Sweet Agatha

Sweet Agatha is an ambitious product in many ways. It's a two-player, limited scope, narrativist RPG; it's a literarily ambitious attempt to marry themes of love and loss to an interactive product; it's a beautifully designed (from a graphic perspective) product that gets destroyed in play.

It's a small format, 36-page book published in full color on glossy paper. It's filled with photographs -- of Agatha, of her apartment, of locations in and around the town in which she lives. Short bits of text carry the background of the story. There are forty-something "clues," cryptic little sentences, printed in triangular areas you are supposed to cut out, like:

Agatha's TV shows live security camera feeds from unknown buildings. Changing the channel only reveals different camera feeds, not television shows.

Agatha is a friend of yours; she disappeared last night. She's had a troubled past, some of which is revealed in the text of the book. You are one of the few people she trusts, and you take it upon yourself to figure out what happened to her.

The game is played by two; a sort-of gamemaster called "The Truth" and a sort-of player called "The Reader." Before the game begins, The Truth selects some of the clues, the ones he or she finds most interesting. Three clues must be introduced in each of ten scenes, except for the last, so of the 40-something, 27 or so will be used. The Reader speaks in the first person ("I go down to the lake,") while The Truth speaks in the third person. In a scene, they take turns narrating the story of the scene. A resolution must be reached in scene 10.

That's it.

In a sense, Sweet Agatha is much like a two-person jeepform; there's a setting and motivation, there is a small set of rules to guide narrative improvisation, and there's some control over narrative arc, in the requirement that ten scenes suffice to bring a resolution. That narrative arc is far less controlled than in games like My Life with Master, but the rules set is even more minimal than in typical jeepforms. The game relies to a degree on the tropes of the mystery; clues, investigation, a puzzling event to solve. But there is nothing to explicitly control action resolution or narrative outcome; the game is entirely a narrative interplay between two people. In a way, it's reminiscent of Griffin & Sabine, a sort of epistolary novel that comes with artifacts of the correspondence between the titular characters, yet that book is merely an interesting and artistic take on a conventional novelistic experience, while Sweet Agatha pushes the participants to narrative improvisation. Yet it differs from most experimental RPGs, in that the focus is on story, with improvisational acting and roleplay diminuendo.

One of its strengths, and most interesting aspects, is its tone of elegiac melancholy -- not uncommon in noir fiction (and noir is one direction in which you could take the story), but exceedingly rare in a game of any kind.

It's interesting, evocative, and well worth studying for anyone interested in diverse forms of interactive narrative.