Blog - On "Fairywings"-- my frustrating and depressing 'art game'

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Inspired by Ian Schreiber's latest class/post in his online Game Design Concepts course, I'm thinking about my 'art game', which I'm realizing never made it on this website in any form. As I talk about the game now, I'll answer why that is.

The game was created for a class at SCAD where we were encouraged to create expressive games - games that communicated some kind of idea or meaning through their mechanics primarily (as the class's intention was to teach what mechanics would convey particular dynamics, which could then accordingly create particular aesthetics. Or so the designer hopes, anyway.)

I had realized a while back that I had something of an artist's wound-- a topic an artist keeps returning to in their work over and over again, usually due to it being a frustrating, unsolvable puzzle from their life that haunts them. In my case, it was a relationship that I pursued for far longer than I should have. One which never quite worked out and mocked me by manifesting its themes over and over again in future relationships as well. I had realized this aspect of my life had made it into much of my drawings, paintings, music (especially the lyrics, but also the melodic portions as well) and film and play scripts I had written... but never a game.
As a game designer, I thought this was interesting, and decided to look into finally tackling it as a game.

In order to simulate my frustrations with this relationship, my design goal was to make a game that was really boring or outright unpleasant to play, but kept tempting you to keep playing it anyway.

I figured that challenge wasn't as difficult as it first seems. WoW accidentally pulls it off with grinding. Sometimes gambling ends up that way as well.
So, it seemed like designing a game that did this intentionally, and especially about such a personal emotional well, would make a good art game.

My first instincts were to make it a chase game -- after all what kind of game mechanics more instantly scream unrequited love than a chase?

Up to that point, the most serious effort I had put into expressing this part of my life was an allegorical short film I had written for one of my screenwriting classes. The film was named Fairywings. To cut a long story short, it expressed my frustrations about this relationship as a sort of twisted, dark fairytale, where a man falls in love with and pursues a fairy he finds, and not surprisingly this doesn't work out well for him and she flies away, never to be found again. I felt like this allegory could work in a game as well as a story and used it (with some tweaks like making it about a boy rather than an adult man).
I even named the game after the film's highly symbolic title.

My initial design was a non-digital prototype where you were a young boy, and after you discovering a pretty fairy out your window you could chase it forever, but never quiiite catch it.

It sucked.

I realized it was basically the same thing as Heroin Hero from the Guitar Hero episode of South Park. Just chasing the fairy didn't get across any of the issues of why this was personally frustrating, or why I was compelled to keep chasing this 'fairy'.
I needed to go deeper. (Luckily little time was spent on that failed prototype)

So I went back to the drawing board completely ('exploding' my game as became the running joke for my design process amongst the other game designers SCAD) and ended up making for the next prototype a more complex little economic system to express the frustrations.

In the new system you were still a little boy interacting with a fairy, but now you would go visit her in a clearing in the forest whenever you could. You'd bring her bread so that she could slowly, over time, leave a trail through the mysterious woods to the secret fairy lands hidden deep within, where you could live and play with her forever.
But you're a poor little kid so you have to do chores to earn an allowance to buy bread from the store, and you can't neglect your dog or he'd follow you and discover the fairy and chase her away. So, as much as you want to see the fairy to advance your progress in the game, you've got other stuff you have to do first: mow the lawn, buy the bread, play with the dog, walk to the special clearing in forest where she meets with you, etc.
The idea was that your day was never long enough to do all of those things. Some days you just simply couldn't see the fairy, making an entire day wasted on tedium building up to the anticipated days where you could finally run to the forest and see her again and get one step closer to, er, well, 'scoring'.

Worse still, as you play you begin to realize that over time she grows apart from you, and shows up at the clearing to meet with you less and less until eventually, she's never there anymore at all.
And the idea was that this would happen in such away that it was impossible to complete the breadcrumb trail before she's gone forever, leaving you with a half-completed trail leading nowhere. An empty promise that never got realized.
But this would be dragged out over a much larger period of time than the player would want to waste his time on.

I first, due to unexpected technical limitations of my personal computer having suddenly died, prototyped the game non-digitally as a board game.

The results were spectacular when I finally managed to get at least one playtest session done. ("Hey, want to play my painfully unfun board game?" is a hard sell, and makes it difficult to get playtesters...)
The girl playtesting it complained the entire time-- it was apparent I had nailed the intentionally-unpleasant side of the game. But that's easy.

