States of Mind
This is a screenshot from the initial room of "States of Mind"
So I made this text game for my flash game development course. The assignment was to create a decision tree game, so I adapted some code I wrote for a dialog system into my new component model and turned it into a text adventure game. You play as a university student who has to go to classes while the occupy protests are going on. The protests are essentially irrelevant, though. Mostly what you do is go onto your computer and do various things, like read the news or watch youtube videos or play video games, and by doing so you alter your state of mind, which changes how you see the world and what you can do within it.
The sole interesting thing in the game is the way it’s structured. While I was planning out the game I drew up a big flow chart with all the possible parts in the game. At first it was basically a cross shape- in the center was the computer, and branching out were the three rooms (bedroom, outside and school) of the four possible mind states (sober, angry, silly, and “bejeweled”). The only differences between the branches were the text descriptions, though. That wasn’t cool enough. I wanted to incorporate some different ways to move between rooms in the different mind states. I was thinking about how hyperlinks work- they’re a lot like this kind of text adventure game. You click on a thing, and it leads you to another page. Different webpages have different ways of moving around them, though. I tried to make the way you move through the different mind states similar to how you move through the websites that caused your character to enter that mind state.
Youtube is a good example of this idea. When you watch a video on youtube it gives you a few recommended videos that are similar. Sometimes if you follow a thread of recommended videos you’ll end up back where you started. When I was writing the bedroom description of the silly mind state I included a few sentences wherein character was looking around at all their trinkets, reminiscing about the events that brought that trinket into their life, then having that anecdote remind them about another trinket, and so on and so forth. It seemed like a pretty interesting system, so I thought “why tell about this system when I could codify it?” That was the first interesting path I put into the game. When you look at mementos you get into a loop and can keep looking at mementos forever.
Bejeweled Blitz has a more linear structure to it. You start the game, you play it for one minute, then you start it over again (while you’re playing it, of course, there’s more breadth to it, but I didn’t model that). After your character in my game plays bejeweled and enters that particular mindset you are set onto a course that resembles Bejeweled Blitz. After you go to class and have a run-in with the professor you are transported directly back to your room, instead of having to walk back. It’s like a reset button. Get it?
The link structure of reading the news is a little harder to characterize. I figured there were essentially two ways of looking at it- either you start at a news article, which leads to more and more articles explaining related events and the history that led to those events, each of those articles spinning off into yet more articles, or you can think of the process as starting with all those myriad articles and filtering down into your understanding of the subject. Representing either of those processes in my game, however, would have taken a lot of work. Instead, I used the structure of the “angry” mind state to characterize the volatile nature of being mad at the world. When you push your way into the crowd of protesters you have the opportunity to either stop and examine your situation or take action. When you stop you lose progress, sometimes even to the point of sobering your mind state. The friend you meet and the people you can eavesdrop on in the crowd are goombas.
I don’t think this game turned out very well as a finished product. I don’t think there’s a great deal for the player to learn from it as a person, but I did learn something in the process of making it, and it gave me an opportunity to adapt that dialog system for my component model, which has already proven useful. Maybe someone will commiserate with it, or at least recognize the sway that computers have over our states of mind. It might be terribly interesting, but I think it has a least a little bit of truth and honesty in it, and those are things that this medium could use a bit more of.
) The number in the upper right is your “score” for the problem. You get points by putting shapes inside the goal area, and you lose points by putting shapes outside the goal area.