynamite, at which point a cinematic plays, solving the puzzle for you. Thank god I hadn't actually been trying to figure that one out in any kind of intentional fashion. The final sequence in the game is horrifically punishing, obtuse, and just awful: an invincible boss that kills you in one hit chases you through a gauntlet, requiring the player to restart over and over, scouting with death to build enough precognition to perform the routine perfectly, lest the "game over" beast catch up to you for the dozenth time. The abruptness with which the quality of the game design drops off after the second act is striking, and it continues plummeting all the way til the final credits roll.
Furthermore, any subtlety or restraint the game showed regarding its themes is sandblasted away. We go from uncomfortable sidelong allusions to reanimation, fertility, and impregnation, to Riccardo shouting in the player's face, "Your father and I are clones! WE.. ARE.. CLONES!!" and yelling outright, "Fiona! Let me into your womb!" The story, which pointed in an intriguing direction in its early stages, descends into silly nonsense along with the gameplay self-destruction. We see clones floating in green goo tubes, Riccardo makes himself invisible by casting some spell on Fiona's eyeballs, and we meet an ancient alchemist named Lorenzo who falls from his wheelchair and scrambles along comically behind Fiona, flailing his arms in triple-time, practically begging for strains of Yakkety Sax to play in the background. Everything foreboding and unsettling about the game's narrative frame is transformed, alchemically, into its polar opposite: laughable, eye-rolling camp. So, Haunting Ground is a game that I can recommend emphatically, up to its halfway point. Buy a used copy of the game for cheap and play up through the end of Daniella's chapter, then turn off the PS2 and don't look back. Despite the second half's implosion on every level, I completed it out of respect to what a great game the first half was, and out of some vain hope that the conclusion would make my devotion worth it. It wasn't worth it though, except to be able to report with confidence that you definitely shouldn't do the same.
Haunting Ground isn't pleasant. It isn't uplifting. Hell, it isn't even noble or progressive, considering its queasily pandering depiction of its protagonist. But its first half is incredibly well-crafted and entrancing while it lasts. At its best, Haunting Ground will take you to an unfamiliar place, ask you to put yourself in a pair of shoes that are particularly difficult to wear, and to experience all that comes along with that challenge. Good luck.
Manveer Heir, designer at Raven Software, writer of the Design Rampage blog, and weekly columnist for GamaSutra, contributes a Call to Arms design based on his personal reactions as an alumnus to the Virginia Tech shooting incident of 2007. Please visit his original post on Design Rampage for a thoughtful preface and conclusion to the outline.
Bereavement in Blacksburg centers around the concept of loss and grief, and how people cope with it. The game takes place on April 17th, 2007, the day after the shootings. You plays as a male character who resides in a dorm on campus.
You begin the game laying in bed, early in the morning. The phone rings and goes to message. It's your girlfriend's voice and she's asking you to answer and talk with her. It is apparent from her dialog that you knew someone directly killed in the attacks. For obvious reasons, who that person is isn't revealed, nor is it relevant.
Once the message finishes, you take control of the character. From here the world is rather open. There are multiple objects to interact with in the opening room. You can use the phone to call your girlfriend back. You can use your computer and see e-mails from the administration, as well as condolences from friends. You can watch TV or listen to music to escape from things. You can turn to bottles of alcohol to drown your sorrows. Or you can just leave the room and venture to other parts of campus and find other interactions. The choices are yours and they affect the way your character progresses through the game. Getting drunk and then talking to your girlfriend may cause you to speak in a belligerent or flippant manner. It may also make certain choices unavailable to you later, such as going to the school's convocation with her later. Speaking to her sober may open up a dialog that wouldn't occur otherwise, one that may have the character ultimately express his true feelings verbally.
Internally, the game keeps a “grief score”. You start at zero, and positive influencing interactions will increase this score and negative influencing actions will decrease it. However, the player is not aware of this scoring mechanism. In my experience, often during the grieving processes we do not see the whole picture of how our actions can positively or negatively affect us. Hiding the true outcome of different interactions helps proceduralize that state of mind.
The player has an idea that drinking isn't probably the best idea, however they may not realize how bad of an idea it may be. Additionally, this means different actions can have different values depending on the circumstances surrounding it. Using alcohol again as an example, drinking alone may be negative but drinking in moderation, with friends may be neutral or even positive.
