Pigeons In the Park

Deirdra Kiai is an adventure game developer, mostly working in the Wintermute engine, who has created a series of games that explore the functional space of the game in interesting ways. I'm not at all sure that's her intention, actually; my impression is that she's simply creating things to satisfy a personal aesthetic. And yet the results are interesting enough to merit a degree of intellectual analysis that most commercial titles, hackneyed as they are, do not.

In Chivalry Is Not Dead, she created a short graphic adventure where (in Doug Church's conception of the term) player expression dictated outcomes, and the "beads on a string" linearity of most graphic adventures was abandoned.

In Pigeons in the Park, she does something different; this is, in a sense a graphic adventure, but it's essentially the game equivalent of what, in prose, we'd call a vignette: a short passage that evokes a tone, a setting, and an emotional response, but does not constitute a coherent and hermetic story. Mind you, a great much of what gets published in today as "short stories" are really vignettes, lacking the pulp virtues of coherence and closure; one can readily imagine something like Pigeons in the Park appearing in, say The Paris Review, minus, of course, the things that make it interesting to us--its game-like nature.

Not that it's a game, at least by my definition of such: no goals. It's basically a hypertext story, even if implemented in an adventure game engine.

In Pigeons in the Park, you are sitting on a park bench when a green-haired chick starts talking to you. The game, if it is such, is entirely a dialog tree; no puzzles, inventory, or other distraction. Dialog is carried in text, but accompanied a somewhat poignant musical score. There may be more outcomes, but the ones I've uncovered including asking her out on a date, shutting her down because she's obviously nuts, or having a longer and somewhat loopy conversation, touching on the cultural importance of games. No action happens; the two of you sit on a bench, and the only real animation is of speaking mouths, and perhaps slight expression changes. It genuinely is a conversation, and feels like such--in contract to most adventure game conversations, which are mostly dialog selections to get the next nugget of information you need, or to trigger the next quest, with other conversational options provided merely for brief moments of entertainment. In Pigeons in the Park, the conversation is the point.

Now, I don't want to give the impression that this is some kind of landmark of game design; it's very simple, and very straightforward, but it is a use of game technology and tropes in an unusual and interesting way. It's interesting, it evokes an emotional response, and it shows that the vignette, one story-telling mode, can be expressed in the medium of the game in a fashion different from that of linear prose. That is, I think, reason sufficient to check it out.