{"id":102,"date":"2013-06-07T05:41:04","date_gmt":"2013-06-07T12:41:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/xyzzyawards.org\/?p=102"},"modified":"2013-06-07T05:41:04","modified_gmt":"2013-06-07T12:41:04","slug":"c-e-j-pacian-on-best-individual-npc-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/xyzzyawards.org\/?p=102","title":{"rendered":"C.E.J. Pacian on Best Individual NPC 2012"},"content":{"rendered":"

C.E.J. Pacian writes on New Rat City in rat chaos<\/a>, Kadro in Andromeda Dreaming<\/a>, and W.D. in Speculative Fiction<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

New Rat City in rat chaos<\/em>, by J. Chastain<\/strong><\/p>\n

New Rat City, Avatar of Rats, first contacts us on board our spaceship after we \u201cunleash rat chaos\u201d,\u00a0and he isn\u2019t fooled by our video game persona. Whatever we may have got up to in other branches\u00a0of this stream-of-consciousness Twine story, New Rat City knows we\u2019re not real space adventurers.\u00a0He knows we\u2019re just sitting in front of a computer. And now he\u2019s going to take us to Planet of Rat.\u00a0\u201cNew Rat City needs a lot of love,\u201d the game tells us. \u201cHelp New Rat City with his needs.\u201d<\/p>\n

rat chaos<\/a><\/em> is the kind of game that spits out new ideas and moves quickly on without a backwards\u00a0glance. With liberal use of the back button it\u2019s pretty straightforward to map out the entire game in\u00a0your head, and the parts focusing on New Rat City are as simply structured as the rest of it. But that\u00a0simplicity of structure is conciseness rather than shallowness.<\/p>\n

The New Rat City branch of rat chaos<\/em> is interested in the structure of typical NPC interactions in\u00a0games, which are often padded out with the character spouting exposition and backstory, narrating\u00a0over gameplay and generally talking a lot without actually genuinely connecting with any other\u00a0character \u2013 except when the player\u2019s character gets the chance to make some trite binary choices\u00a0that send them one way or another.<\/p>\n

And so our interactions with New Rat City are as follows: first, we get to respond to the offer to\u00a0move to Planet of Rat with a large variety of options, some of which are repeated multiple times,\u00a0only one of which could be construed to be vaguely not in agreement, and all of which are ignored<\/p>\n

in the next scene. From there we can choose to address some of New Rat City\u2019s physical needs, at\u00a0which point we get a binary choice between helping and not helping, options which lead to a good\u00a0or bad end respectively.<\/p>\n

Or there\u2019s the option to just ask New Rat City if he wants to talk. At which point he pours his heart\u00a0out about his complex, negative feelings and how they began when he was bullied as a child. And\u00a0at the bottom of this long speech, presented without any scene-setting or physical context, we, the\u00a0players, are given the option to choose where we ride our dune buggy to.<\/p>\n

This is a microcosm of typical video game character interaction: \u201cflavour\u201d choices that have no real\u00a0effect; binary moral choices that are unsatisfying in their absolutism; and characters who try to make\u00a0us care about them, nattering on over the radio, while we wander around collecting MacGuffins.<\/p>\n

What makes this all work here is both the entertainment value of the game using these mechanics\u00a0in such a barefaced and abrupt fashion, and the fact that, following the branch where New Rat\u00a0City shares his feelings with us to its conclusion, it is ultimately him who grows unsatisfied with the\u00a0shallow character interaction.<\/p>\n

rat chaos<\/em> makes me feel like there\u2019s a well-rounded and human (if rat-shaped) character on the\u00a0other side of the computer screen, tapping on the glass and trying to make a friend\u2026 but all I can do\u00a0in response is typical video game stuff. Why on Earth (or Planet of Rat) would he want to be friends\u00a0with somebody like that? New Rat City realises that player characters just aren\u2019t worth his time.
\n<\/a><\/p>\n