As you leave your room and explore more of campus more interactions are available. You can write your thoughts in your journal or compose music that expresses your feelings. You can attempt to go on with life as if nothing is wrong, by just doing normal everyday things such as going out to dinner. You can stop going to classes, once they resume. You can visit the memorial erected to the victims. There are many possibilities available.
All of these minor interactions will force scripted major events, depending on your “grief score” at the time. The minor interactions of beginning to drink and never answering your girlfriend's phone calls may result in the major event of her breaking up with you. The minor interactions of regularly writing in your journal and communicating with others can lead to the major event of moving to the next stage of grief.
Ultimately, there should be multiple paths to end the game, just as there are in life. One can move through all the stages of grief, or become stuck at certain stages. The needs to be a clear end to all narrative paths. In the end, the game is one of choices and how these choices ultimately affect how we deal with grief.
My concerns with this design are numerous. Are there enough interactions available to make a meaningful experience out of? How does one define what are positive and negative choices? One person's positive choice could be another's negative. Also, does this actually help the player understand the grieving process or does it rely too heavily on narrative to push this feeling and just have simple interactions as the way to branch that narrative?
The Nintendo Channel worked on me. I was drawn in by its video and description of My Life as a King, and after looking up a few generally-favorable reviews, cashed in some Nintendo points for this WiiWare title.
The first four-to-six hours were great by my estimation: I was introduced to the world and began building my town and sending out adventurers to explore nearby dungeons. The story was fairly tepid but new buildings were quickly and steadily introduced to my town, keeping my interest and encouraging me to keep playing just one more game-day to gain the next unlock. Before long my town was bustling and I had a crowd of (all basically identical) skilled adventurers lining up to do my bidding. The story kept grinding on stupidly but was overall inoffensive. I acquired all the building types (including the DLC ones I paid for) and integrated them into my little city.
And then.. the game fell flat. I'd exhausted the mechanical payout curve by unlocking every building type before the story ended, so that my motivation to advance another game-day went from "discover what new kind of building you'll get next" to "build a second instance of that same building you already have."
My two major critique points would be these:
Extend the mechanical payout curve to match the length of the campaign. My Life as a King reminded me of an FPS where they feed all the weapons to you in the first half of the game. "Do the same thing, but more" is not a compelling motivation for me to complete your game. Sure, building more of the same buildings allows me to expand my city, which in turn allows me to advance the storyline. But the storyline is so boilerplate and uninspiring that it fails to keep My Life as a King afloat on its own. The game should have spaced out the reveals of new buildings all the way into the final chapter, so that I would have new mechanics to keep striving for up til the end.
Allow me to customize individual adventurers. There are a few different classes of adventurers in My Life as a King: fighters, thieves, and white and black mages. But aside from some slight cosmetic differences, a fighter is a fighter is a fighter. Individual adventurers who complete quests for you gain (invisible) "medals" which buff their stats, but all adventurers still basically look and act the same. Let me personalize my individual adventurers! This fosters emotional attachment to individual pawns and motivates the player to continue forward in the campaign, to gear up his favorite adventurers and track their little lives. As the king, let me bestow the armor, weapons and accessories of my choice to my favorite adventurers, along with stat-tweaking medals. This way it becomes not just the story of my town or my voiceless little king, but of the individual adventurers I decided to specially favor.
I'm not sure how far through the campaign I made it, but I'd guess about halfway. I have a mild urge to pick it back up, but it feels like there's nothing left to discover, and the urge passes. I don't understand the predilection for mechanical frontloading that so many game designers have, but at this point I feel like I've seen all My Life as a King has to offer. It plays into the self-fulfilling prophecy wherein traditional wisdom states that most players don't complete games, so we should put all our content up front, which makes players unmotivated to actually complete our games... and whoops, here we are.
I bought a used copy of Bushido Blade for the PSX and began replaying it tonight. It's still a fun and very interesting game from a mechanical standpoint, but what I hadn't remembered was its broad set of subfeatures and its unapologetic localization style.
