My presentation focused on Tale-Spin, a game that has become a blueprint chiefly because it was bad. To summarize — the player inputs which characters they would like; they receive the characters, along with settings; to start the simulation, they pick which character to focus on and which problem they want to “solve.” From there, whether the user attains their goal depends on a combination of personal choices (i.e., whether they believe a character they must persuade is telling the truth), luck (i.e., whether said character is, in fact, deceptive), and game performance (i.e., dodging glitches that trap your character in a loop). Noah Wardrip-Fruin, responsible for our reading the week of my presentation, illustrated the game’s fallibility through the tale produced by another scholar — the hunger of Arthur the Bear, whose optimism (decided through the player) gets him deceived (decided through the RNG) by George the Bird, culminating in zero food.
I also asked a series of questions, some of which we didn’t discuss. For the remainder of this blog post, I’ll provide my own thoughts on the questions I posed, beginning with this:
“No simulation will ever perfectly mirror human behavior (Wardrip-Fruin). Even so, Tale-Spin tends to oversimplify characters’ motives; whether George answers you is based not on mood, social skills, or opinion, but solely on kindness. (147) Should a game want to achieve greater realism, which elements should be based on multiple variables?”
In retrospect, I worded this quite ambiguously. Games can be at once realistic and not realistic, incorporating similar natural laws as Earth yet having entirely different creatures, customs, and countries. (The Super Mario Bros franchise, while by no means a realistic game, requires a realistic rule — gravity. Otherwise, the playthrough would be significantly harder.) For this blog post, I am confining “realism” to character motivations. I am assuming that many games wish to have richer character development or, at least, enough development that the reader finds the events plausible.
The problem with Tale-Spin, I believe, resides in its clumsiness. When you create a game asking an animal to cure its primitive urges — hunger, tiredness, thirst, lust — you expect the character to act primitive in turn. If not, there should be a very legitimate reason. Where Tail-Spin (in my mind) falters at this juncture is failing to consider alternate explanations like a lack of trust. (While trust eventually comes into play, this occurs at a different moment.) The singularity of kindness may also prompt a reader to anticipate some moralization by the end, but such moralization never happens. In fact, the randomness of the simulation makes it so moralization is near-impossible; whether George truly assists you is determined by luck. In this sense, a realistic microcosm of the anthropomorphic animal world does not require complexity, but, rather, requires single-variable decisions selected intelligently.
Then again, single-variable decisions — incredibly rare, if not nonexistent, in situations asking a person to determine with whom and how to socialize — might actually hinder a pursuit of realism. As is, the game is operating without a narrative because it is operating without a plot. While single-variable decisions can make the game’s purpose feel tidier, life, itself, is not always tidy, able to be readily condensed into chapters and plot points. In this regard, too many intelligent single-variable decisions can result in too many life lessons, making a story more fiction than no. For a game like Tale-Spin, of which glimmers of narrative feel unintentional, perhaps eliminating single-variable choices entirely would have rendered it more lifelike. (Although the game centers around anthropomorphic animals, so efforts to achieve realism could prove futile.)
Another question I asked related to how Tale-Spin was coded.
“To what degree does a game require [eleven primitive acts]?” (e.g., does a cooking simulator with no human customers require Delta-Know?)
I originally anticipated that this question would not elicit many responses. It’s not a particularly contentious issue worthy of debate; no major authors, to my understanding, found the eleven-act structure inherently flawed. Post-presentation, I also realized I made my question quite narrow in scope. Understanding Tale-Spin’s inner mechanics won’t help us “read” games on a platform like Twine, in which the computer’s text is entirely spoonfed from one human. As such, I’d like to amend what I asked. When does removing one of these eleven acts in general improve or detract from a game, and how so?
Consider the removal of Speak — defined, by the author, as “[the ability to] produce a sound.” (Wardrip-Fruin 125) Tale-Spin surely would become more complicated, Arthur’s search for honey thwarted by his inability to communicate (assuming that, being a bear, Arthur cannot scribe.) This would be far from an isolated incident — most of the games we have discussed beyond Tale-Spin would be in trouble. Elsinore in its current state would easily fall apart, as the path to any ending requires overhearing conversations. Immortality would become a silent film. There Ought To Be A Word would remain untouched, its plot progressing through the author’s speechless conversations on OKCupid, but Aegis-Wing would require an overhaul beginning with the early mentions of voice-chat.
Certainly, in many instances, this seems negative. However, this also presents an opportunity for experimenting with characters. A mute person inhabiting a mute world, for example, would work around the seemingly essential feature. The degree to which a game feels such an impact would also likely depend on how it fits the requirement of a game. Sacrilege’s click-through poetry at certain points, as well as the student’s interactive poetry referenced in Hamlet on the Holodeck, do not require spoken dialogue to succeed. Tale-Spin’s eleven primitive acts serve a significant role in moving the plot forward for numerous stories, but they are not always the only means to moving it.
I entered the Tale-Spin saga with the belief that high-quality games are inclined to use minimalism or complexity equally, depending on the occasion. In writing this, I reached a different conclusion — games aiming for richness often need to be correspondingly rich in their mechanics. While Tale-Spin was a flop in critics’ eyes, if nothing else, it wanted to represent something larger than itself.