Kadro in Andromeda Dreaming<\/em>, by Joey Jones<\/h3>\n

Andromeda Dreaming<\/em><\/a> begins with us waking up on a spaceship \u2013 not a sleeper vessel that\u2019s\u00a0encountered an emergency, as in so many other games, but a medical space station called\u00a0Morbozzo. Strapped into our quarantine pod, all we can do is sleep and interact with the three other\u00a0nearby patients, of which the most talkative is the bushy-bearded Kadro.<\/p>\n

We talk to Kadro using a menu-style conversation system that, for the most part, simply works as\u00a0a more nuanced and transparent kind of ask\/tell system. Various statements are appended to a\u00a0numbered list which you can select from seamlessly with other actions – except on the odd occasion\u00a0when you\u2019re forced to select a response before you can do anything else (which I\u2019m sure has a solid\u00a0foundation in the behind-the-scenes mechanics but rankles a little from the player\u2019s point of view).\u00a0Overall, though, this system works well as a way of interacting naturally with Kadro, and as a way of\u00a0characterising the PC.<\/p>\n

Your first chat with Kadro, for example, might go something like this:<\/p>\n

>talk to man
\nYou turn to the bearded man and he temporarily turns off his speakers. “So at last the reg\u00a0awakes. Stato me amato?”<\/p>\n

[1] Uh, sorry?
\n[2] My name is Aliss?
\n[3] I had a bad flu?<\/p>\n

>3
\n“Amato, that’s cold as Korh. I hope the bitsters deflagged it. Wouldn’t want to catch\u00a0something I couldn’t throw back.”<\/p>\n

[1] Don’t worry- it’s not infectious.
\n[2] Why do you speak so strangely?
\n[3] [Say nothing]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Two things to note above are firstly, of course, the Morbozzan dialect, and secondly the way that\u00a0you are given two different options to express your bewilderment with it. Replaying this short game,\u00a0you\u2019ll have a good idea what Kadro\u2019s talking about, but on your first time through, these options\u00a0make it clear that the game realises you\u2019ve been thrown in the deep end – and gives you confidence\u00a0that the author will make things clearer in time.<\/p>\n

As the game progresses you, unsurprisingly, find out that Kadro knows more about your\u00a0predicament than you do. But, refreshingly, he plays his cards close to his chest and refuses to dump\u00a0any exposition on you. Filling in the gaps in the story depends on grasping Morbozzan slang and\u00a0reading between the lines.<\/p>\n

Consider the following, when you ask Kadro about the other Morbozzan native in the room:<\/p>\n

“You bit Morbozzo’s the can where they space whatever the prens don’t want spreading.\u00a0Jimmy, well he has a head full of ideas and there’s less than four more infectious.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now we get a sense of why apparently healthy men like Kadro and Jimmy are long term patients on\u00a0a medical space station. Morbozzo isn\u2019t just used to quarantine diseases, but also ideas. Those on\u00a0\u00a0board include both patients and political prisoners. So it\u2019s no wonder that this place apparently has a\u00a0criminal underclass of schemers with their own thieves\u2019 cant, and no wonder that a fake illness and a\u00a0trip to Morbozzo are a good strategy for a high-ranking politician looking to get up to no good.<\/p>\n

It is true that we don\u2019t actually get to know Kadro that well. We don\u2019t get too good a sense of what\u00a0makes him tick, what his motives are and whether he\u2019s really someone we should trust. But that in\u00a0\u00a0itself fits the character: this man shouldn\u2019t be loose-lipped when someone saying the wrong thing\u00a0\u00a0may be what got him where he is now. And, well, when a piece of fiction leaves you wishing that\u00a0\u00a0you\u2019d seen more of a character, that\u2019s a pretty strong indication that it did a good job.
\n<\/a><\/p>\n