There are a number of "flourish" features in the game that are just sort of strange, left-field ideas that could nevertheless make it to retail in the age when Bushido Blade was first released. For instance, while Bushido Blade is first and foremost a third-person swordfighting game, the developers also included a "POV Mode," which allows the player to control his avatar in a (near-useless) first-person perspective. It's novel-- hell, semi-experimental-- but in 1997 warranted its own main menu entry. Smaller touches include a black & white mode, which desaturates the screen entirely, much like the same feature found in Sam & Max Hit the Road. Presumably in Bushido Blade this is to emulate the feel of an old samurai movie-- a worthy aesthetic goal, and nice to see as a supported menu option as opposed to a hidden cheat code. The localization of the game is striking for how little it tries to hide its Japanese origins on any level. Except for one opening narration, there is no English language track: Bushido Blade is a subtitled game, period. Unlike newer games with an equally Japanese premise, such as Sega's Yakuza, when you pick up Bushido Blade you're signed on for Japanese vocals with subtitles. Kanji also appears prominently throughout, on the character selection screen and elsewhere. Where many publishers attempt to Westernize Japanese games as heavily as possible to draw a mass market audience, Bushido Blade stands by its identity unabashedly.
Other great touches in the core game include the player character getting bandaged up in places they're struck non-fatally by a sword swing, resulting in most of my playthroughs ending with my character sporting a cool-looking bandage eyepatch. The game also offers the ability for the player to mix-and-match any character with any weapon. While many games would automatically pair the quick, weak character with the small, nimble weapon and so forth, Bushido Blade allows you to equip a rapier to the hulking brawler or a battle hammer to the waifish female fighter, to your own handicap (and amusement.) The internal matrix resulting from all those combinations of characters and weapons must have been incredibly complex from a production standpoint, but pays off in the player's feeling of agency and the inherent replayability of the game.
These are all risky decisions that I feel may only be possible with a game of Bushido Blade's limited scope. If the production costs had been in line with a modern-day AAA title, and the target audience broad enough to support such an investment, could the game have gone out on a limb for oddball features like black & white or POV mode, committed to a huge mix-and-match matrix of fighting styles and animations, or stuck to its baldly Japanese presentation? I'd wager not.
Looking back on a number of older games recently has caused me to ponder a specific kind of 'discipline' that might be required to create a modern commercial game with the attitude of experimentation and discovery that was prevalent in the time of Bushido Blade. It's another manifesto kind of thing, and elaborates on the 'game noir' ideas I posted some time ago. I'll think some more and write on it soon.
Justin Keverne of cleverly-if-distressingly-titled blog Groping the Elephant presents "Friends Like These," a Call to Arms entry which heavily abstracts human relationships on the path through life.
Friends Like These represents the player as a blob, constantly traveling onwards through a void filled with various other blobs. Your progress is signified by three metrics, two bars which indicated Hope\Optimism and Guilt\Self Loathing and the speed at which you are traveling through the world. The aim of the game is to reach the natural end of your existence (A point that is not explicitly know, as we never known when our time is up), without your Guilt reaching its limit or your Hope running out; if that happens, the screen fades to black with the a message that “You succumb to your Guilt,” or “You are lost to despair.”
Since you are always moving forward through your life, your only control comes in the ability to move across your life stream to bring yourself closer to, or further from, the other blobs in the world. In terms of appearance all blobs look similar but unique. Once you get within a certain distance of another blob they begin to have an affect on your own blob; the distance at which this effect is felt and its strength is different for each blob.
If you spend too long without coming into contact with other blobs your Hope will begin to lower.
Some blobs are friends: the closer you get to them the faster you both begin to travel, and they will also tend to stick with you if you move away (up to a certain distance) allowing you to bring in more friends and collectively rush to the end together. When a large group of blobs is together like this your own Hope begins to increase.
Some blobs are not friends. These blobs will slow you down but they will not be so likely to stick close to you if you move away.
The third type of blobs are toxic, they follow an erratic path but if you can stay close to them your speed increases dramatically, everything else seems to rush past and you race towards the end together. However these blobs also dramatically increase your Guilt, the effect growing exponentially the longer you stay with them.
The effect of other blobs on you is not the same as their effects on each other. Though two blobs might both be your friend they may not be friends with each other; some may even be toxic to another but not you. Bringing such blobs into a close group results in other blobs slowing the group down and could potentially lead to the group itself fracturing if you are not careful about how close you allow those opposing blobs to get. If you bring in a blob to a group that then causes the group to split apart your Guilt will begin to increase until you either manage to bring the group back together or leave it behind (Life is harsh).
