reflection on Quest for the Ban Hammer

Inspiration

We were encouraged at the start of this project to make a quarantine inspired text adventure. One of the aspects of quarantine I’ve found most interesting, is taking note of how communications, relationships, and communities have adapted and been transformed as they’re forced to exist through various social media ecosystems. Now that almost all interpersonal action takes place within these platforms, I feel it’s worth exploring the characteristics of these various mediums. An easy way of eking out some clues as to the nature of a medium, is to try translating an artifact through it, and observing what the result is like, how it’s changed, and what decisions had to be made along the way. Discord is thoroughly mod-able through bots, and is already text centric, so I thought it would be a perfect fit for this experiment.

​ Oughts’ going in

What about Discord makes it different than playing in a glorified console window? What are its unique verbs? What is it like to play a game through a social media platform?

An obvious translation is to make Discord channels act as equivalents for traditional text adventure’s rooms. But in Discord messaging is not necessarily be linear, or confined to the channel the PC was currently in. This forces players to interact with the game as they might with a more contemporary user interface: looking around the screen for interaction possibilities and notifications, instead of just from the top to bottom of the screen as one would in a console.

Discord does a significant amount of work when a link is posted: automatically scraping it for an illustrative thumbnail and allowing users to hypertextually teleport themselves to the corresponding page with a single click. This has the effect of seamlessly connecting Discord to the breathing internet. On a similar train of thought, the way Discord allows users to painlessly upload (by simply dragging/dropping) and download files seems very particular to social medium platforms of our day. Creating another seamless connection between the application and our local networks. This thinking made me want to find ways to include link sharing and file transferring as necessary verbs in my game.

Finally, emoji and emotes have become ubiquitous in online parlance, so I wanted to honour the way in which they’re used alongside traditional characters to express and communicate textually.

Thoughts going in

As a large portion of my mental resources were taken up with musings over the particularities and potentials of Discord as a ludic medium, and increasingly with how Discord APIs would allow me to programmatically interface with the platform. It was really hard for me not to make the narrative a meta adventure about Discord itself, similar to the way in which many early text adventures contained meta stories about computers themselves.

As bots in Discord are ostensibly just user accounts controlled by computer programs, there wasn’t a real way to have an omniscient voice or narrator that you might have in traditional text adventures. I therefore decided it would be important to have a “Body” bot, representing the PC, which could provide inner monologues distinct from the detached voice of the Dissonance bot which represented the server’s owner and the game’s antagonist. Throughout development I sometimes found myself inconsistently employing these voices and metaphors, which to some extent lead to a less satisfying and more frustrating puzzling experience.

Thoughts throughout

The vast majority of my time was spent on technical development: setting up a framework which supported parsing of phrases, links, file transfers, and (emoji) reactions as well as more traditional text adventure’s room/object relationships. I spent many days on a parsing system which supported prepositions and indirect objects which I ended up not having complicated enough puzzles and populated enough worlds to appropriately use.

The first in class playtests led me to recognize the need for more feedback on incorrect actions to direct the player towards solutions. This also helped avoid the undesirable feeling that actions were entering into a meaningless void, impact less and unrecognized by the game world.

Unfortunately, some game-breaking bugs introduced when I scaled the program up to support multiple servers meant that players could only experience the first third of the game. I later conducted another, extra-curricular playtest with a roommate to get feedback on the remaining untested areas of the game. In general these tests helped me add more hints where needed to guide players, I began bolding keywords and sentences, for instance.

Reflections

In two of the three play testers, the fact that the game was played in Discord, with platform-specific verbs seemed to be a novel and exciting experience, while for the other tester it seemed to be somewhat anxiety inducing. Being able to communicate through native discord verbs like links, emojis, roles, and file transfers seemed to garner a general positive and excited response. There also seemed to be something about having no idea what types of verbs even exist that seemed to generate a modest sense of wonder, curiosity, and creativity.

I haven’t conducted enough playtests or spent long enough time away from the project to have many broader confident takeaways, however. Aside from the conclusion that at least as a onetime gimmick, players seem to be intrigued and excited by the translation of old game design archetypes into well-known, contemporary, and unexpectedly ludic mediums.