Here's what's great about a Call of Cthulhu interactive fiction: you can peer at the unspeakable evils, go mad, be sent to a lunatic asylum, and gruesomely die as often as you want -- and then UNDO to play on, your protagonist unsullied by madness while the player has seen into the abyss over and over.
The King of Shreds and Patches is Jimmy Maher's adaptation of a Call of Cthulhu module by Justin Tynes, and created with the permission of Chaosium. It's interactive fiction, but IF bolstered by atypical extras: a graphical map that develops during play, a goal-tracking system that keeps track of what you're supposed to be working on at the moment, and context-based hints. A characteristic it shares with some other very recent releases -- notably Aaron Reed's massive Blue Lacuna -- is its willingness to adopt gameplay conventions from other forms of gaming in order to make play more accessible to people who haven't spent their whole lives playing IF.
In other formal respects, The King of Shreds and Patches is notable not so much for any specific features as for its scope, solidity, and ability to pull together many already-known IF virtues. There's extensive conversation, and (more surprisingly) combat; not randomized fight scenes, but combat puzzles of the sort where there are multiple ways to block or disarm the opponent but you only have a few moves to think of one. The setting is Elizabethan London, just -- the Queen is dying -- and the geography and props give a sense of period, though the dialogue and conception of the universe sometimes seem a bit more modern; both of which elements are probably true to the original RPG module, though I imagine Jimmy must have done a fair amount of research to fill in such details as the correct working of a printing press ca. 1600.
But what makes the game interesting from an interactive storytelling perspective is its particular use of the losing endings: the way it invites the player to go mad, and go mad, and go mad again (and then UNDO and happily escape). In this respect it is not unlike Anchorhead, another game that gives depths to the protagonist's terror by implementing many forms of death and making it likely that the player will meet quite a few of them before succeeding.
The difference is that in Anchorhead, those deaths are usually the result of the player's failure: failure to solve a difficult puzzle in time, failure to plan ahead. When the protagonist succeeds, it is through cunning, skill, and determination. In The King of Shreds and Patches, the emphasis on terrible (yet fascinating) secrets is stronger, and the descriptions of many dread documents and other occult objects lure the player on to look. The player's interest in finding out what is going on is at odds with the protagonist's need to survive. I rarely died in The King of Shreds and Patches without knowing what I was getting into and bringing that outcome on myself deliberately.
I didn't think, ultimately, that The King of Shreds and Patches achieved quite Anchorhead's successes with mood and menace expressed through setting. The writing is a little less well observed and the set scenes less subtle. But it achieves something else instead. The temptation to discover the unspeakable, and the imperative not to, is the main conflict in Lovecraftian stories and a core mechanic in Call of Cthulhu. Maher's undo-able deaths -- some of which are merely horrific, others surprisingly evocative -- handle the same problem but in a way unique to his medium.
Having the experience of giving in to that temptation makes the overall story richer and deeper, because it allows the player to experience the world fully even as the protagonist absolutely must not.
N.B.: The King of Shreds and Patches was built using Glulx. To play the game, you need to install a Glulx interpreter on your machine, and download the game file. We link to Glulx interpreters for PC, Mac, and Linux above. Those new to interactive fiction may also be interested in the introduction found here.
I was thinking about this in
I was thinking about this in terms of table top play and it wouldn't seem right somehow? I think it's because in table top you don't have alot of prewritten material to read, typically, as part of the pacing. So going off to die, even if you can undo, seems silly, because there is no content there really and no one is terribly interested in making content for it at the moment of play because it'll all get undone anyway.
Yeah, probably way off topic. ;)
Yeah, I definitely think
Yeah, I definitely think this is a technique that wouldn't have worked in the original medium.
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Emily Short
Cumulative vs Instant
Well that's true. But in the table-top game, the effect is cumulative. Yes, there is a downside to reading those oh-so-tempting documents, but it isn't necessarily instantly apparent. After all, it's a rare game of CoC that doesn't end with everyone going mad, even if they do manage to save the world into the bargain. And yes, an obsessive GM will indeed prepare content stuff like that. (Not that I ever have, you understand...)
But that may be an inappropriate model for IF, where subtle cumulative effects can really piss the player off - if a minor choice they made early on turns out to tip the balance at a later point, then they may feel entitled to consider that unfair.
I'm not talking about leaving a critical object behind here - I'm talking about, say, examining a bookcase incrementing a hypothetical "sanity" counter that later on means that you go mad from something that would have been OK if you hadn't examined the bookcase at the start.
Those are excellent
Those are excellent points.
The only way to make your bookcase situation fair, I think, would be to expose the stats to the player, so he can see his SAN effects changing like the RPG players can. Except then the problem is you get the UNDO cycle back again, because most players will respond to their sanity loss like this:
>X BOOKSHELF
(stuff, SAN results)
>UNDO
...