How do you want to live your life? Do you stick to your friends through the good times and the bad, or do you leave them behind when the going gets tough? Do you latch onto that one person who burns with an inner fire? They’ll show you the world but might kill you in the process.
[INTERMISSION: And now for something completely different.]
There are some games that would be just plain fun to design. For instance, Golden Axe: Beast Rider:
What have we got to work with? A hot chick, beasts, swords, blood, magic, and not a whole lot else (including, notably, any axes.) How can you not just jump in with both feet and have a blast designing that?
Here's my crack at an outline inspired by the premise: The Rise of the Warrior Queen a design pitch inspired by the Golden Axe: Beast Rider trailer
RotWQ is a game about a badass barbarian chick that I'm going to give the placeholder name of "Shanna" (in homage to the comics series recently reimagined by Frank Cho.)
Shanna runs around barren cliffsides, ruins and jungles, tearing her foes asunder with her fearsome battle skills and bathing in the resulting fountains of viscera. As she goes about her journeys, she prays to the Darke Gods for strength, and eventually smites an ancient evil, returning to be crowned the queen of her people's domain.
Core values of this design:
Shanna is a smokin' hot barbarian warrior babe. Shanna's saleable physical appeal is emphasized by a variety of scanty outfits and an array of vaguely sexualized combat techniques.
Shanna is badass, and through her quest becomes more badass. As Shanna shreds her enemies, she gains more and more powerful weapon- and magic-based attacks.
Shanna rides beasts. Beast riding is central to play, allowing Shanna to traverse the landscape and crush her enemies.
Core gameplay:
RotWQ is a weapon-based brawler featuring character skill and equipment progression.
Fighting, weapons, and combos: Shanna faces hordes of foes on her quest. She may attack them with swords, axes, hammers, or her bare fists. Using the controller's face buttons, Shanna breaks through her enemies' guard and unleashes deadly combos, ripping her rivals limb from limb. She sprints and dives into the fray, throwing herself into the thick of battle. Massive finishing moves mow down half a dozen foes at once.
Weapon skill progression: As Shanna uses a particular type of weapon, her skill with that weapon increases. Over the course of the game, Shanna may find a wide variety of individual weapons, each with its own stats. Shanna's damage output is determined by her current weapon skill coupled with the stats of the particular weapon she's found. Over the course of the game, the player may choose to generalize and become moderately skilled in all weapons, or to specialize and become the master of only one or two. For instance, Shanna's fists are the weakest to start and the slowest to progress, but inordinately powerful when fully mastered. Introduces interesting choices when a player finds an inherently powerful weapon that falls outside their current specialization.
Magic skill progression: As Shanna progresses through the wilderness, she happens upon many small shrines built to the four Darke Gods, each representing an element: Wind, Fire, Ice, and Earth. Her interactions with these shrines alters her alignment with the Gods. If she presents a sacrifice of her own blood to a shrine, her favor with that God increases, while her favor with the other Gods decreases; if she destroys a shrine, the reverse happens. Some enemy types are weaker or more resilient with respect to each element; like the weapon system, the player may commit to completely dominating one or two elemental resistances, or spread their tributes evenly across all schools.
Unleash barbarian rage by bathing in gore: As Shanna uses her powerful moves to tear her foes asunder, she is splashed with their gouts of blood; similarly, when Shanna takes damage, her own blood flows out of the wounds. Over the course of a battle, she eventually becomes covered in gore from head to toe.
The more blood Shanna is covered in, the more quick and powerful her attacks are. This encourages the player to throw themselves headlong into battle, and risk death to gain stronger offensive abilities.
Dive into a healing spring to recover: At checkpoints along her path, Shanna finds isolated healing springs. She may dive in, emerging with the gore washed off of her body and her wounds healed, losing her bloodbath-derived combat buffs but refilling her health.
Getnew stuff byshopping: Shanna gathers valuables from her fallen foes, and may barter with traveling traders she encounters along her journey. She may buy additional empty vialsto fill at healing springs which provide partial rejuvenation in the field, as well as charms which increase her attributes, upgrades which improve her current weapon, and new scanty outfits to show off her form.