What I was super pleased about was when the professor called out that it was time to pack up and turn in the games for review, my playtester refused to quit the game, believing that if she just had one more turn, maybe she could win.
I assured her that would not (could not!) happen, even told her I had spent weeks of development time ensuring the game was unbeatable, but she was determined and kept going. It happened to be that very turn where she activated my final failsafe I installed to prevent players from being able to win the game: a card that cuts the progress you made to that point in half after you've accidentally 'offended the fairy' by stepping in a fairy ring. It was this moment of desperation where she gave up hope and quit, which is to be expected.
Still-- I had successfully made a game with the reward of the end of the game hung so tantalizingly close that the player couldn't stop playing it even though she did nothing but express her hatred of it and how unpleasant it was to play from the moment she started playing the game. She wanted to continue suffering through because she felt so close to achieving... something.

I consider that my greatest accomplishment of game design, right there.

I then proceeded to start the video game version.

After all that development time over the rest of the quarter, it became interestingly apparent that the board game was more successful than the digital version.

The issue was the board itself. In order to represent the breadcrumb trail I had a sort of bookkeeping board where you put little pretzel-bits onto squares on a race-to-the-end sort of board. Yes, that's right, it was basically a race-to-the-end game, with a very intentionally irritating economic system in place in order to advance further down the board, and narrative hooks to provide the inspiration to get there.

In the video game version I instead did a procedurally generated never-ending mysterious woods... the path the breadcrumb trail changed every time, storing each 'room' of the forest it went through in an array. Get off the trail and you immediately find yourself in a never-ending loop of randomly generated rooms that never lead anywhere and eventually mysteriously spit you back out at the forest entrance no matter how far you had gotten lost.

The thing was, I discovered that the board game's solution worked better because you could SEE how close you were to the goal, and that made all the difference.
In the video game version (at least as it exists so far), you couldn't really track how close you were to achieving the end goal, so it was too easy to be cynical about your progress. Since there was literally no end in sight, it was easy to give up hope too soon. You could easily assume that, since this game is what it is, that there is no end in sight and there's no reason to continue (which is all true.)

But in the board game version, there's a space for the end, the victory condition, and it was right there on the board. It stared you in the face, clearly marked as the end. You know it's real, as you can clearly see it's there. More importantly, you could clearly see you were only, say, 5 spaces away from it. You just feel "Oh man, I'm so close... just get lucky a couple more turns and I could finally win and be done with this stupid game." All it would take is a lucky serious of events to get you to move just a few spaces ahead and win.

But of course, the game was designed to never let you get there. The dynamics even mapped well to the real events they portrayed: A lot of progress in the beginning with those flutterings of the early stages of a relationship, and then things begin to slow to a crawl like you've hit a sudden invisible wall.

Yet you could see how close you were, so you want to keep playing.


So, I've neglected ever mentioning this game here until now because, well, first of all, I clearly had a lot to say about it, and it's taken far longer than I would have liked to write the above. I'll be pleased if anyone actually reads all this. It's also difficult to express such personal demons to strangers like I am now (It's easy to see I wrote this entry in a very guarded, conservative way).
It was difficult when designing the game too-- I feel I hide behind my allegory too much there.

But also the game is at a strange unfinished stage.
I'm trying to decide what to do with it, having hit the realization of how the board game succeeds where the video game version of it fails.

It doesn't seem difficult to conceive of a way to provide some sort of feedback in the video game version that serves the same purpose as the non-digital progress board... but that would take time to implement (especially for me who will be the first to admit that writing code is not my strong suit).
Now that I'm an actual professional game developer, that kind of programming time doesn't sound appealing activity to fill up my precious spare time. (I've got plenty of games to PLAY to catch up on!)

On the other hand, the non-digital prototype worked fairly well in at least what few playtests it got-- should I just instead continue working on developing that from a quick and dirty prototype to a complete and polished board game? The idea immediately appeals to me given my fond memory of how successful the prototype was, until I think about how few people would play and experience it as compared to a simple video game online. How would I even release such a project? My only reference for such an intentionally dark, non-digital art game is my mentor's projects like Train, which aren't really being 'released' at all, technically. I'm suspecting such an approach wouldn't be nearly so successful for me.

So for now, it's in sort of a limbo. But I'm glad I've taken this time to at least explain this and my process of designing it. It gets my ideas (and demons) out.

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posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 3:27 PM  0 Comments Links to this post