A buddy introduced me to an online game called A Dark Room, which basically killed my entire day - I just sat on my bed playing it. That first sentence was written three hours before this one. I had to stop writing to play the damn game. Finished it.
The first few minutes of this game are super interesting, arresting, even. You get a stark white screen with a timeline of events described in text, “the room is cold. the fire is dead.” You have a single button: “light fire”.
“the fire is burning.”
Things continue in this text-based, minimalist control fashion for a while, with no instruction on how to play the game or even what sort of game it is. There are occasional random events if you wait long enough. The fire will die down, you hear a scratching sound behind a wall. You’re soon introduced to a new character called “builder”. You stoke the fire to warm her up. Before long the game balloons into a survival, resource collection type thing, with combat and exploration.
During the first part of the game I wasn’t sure how much of a “game” it actually was. It seemed more like a linear narrative relying on attentive prompts by the player to direct and advance the story. Would such a thing still be considered a game? Temporarily forgetting about my “every game is a race” argument from Race Design Theory, what differentiates a game from any other narrative text is the capacity for interaction. David Cage and his company Quantic Dream attempt to produce games that blur the line between games and movies, however they are unequivocally video games. The player is given choices which affect the action and storyline. Occasionally, during the early ‘training’ stages of QD games, the player is asked to control the player in menial tasks, without any decision-making on any level. If the text were to be made entirely of these interactions from the player it could be argued that it would not longer be a game at all, however this is pointless and irrelevant, as this text would basically be reduced to a movie that pauses itself and requires the viewer to continuously perform some simple and menial action to unpause and ‘advance’ the plot. That would be silly.
Consider also choose-your-own-adventure books, in which the reader (or player) does have some degree of influence over the story. They might contain multiple endings, or multiple paths to the same ending. If this sort of narrative were presented on a computer screen it might be labeled (or mislabeled) a video game. The prevalence of ereaders ie. Kindle, nook, with the capacity for in text hyperlinks further blurs the line between computers and books, between video games and novels. Admittedly the CYOA genre (if it is indeed a genre, otherwise, medium) has declined in popularity seemingly in time with the public acceptance of video game culture. Despite the fact that video games have existed in some primitive form or another since the 50s (debatable), one could say that these types of books were a precursor, at least in the popular sphere, to modern video games.
As were tabletop role playing games, and board games before them. TTRPGs generally follow a common structure involving one Game Master directing the action based on some prewritten script. Again, I ask where the boundary of the video game definition lies - what is the minimum amount of digitisation needed? There are online platforms for existing typically offline games, such as online casinos or scrabble clones played via Facebook. Are we supposed to call these video games or digital versions of traditional games? I don’t believe that there is a difference.
A significant portion of modern video games fall under the category of simulations of offline games (i.e. the FIFA series, aforementioned scrabble and online casinos,) while a wider category includes simulations of other offline activities (i.e. flight simulators, tactical combat, auto racing,) and all of these are merely approximations of their real-world counterparts. As technology increases they will obviously grow more and more accurate - I guess asymptotically. As they do so, performing given actions in the game will become more procedurally similar to performing them in the real world. Digital virtual cockpits will more and more resemble actual cockpits. Regardless of this, though, at any level of sophistication and accuracy these simulations will always remain such. They will exist solely as metaphors in the same way that their primitive predecessors did. By these predecessors I am talking about this:
Very early video games such as Mike Tyson’s Punch Out! are (by today’s standards) too far from real life to be considered accurate in any sense. Some might argue that to call Punch Out! a boxing simulator would be an insult to the sport of boxing. Nevertheless, it is in some way a simplified, primitive version of a hypothetical ‘perfect’ boxing simulator (perhaps utilising some futuristic The Matrix-style virtual reality) and therefore acts as a metaphor for boxing in the same capacity as the perfect simulator would.
The next point I would like to make concerns the fundamental structure of early video games, and, by extension, modern ones. Punch Out! is not that far removed from other games of its era, for instance Space Invaders. If one were to compare player inputs (control button sequences, timing, etc) from both games they might be indistinguishable - the only real difference between the games is their graphical presentation. In one a man moves around a boxing ring, executing specific attacks at specific times while evading opponents attacks. In the other a spaceship moves around a 2-dimensional space, performing the same (or at least comparable) timed attack and evasion maneuvers. Rather than presenting these games graphically as they are, let us imagine a text-based version. Obviously it would have to be slowed down since we can’t read as quickly as we can interpret images. It might look something like this:
Opponent moves left 2 spaces.
Opponent moves forward 1 space.
Opponent attacks.
Player takes 1 damage.
Note that this reads similarly to a TTRPG GM’s narration. The antithesis to this point revolves around complexity: Modern games of the same type still follow the same structural pattern, albeit with slightly more complexity. Space combat games now successfully utilise 3-dimensional movement rather than two. Boxing simulators now use a wide range of moves. The ways in which games handle dealing and receiving damage varies in complexity - compare different health systems across various popular modern shooters.
Obviously not every video game in existence, when reduced to this data-centric form, will be indistinguishable. Most puzzle games, for example, do not have enemies. Perhaps in the future someone, maybe myself or maybe not, will construct a list of categories of games which when described this way will be incompatible with each other - a list of fundamental genres.
5 out of 6 for A Dark Room. A strong first product by Doublespeak Games and a thoughtful reminder that games don’t need to be flashy to be great or interesting.
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