Ride beasts: Shanna may jump on beasts she encounters and ride them as a mount. Wild beasts must be tamed with a balance-based bucking bronco minigame, while saddled beasts wrestled from her foes are immediately ridable. Beasts are hulking creatures, capable of striking down most foes with ease: beasts are strong against normal-sized and large human enemies, and evenly matched with other beasts; their weakness is in fighting swarms of small enemies, which overwhelm them with their agility and numbers. Shanna must dismount and fight off these sorts of enemies lest she see her beast dragged down by the mob. Similarly, Shanna is weak against beasts and large humans, but equally matched with normal-sized humans and strong against little guys. Shanna and the tamed beasts' relative strengths and weaknesses mean that neither is a silver bullet for all enemy types. When riding a beast, Shanna's mount may grapple with another beast, locking the two into a struggle for power. During this struggle, Shanna may leap across and slay the rival beast rider, wrestling his mount into submission.
To complete her quest, Shanna must defeat the powerful marauders who generations earlier stole a sacred artifact from her people, retrieve the artifact and return it to her homeland, whereupon she is crowned warrior queen and leads her valiant tribe into a harmonious future.
That sounds like fun to me, anyway. Godspeed, Secret Level!
Dan Bruno, maintainer of the blog Cruise Elroy, submits a Call to Arms concept which subverts the expectations of playing a platformer, and encourages the player to seek out the game's hidden agenda.
Summary: A puzzle game disguised as a platformer, Bumbershoot uses player expectations to disguise its true mechanic. It’s my hope that the subversion of a familiar genre will address the conflict between convention and innovation, while the “metagame” of figuring out how to play will evoke a unique sense of discovery and accomplishment in the player.
Play:Bumbershoot looks like a simple 2D platformer. There are critters to jump on, coins to collect, and obstacles to overcome as the character progresses through each level. The game offers no instructions beyond explaining the controls, so an experienced player will treat it like a Mario game.
However, the feedback and reward mechanisms that are typically found in platformers are absent in Bumbershoot. Jumping on critters doesn’t yield any powerups or bonuses (and isn’t necessary anyway, as they aren’t actually dangerous); collecting coins doesn’t make a “pling” noise, count towards an extra life, or otherwise give any indication of being useful; getting to the end a level doesn’t cue victory music or a cutscene, but just dumps the player unceremoniously at the beginning of the next one. In short, the player can complete the game “normally” by moving from left to right through each level, but the game will give no particular indication that she’s doing anything right. If all goes well, such a victory will be hollow and unrewarding.
During play a score is displayed prominently at the top of the screen, but typical platformer actions like the ones described above have little or no effect on it. Meanwhile, seemingly random actions will send the score through the roof, and the game makes a big deal out of those events. Right now I’m thinking of the score-tallying beeps at the end of a level in Super Mario Bros. or the extra life fanfare in Sonic the Hedgehog, but there may be better signals.
The point of the game is to first realize that typical platformer behaviors are not rewarded, and then figure out what behaviors are rewarded instead.
The plan is for each level to have a different hidden task. One might require the player to perform some action in time with the background music, like the Koopas in New Super Mario Bros.; another might be to jump on all objects of a particular color, or to touch all the floating platforms. Ideally they would be simple enough that the player could find them and unusual enough that she won’t do well at the game without trying to. If necessary, there could be clues embedded in the environment — the colored objects could catch the light and sparkle to attract attention, for example. Completing these tasks will increase the player’s score, trigger sound effects, earn extra lives, and feature all the other reward mechanisms that gamers have come to expect.
At the end there will be a high score chart and a catchy song, because after Portal, You Have to Burn the Rope, and On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness I’m convinced that every game needs to end with a catchy song.
Concerns:
Designing the hidden tasks would be difficult. At least a couple of them will need to be obvious enough that an average player will stumble upon them so that the meat of the game isn’t missed completely. Ideally I’d like to see someone play it like a standard platformer, accidently earn a ton of points for something that seems insignificant, and then think “what the hell did I just do?”
Using a mysterious game mechanic to evoke a feeling of discovery may not be enough to make the game hold together. Hopefully combining that idea with the genre subversion is enough to keep a player interested. If necessary, the score could be replaced or combined with some other kind of feedback.
Since the real impact is the initial discovery about the nature of the game and not in the subsequent puzzle elements, the game needs to be pretty short. As with Jason Rohrer’s games, I actually think Bumbershoot will make its point rather quickly — perhaps five Super Mario Bros. 3-length levels would do the trick.