...only instead of this being a rare and interesting effect where the player deliberately does something really risky and then pulls back from the madness ending, you have a frequent and largely annoying effect where the player learns minor secrets and then has to go through the UNDOing step to optimize his SAN stats. Way less fun.
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Emily Short
look at bookshelf, undo..
When what is gained by looking at an item, for example, is a sanity loss coupled with another stat increase, undoing will work. But when the player gains knowledge from looking at the books in the library, for example steps for a ritual or a planet alignment to solve a puzzle later, undoing will not remove this knowledge from the player's mind..
The pacing in a tabletop game being crated by the game master, tipping the odds in one direction or another to increase suspense/drama/fun/insanity is something that IF is, from what I can see, not currently trying to achieve.
There's an article on how Eidos is collecting data on what the players are doing in Tomb Raider, and categorizing them in archetypes. Being able to track what your player is doing and hitting him back with something that will throw him off his game (or give him more of what he enjoys) is definitely something that gives an edge to pen & paper. We are definitely living in interesting times.
In case it wasn't clear, I
In case it wasn't clear, I was arguing for why X BOOKSHELF. UNDO. would have been a poor thing to encourage. The reason KoSaP's UNDOable deaths work is that they provide glimpses into the evocative nether truth of the world -- things the player might be interested in reading about -- but offer no actual gameplay advantage. There are no hints in the game that the player can learn only by sacrificing sanity. It's a different dynamic from the tabletop game, but it has to be.
"The pacing in a tabletop game being crated by the game master, tipping the odds in one direction or another to increase suspense/drama/fun/insanity is something that IF is, from what I can see, not currently trying to achieve."
Yes and no. IF isn't mostly about tipping odds, because there are so many problems with randomized/odds-based outcomes in IF (partly because it is possible to UNDO a turn if the player doesn't like what happened).
But that's not to say that no IF is designed around detecting what the player is interested in and trying to provide more of that, or bringing out dramatic events to nudge along a stuck player, or otherwise detecting pacing problems and responding to them. The most obvious recent example is Blue Lacuna, which doesn't always work perfectly but is certainly trying to do all these things. (Aaron Reed discusses this point a bit in his design paper here: http://www.lacunastory.com/overview-paper.pdf.)
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Emily Short
Background color
Is there some way to change the background color? This game seems interesting, but the papyrus background makes it hard to play, and the game overrides any style changes.
Colorless Version
Amonwilde,
There is no option to change the background color within the game itself. However, in response to several comments such as yours I've created a version that does not alter your default text colors. You can grab that at http://maher.filfre.net/King/King_colorless.zip if you like. I'm afraid, however, that save files are not interchangeable between the two versions.
...only instead of this
...only instead of this being a rare and interesting effect where the player deliberately does something really risky and then pulls back from the madness ending, you have a frequent and largely annoying effect where the player learns minor secrets and then has to go through the UNDOing step to optimize his SAN stats. Way less fun.
Yeah, I think your right.
It's like you have an insane, horrible death and go OMG! NOOOOO(but cooool too seeee!)! UNDO!
While a sanity point loss? You go "Oh, that's annoying. Undo."
Sanity Points and Undo
By making Sanity points persistent over UNDOs, you get the best of both worlds. You create a tension in the player between wanting to see cool madness endings but also wanting to finish the game without going insane. This allows the player to see all the work the author went to, but also keep Sanity points meaningful.
I think the Next Big Thing will be games that keep track of how the player is playing, and tailoring the experience to be more enjoyable and more challenging based on this information. Consider a FPS that notices that the player is cautious and sneaky more than balls out aggressive, and so ramps up the difficulty for sneaky situations. Either the player must be super sneaky, or try a new strategy. Both options lead to greater satisfaction.
Really enjoying the King of Shreds and Patches!
Another form of horror
I hit an interesting dead end while playing King of Shreds and Patches, and while probably unintentional, it did bring me more closely into the character. (I'm going to be intentionally vague here to avoid spoilers.) It happened on the day after a trip out of town, when I discovered that another valued ally was in danger and set out in search. But the most likely location proved guarded and deadly! I wandered from place to place, all over the city, racking my brain for clues, gradually growing more and more hopeless as attempt after attempt met with failure. I had a great deal of hints as to what might be going on, but nothing I could use.
And then I realized that I, the player, was inhabiting the same place of frustration as the character. Fortunately, I had an option he did not: I stopped playing.
Great game so far, though.
Thank you
Thanks for the colorless version...I really appreciate it.
How to undo player learning
Of course
undoought to cause the player not to know the secret - and if the secret is minor enough, that is not hard. Let's say the player reads a password. Undoing that would mean that the password is randomised, so that the word read has no meaning in the game.The bigger the secret - that is: the more it is vital to the story -, the harder undoing becomes. When I learn the powers of the central artifact, or the real reason why the king is always cloaked, it becomes hard to create an alternative when the player undoes.