W.D. in Speculative Fiction<\/em>, by Diane Christoforo and Thomas Mack<\/h3>\n

Around the turn of the century, Graham Nelson observed that a \u201ctriangle of identities\u201d defines our\u00a0relationship to a text-only game: the main character (who acts within the game world), the narrator\u00a0(whose voice describes what\u2019s happening) and the player (that\u2019s us). Speculative Fiction<\/em><\/a> is one of\u00a0that minority of text games to give all three sides of the triangle a place in its world. The duties of\u00a0both main character and narrator fall to W.D.: a raven and wizard\u2019s familiar. The player, meanwhile,\u00a0takes the role of the scheming and inept wizard who is sending W.D. telepathic commands.<\/p>\n

Speculative Fiction<\/em> is a deliberately challenging text adventure that aims to make tough puzzles\u00a0more playable without reducing their difficulty. And probably the most effective weapon in its\u00a0arsenal is not just essentially giving the parser a likeable personality in W.D., but also setting up his\u00a0relationship with the wizard as one in which we sympathise with the entertaining raven over his\u00a0deceptive and immoral boss \u2013 even though the latter character is our own role in the game. One\u00a0ending even concludes, with considerable accuracy:<\/p>\n

*** You’ve won! You have a long and destructive career in magical accounting. No one cares\u00a0about you anyway. W.D. was the real hero. ***<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

W.D. is a chatty, easy-going fellow: fond of shiny objects and raw food; occasionally limited by his\u00a0avian nature; mostly loyal to his boss. He\u2019s also very much a character we provide instructions to,\u00a0rather than a vessel under our absolute control. In addition to refusing certain actions for which he\u00a0lacks the dexterity, one puzzle hinges on acquiring a respawning item that W.D. will gobble up on\u00a0sight and in another instance he ignores your commands altogether to go on a rant.<\/p>\n

This is certainly a highly anthropomorphised raven, but his physicality as a bird permeates the\u00a0gameplay (although his ability to fly is rarely utilised), and his narration conveys an appealingly\u00a0cartoonish take on a corvid\u2019s perspective.<\/p>\n

Speculative Fiction<\/em> is, of course, not a character study. It\u2019s a puzzle game, it\u2019s structured around\u00a0puzzles and W.D. is our means of interacting with them. The puzzles certainly benefit from W.D., but\u00a0the reverse is perhaps less true. At his best W.D. sounds like this:<\/p>\n

>look in pockets
\nHey, hey, there’s a magic wand in one of the pockets! Man, the fat guy didn’t even think it\u00a0was worth taking? That’s just sad.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And at his worst, he sounds like this:<\/p>\n

>disconnect brown
\nWhich do you mean, the brown wossname or the brown receptacle?<\/p>\n

>wossname
\nDisconnected.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The latter dialogue coming from that troublesome fourth lurker in the triangle of identities: whoever\u00a0wrote the parser\u2019s default messages. The thing is that for a relatively large and complicated puzzle\u00a0game, it\u2019s difficult to write a characterful response to every command \u2013 especially mechanical and\u00a0perfunctory actions, and even more especially for the actions players take while fumbling with the\u00a0puzzles and parser. It\u2019s not impossible to do, as other authors have demonstrated, but it is laborious\u00a0\u00a0and unrewarding \u2013 and also probably unnecessary for a game, like this, that wants to focus on solid\u00a0puzzles. W.D. is a cool character, used efficiently.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

C.E.J. Pacian writes on New Rat City in rat chaos, Kadro in Andromeda Dreaming, and W.D. in Speculative Fiction. \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,2],"tags":[36,40,54,48,45,37,46,47,49],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/xyzzyawards.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/xyzzyawards.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/xyzzyawards.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/xyzzyawards.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/xyzzyawards.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=102"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/xyzzyawards.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":143,"href":"http:\/\/xyzzyawards.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102\/revisions\/143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/xyzzyawards.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/xyzzyawards.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/xyzzyawards.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}