Coleman McCormick, an old friend and maintainer of Chucklefest.net and his Tumblelog, Shodan Lives, submits a Call to Arms entry about the challenges and rewards of leaving modern society behind.
Survival
You’re a simple, essentially talentless man, waking up in the middle of the wilderness. In complete desolation. There may be no people within tens or hundreds or thousands of miles, you have no idea. Your objective is to reach something resembling civilization, be it a full-blown city, campsite, cave-dwelling natives… something.
You begin your trek armed with only some pocket items. You have your wristwatch, cell phone, wallet containing a few items, and maybe a candy bar. Because the wilderness is completely foreign to you (maybe you were previously a Wall Street investor), you have some serious things to learn if you wish to survive even the first few days. Feeding yourself will entail scrounging for berries or fruit initially, and as you collect some basic elements, you may even be able to fashion some primitive weapons. You’ll have to acquire clothing and create some form of shelter in order to stay healthy, otherwise exposure will weaken and possibly kill you. Clothing yourself might include killing an animal, cleaning it, and tanning hides or tailoring the fur into warmer garb.
Setting up camp will allow you to become more familiar with those immediate surroundings. This may pay off in the short term, allowing you to avoid danger and injury, but only in the short term. You must move along if you expect to truly survive. You absolutely will succumb to some uncontrollable force of nature eventually. A bear might rip you up in your sleep. So you camp for a few days and move on.
As you journey along in search of someone, your experiences will pay off. Hunting more often makes hunting easier and in turn keeps you well fed. Learning about plant life will allow you to gather more varied fruits. With blade-wielding talent you’ll more efficiently clean your kills providing better yield of hide, fur, or meat. Collecting firewood, climbing mountains… it all becomes easier with practice. Life in the wilderness can be exhilarating, frightening, fun, deadly. Climbing a sheer cliff face may get you a hundreds of feet above, providing a better vantage point to view your surroundings, a stunningly picturesque landscape, and access to whatever’s on the other side of the mountain. You’ll encounter rivers to cross, predators to evade, and if you’re lucky: signs of human life.
As you begin to run across signs of other travelers or settlers — old campfires, animal carcasses, beaten paths through the forest — you must use tracking and pathfinding skills to seek out the nearby civilization. But there’s another catch: they won’t necessarily be friendly. You’ll have to figure that out.
If you find friendlies, and they accept you into the fold, The End.
————
This game would be best if it played out over the course of dozens of hours, giving you time to learn the ropes of survival, as well as making new experiences in the wilderness all the more affecting. Of course since the world is completely open, you play at your pace. However, there is one absolute certainty: you will not last forever in the wild. You’ll do what’s necessary to survive, and sometimes that means it isn’t what you “want” to do. The player would experience hardship, cheat death, overcome adversity, and avoid disaster through becoming one with a foreign environment (without having to risk one’s real life in the bush.)
In Potter, virtual pottery-throwing allows the player to express their creativity while gradually mastering a craft.
Summary:Potter expresses the satisfaction of a job well-done by casting the player as an apprentice to a Master potter, and allowing them to express their creativity and skill to create a wide variety of ceramics. Using the Wii interface to simulate the acts of throwing and glazing clay, the player gradually improves his craft, learning from the Master and sharing his work with others.
Play: At the outset of the game, the player may choose a Master potter whose apprentice he will become. The player browses a sampling of each Master's wares, along with a personal statement about his style and methods. The player's own work will be steered by his Master's guidance, so the player should choose a Master whose work he'd most like to emulate. Once the player has chosen a shop to apprentice in, he begins introductory lessons in the craft of creating fine ceramics. As he throws his first pieces, the Master judges the work against his own standards, and gives the player guidance as to how he may improve.
The player uses the Wii remote and nunchuk to track the position of his hands as he performs the motions of molding a piece of clay as it spins on the wheel. Depending on which Master's shop he enters, the player may simultaneously have to press rhythmically on the Wii Balance Board to simulate running a potter's wheel via foot pedal.
The player proceeds to craft different sorts of pots and dishware, including pitchers, vases, bowls and so forth. Once a piece has been thrown, the player may proceed to the glaze stage, an entirely different art altogether. With the Nunchuk in his left hand the player slowly turns the piece around, while with the remote in his right hand he strokes on glaze with a brush or other available tools.
