[Silent Sound] Revisiting My White Whale
jburneko:
So I thinker with game design from time to time. I admit I'm not crazy serious about it but there is one project I keep revisiting. It is very much my white whale. The game is called Silent Sound and it can be found here:
http://bloodthornpress.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/silent_sound.pdf
I've talked about it here before. But to recap: It's a game inspired by the video game Silent Hill 2 and particularly the thematic dynamics of that game which involves a main character confronting horrors that turn out to manifestations of his own guilt. I wrote and play tested one version of the game then scrapped it in favor of a totally ground up design you'll find in the link above. I haven't play tested that version of the game yet.
So here are the design goals of the game:
1) The game is about dealing with guilt. Each character has did something in the past they are harboring unresolved guilt for.
2) The opportunity to "make amends" in any substantial way to those wronged by their actions has long past. This is important because I want this game to be about the internal spiritual journey concerning moving past something that is no longer actionable. It's about being alone.
3) The primary antagonist is the entire setting. This is (theoretically) how the game is not just character navel gazing. The character's guilt is externalized by an active hostile setting out to get the character. I often say this is Dogs in the Vineyard in reverse. The town is here to judge YOU.
4) Success is not guaranteed. I want the full range outcomes to be live at all times from totally soul crushing despair to cathartic hard earned self-absolution.
5) I want the game to actually be fun in a kind of a Dark Existential Fantasy/Horror story kind of way. If the game is crushingly depressing or overly painful then it's not working.
To rephrase the above in terms of the two questions Vincent has been posting on his blog lately:
What are we here to do with this game?
Discover whether the characters can come to terms with their past or not.
What are we doing right this minute?
Exploring a surreal landscape, interpreting symbolic clues, and fighting demonic monsters.
In may ways, I almost think the game should play a little bit like Call of Cthulhu on a mobius strip. The characters are following clues and confronting horrors that ultimately lead back to themselves. In an ideal world this would be surprising to the players each and every time they play the game. Not so much that the clue-chain leads back to themselves but what they discover about the character along the way that they didn't know back at character creation.
Anyway, here's the point of discussion: I think my current design gets pretty close to this but at the price of being overly formulaic. What I'm looking for is feedback on that structure. Is it boringly robotic? How can it be opened up? I'm even willing to go back to the drawing board again taking this draft as sort of a "what play MIGHT look like" scripted example.
Thanks.
Jesse
jburneko:
How did this end up in AP? I thought I posted it in Game Development? If it could be moved that would be appreciated.
Jesse
hix:
Hi Jesse,
Silent Hill 2 is one of my favourite games, and I'm totally into your aim of creating a game that hits that combination of dread and self-discovery. I'm reading through the draft, but it be great if you could help me out by highlighting some things I should look at.
[*]In what ways do the players discover truths about the character that "they didn't know back at character creation"?
[*]When the game's finished and working perfectly, how do you want these insights and discovered truths to surprise the players?
[*]What are some of the ways that the players' choices affect the outcome of the story?
jburneko:
Man, those are really good questions! Thanks for asking. That's exactly what I need. Here are my answers. The first and second are related so I'll answer them kind of together.
The Flashback sequences run by The Voice of Reason player is the primary method of character development. That's how "new information" about the character and his "backstory" become developed. The Shadow player is watching these scenes for material to turn into painful, objects, messages and demons. The primary goal of those things is to provoke reflection on the part of the player about the choices he's making for his character. That's where the surprise comes in. For example, The Shadow player might notice that in the majority of Flashbacks the character takes the advice of a male character over the advice of a female character. So The Shadow player might introduce a message that says something like, "Why do you ignore the women in your life?" The player may not have even been AWARE that he was having his character do this. So now he has new material to take into the next flashback: Why DOES his character do this?
Your third question is actually the hardest. Because truthfully, maybe they don't? Or more specifically the fate of any given character is in the hands of the other players. Looking at the design I may have unintentionally created a voting mechanic. That is as a player goes through the game he is justifying and defending his character which will affect the other players choices. Does The Shadow lean on him harder than someone else? Does The Voice of Reason give him more white dice? Or do other players trade good dice with him more often?
It's possible that in many ways the player can only argue his character's case and the other players act as a jury. That is either really bad or exactly perfect. I need to give more thought to that.
Jesse
Chris_Chinn:
Hi Jesse,
Three things come to me.
The first, is about color. The Silent Hill games work really well because they're evocative and take normal places (a school, walking down the street, being in your apartment) and turn them into threatening and dangerous locations (even if nothing at the moment is threatening you).
The procedure for describing places is collaborative, which means it gets two steps - one, negotiating what this place looks like (as a normal place) and two, what's off or wrong about it in a general sense (even before the bad dice start coming out). So, while it's light in terms of procedure, it seems that it might be a little more work than necessary for what it does?
Maybe just having one player always describe locations, or have a list of pre-set locations set up, and let players add descriptive modifiers to them?
The second thing, as you mentioned, is the idea of it as a moral voting structure. It doesn't seem particularly strong or pronounced. (Though, I could see it giving the sort of WTF kind of endings you get in Silent Hill... "Wait, I won, but I won the right to live in a limbo in my head sleeping with the projection of the woman I was obsessing over who didn't even know me? It's like winning is losing!")
The third is that the penalties of losing Encounters aren't exactly clear to me as to what they mean in game. Having a Scar or a recurring Message doesn't seem enough to make me want to seriously push to avoid having them. Bad things happening is pretty much -why- you play a horror game so it's not exactly something you can threaten with, totally.
I could see something really fun where different players randomly get to toss out messages/questions to the other characters as part of play. And maybe winning control in the end, of putting together facts or truths about who a character is and what they did and why.
Chris
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