Once a piece is complete, the player places it into the kiln. The player may return to the kiln in a number of realtime hours (using the system clock, like Animal Crossing) to retrieve the fired piece and see the final result.
The player receives guidance from the Master while the piece is in process, as well as a more thorough judgment once it is fired and finished. Using the expressivity of the Wii's controls, the player may craft all manner of ceramics; over weeks or months of play, the player's craft progresses from producing clumsy, novice pieces, to creating beautiful works which will impress and instill pride in his stalwart Master, eventually becoming the Master's equal. This results in an extensive gallery of ceramic pieces the player has hand-crafted, which he may look back on proudly, and share with friends via the Wii's online connectivity.
Notes: What I tried to do here is to maintain the process: I didn't start from "I'd like to make a pottery simulator," but rather from the feeling I hoped to instill in the player through the game's interactivity (satisfaction of a job well-done, or more specifically, the pride of mastering a craft.) The follow-through was in choosing pottery as the core activity, and then abstracting that real-world activity in the specific ways which support the chosen core feeling, as opposed to rotely or aimlessly trying to simulate pottery as a purely mechanical act.
It starts in a house -- don't know how you got there -- and this game is clearly a shooter because there you are in first-person perspective with a crosshair and health/ammo meters and weapon slots. But your health is set at 40 for some elusive reason, and you don't have a gun. Neither does the game. No weapons at all and no enemies either. You can jump, crouch and strafe but there's nothing to jump over, crouch under or strafe around. Nothing in your inventory. What you can do is wander around the dark, empty rooms of this boring house looking for, well, a game to play. The doors are locked. You can see out the windows, but because the game won't let you punch anything you can't break them. There's a complete lack of direction to the level design: it's not subtly or overtly ushering the player down a specific path. Everything's open to you; you can go anywhere you want. It doesn't matter. There are people in some of these rooms, but you can't talk to them. You have an all-purpose 'use' button, but nothing happens when you press it. You can't ask him what you want to: what's going on and how do I get out? If you're within a certain proximity, something will trigger and they will talk at you -- but they won't address you personally and you have no input into the conversation.
These NPCs will give you a quest -- something to find or something to fix. You oblige them, because what the hell else have you got to do. This is added to your quest log, which is viewable at any time. It's a big house and there are no clues so you can only hope that you'll stumble across this thing. Say one guy is looking for his telescope and say you do actually find it. You center it in your crosshairs, press the 'use' button and nothing happens. Check the key bindings, yeah, okay, that's right, press it again. Still nothing. You could walk back to the guy but you're unable to tell him anything, much less the whereabouts of his dumb telescope. Using a late-90s physics engine you can kind of nudge the telescope with your body or other objects. But the thing only gets so far before it breaks. Whoops. Immediately, you lose the quest.
Now the guy will talk to you; in fact he'll start yelling at you. There are other people around, so you can repeat this process for a while, but the object will always break. After x number of failures, word gets around (via our groundbreaking influence system) and NPCs you've never met will decide not to give you any quests. If you keep trying to help them then nobody will even talk to you.
The quest log is represented in-game by a piece of paper. It will soon surpass that original allocation -- you've taken on more than you thought you could handle-- and you'll start to see quests written all over the screen, with failed objectives furiously scratched out. Eventually, even though there's some space left, you'll stop writing down quests even as you get them, because what's the point?
It shouldn't take long to recognise that this game isn't very good. The game really sucks. And once you learn there's no way to win then the only thing left is to lose. After a certain number of quest failures, the world changes. It gives you a break. One of the windows swings open and at this point all you can think to do is -- from ten stories up -- jump.
---
I like the idea of a game where you act out one long metaphor, forcing players to empathise with a certain psychological state. I like subverting typical game mechanics to render the player depowered and useless. It takes away the basic tools players rely on to cope in a game world, while retaining enough dead-end artifice (weapon slots) to make them feel like there's all this potential they're failing to unlock. Players don't feel like a hero or even competent. They're depowered and useless and no one likes them.
I'm tossing another one in the ring, just for fun. Thanks so much to everyone who's contributed so far to the Call to Arms!
Summary: Strange Land casts the player as a 'stranger in a strange land,' who must survive in an urban setting with no initial knowledge of the native language. At first the game conveys the alienation of living behind a language barrier; as the player progresses, he gains the pride of mastery by internalizing and becoming fluent in that same language.
Play: Strange Land is a single-player game structured somewhat like Animal Crossing, or The Sims, or Shenmue without the story; the input and point of view is most similar to the latter, with the player directly controlling his avatar at ground-level. The player takes on the role of a young person who has left their native country and recently arrived in a bustling town somewhere in Strange Land. The people here are much like those of the player's homeland, but with different language and customs. From this starting point, the player must first figure out how to communicate well enough to survive, then build a life for him or herself in this new place. At the outset, most spoken and written language in Strange Land is indecipherable to the player, making navigation and communication a challenge. Signs, instructions, menus and the like are written in Strange language. Initially the player may speak to Strange people, but can only reply in English and make hand motions, which communicates relatively little.
The gameworld contains tools for the player to make inroads towards learning Strange language. Some signs include an English translation along with the Strange text, working as bits of Rosetta Stone. The player carries around a digital notebook, in which he may copy down these translations for future reference. Once he has seen the same Strange text enough times, he should be able to interpret it directly without referring to his notebook.
Similarly, whenever a character speaks, the words appear as text which the player may highlight and save into his notebook along with a corresponding label in English. Then, when later speaking to a Strange person, the player may select any previously-saved text from his speech bank and say that phrase. So for instance, if the player wanted to order a sandwich, he could observe a Strange person ordering a sandwich, copy their speech text, then repeat the phrase used to order one for himself.
As these saved text samples accumulate, the list grows unwieldy. If the player takes too long choosing a phrase from the list while speaking to a Strange person, that person will grow impatient and turn the player away. So, the player may instead type Strange phrases directly into a parser using the keyboard (or 360 thumb board, depending on platform.) This encourages the player to internalize the language well enough to use it effectively without picking from a list of English translations. This mimics the feeling of actually learning to use a language naturally instead of running it through the filter of one's own native tongue.
The player's first goals are simply to make money, buy food, maintain domicile, and generally to survive. Especially in the early stages, this can seem a daunting task, when one doesn't even know how to say "yes" or "no" in Strange language. Attempting to talk to Strange people generally leads to confusion or rejection, and the only available jobs are the menial kind that don't require much verbal communication; living at the English-speaking hostel is easy and cheap, but securing an apartment is another story. The player must either push themselves to better understand Strange language and culture, or simply to subsist as an outsider.
The player uses context clues and closely observes Strange people to learn their customs and how to perform simple tasks. The player may run into other native English-speakers, who may befriend him and help him get by. At any time, the player may highlight an NPC's speech text and ask "what does that mean?" The player's social standing with that NPC will determine whether they help you out or not. As the player becomes more integrated into the daily routine of Strange Land, his reliance on these helper characters lessens, and he gradually becomes more able to start up friendships with Strange people, using only their own language to communicate, without any training wheels. Over time, the player's improved abilities allow him access to more fruitful aspects of Strange society: better language skills allow him to get better jobs, attend more obscure or exclusive cultural events and venues, meet and befriend more and different Strange people, and generally become a full-on Strange citizen for all intents and purposes. By increasing his own fluency, the player naturally gains access to deeper parts of the Animal Crossing/Sims-like gameplay of living in a nicer home, getting better jobs, buying more and better stuff, and expanding his social sphere.
Along with text, all Strange language is read aloud via voice synthesis. Strange language is a relatively simple, consistent syllabic, most appropriate for text-to-speech software interpretation. Hereby, the player's experience isn't limited only to the game designer's authored voiceover samples; all NPCs' speech text and the player's own input are both written and voiced. Since the natural result of game mastery in this case is fluency in a foreign language, Strange Land could even be used to teach a real-world language by acting as a "virtual immersion" tool. The trick in teaching a real-world language in this way is to make the final goal not simply "learn the language," but to make learning the language the means towards some other attractive end-- an end which could theoretically be supplied by the desire to progress in a Sims-like life-building game.
Concerns: The core language internalization mechanics would take a huge amount of prototyping, playtesting and revision to get right. Would the described system allow a player to really grasp a language and begin using it? Would the game be 'smart' enough to interpret the player's reuse of saved phrases, and further his typing strings directly into the engine? Like a language itself, executing on this concept well would be intimidatingly complex.
