1)Collaboration and Division of Labor

First, I would like to extend my gratitude to Tasha and Matthew for their efforts in structuring the project and exploring various ways to present the text, which allowed this work to successfully appear on the online platform. They also ensured that overall progress was maintained and managed the organization of meetings. I am also grateful to Melissa for her ideas and demonstrations regarding chapter breakouts, which provided us with concrete directions for implementation. Wictor’s specially designed game significantly enhanced the interactivity of our project.

During our first meeting, we had many initial ideas. Alice in Wonderland is such a classic that it has already been adapted into similar games and several films, so the purpose and form of our version were somewhat unclear to us. Given Wictor’s professional experience in game design, we even considered incorporating elements of shooting games. We also thought about how to present some of the iconic scenes from Alice in a visually engaging way, allowing players to become participants rather than merely observers bound by the text. The first meeting concluded with each person having different interpretations and ideas about the text.

Before the second online meeting, Melissa created a list identifying sections of the book that could incorporate breakout options, based on our previous discussion about providing players with different choices. Using this as a reference, we began to focus on a recurring point from our earlier discussion: Alice’s journey is a strange, absurd dream, where the dream world is filled with illogical statements, akin to the nonsensical ramblings of a dream—seemingly logical but completely irrational upon closer inspection. During this meeting, it was decided that Tasha and Matthew, both possessing coding skills and an interest in trying out platform development, would select the presentation method. Each participant chose a chapter they found intriguing, identified suitable breakout points, and considered how to integrate their own skills and creative expressions.

By the third meeting, as we began piecing everything together, it became clear that each person had a different interpretation of the bizarre and absurd aspects of the story. This diversity in perspectives made the final outcome resemble a strange, unique version of Alice‘s world.

2)My Design

Before the second meeting, I reviewed some previous projects provided on prompt pages and drafted a document expanding on the ideas discussed earlier. At the time, I considered Twine as the game platform, as not everyone in the group possessed coding skills. Twine, as a visual novel creation platform that doesn’t rely heavily on coding, would ensure that everyone could contribute. However, I appreciated Tasha and Matthew for taking on the web development task. Drawing inspiration from Wictor’s concept of a dual-world experience from the first meeting, I saw this as an opportunity to construct our own world-building narrative. In this version, players control Alice, and every choice she makes in the dream world affects a “madness meter”—the more absurd the choice, the higher the madness level. As the madness level rises, the dream world gradually fades to grey, while the real world becomes increasingly colorful. The idea is that people, through playing the game, enter a fantasy world, often drawing creativity and freedom from another world and bringing that joy and imagination back to the real world. This is somewhat akin to Murray’s idea that games attract people by transform them into new identities, offering a sense of control that is less present in the real world, and providing an opportunity for catharsis. This was my interpretation of Carroll’s work (acknowledging that there are many ways to interpret it, I chose to view it through the lens of literary nonsense, which might also reflect Carroll’s satirical take on society). However, as game designers, we needed to give players the freedom to interpret the work themselves. If players chose not to select the more “stimulating” options, the story would be interpreted as a straightforward children’s adventure narrative.

As we shifted focus for the sake of completion, we ultimately did not use Twine and instead concentrated on exploring breakout options within each chapter, allowing everyone to add their personal expressions. Considering my lack of coding experience, I wondered if I could contribute through illustration. However, due to limited time for creation, I designed options for Chapter 11, focusing not on leading the player to the correct path or a branching path but instead inserting unexpected video clips, allowing players to experience strange dreamlike sequences.

I chose video as the medium for insertion because I believe that the levels of engagement among text, video, and games increase progressively. Text, when presented alone on a webpage, can be exhausting for users without a clear reason to engage with it. Videos, on the other hand, convey a larger amount of information per second, prompting viewers to actively interpret their content, even as passive observers. Games, in contrast, offer a more active means of engagement with information that is easily absorbed by the brain.

Additionally, for the first choice involving the March Hare’s proclamation, I included a Dadaist reading video and a video about making fruit tarts (as the trial revolves around the theft of a fruit tart). Dadaism, although entirely unrelated to the story, has a serious yet nonsensical style, which I found to align well with the concept of a dream that lacks logic. The fruit tart video, in contrast, represents those dream fragments that are somewhat tied to real-life experiences but ultimately stray from rationality.

For the second option involving the judge, Bill, I included different animal videos. I thought Alice’s action of taking the judge’s pen was a particularly interesting and childlike act, so I chose to include some cute content.

The third section concerns the Hatter’s testimony, where they engage in a meaningless argument about the time for tea. Here, I included significant historical dates (such as the beginning of some brutal wars) to contrast with their trivial arguments.

In addition to video inserts, I also considered whether illustrations could capture the absurdity of the book’s text. I designed a cyberpunk-style March Hare, a design element that definitely does not belong to Carroll’s era. I also planned to have the screen filled with hats falling during the Hatter’s testimony when he mentions that he is a hat seller. I designed a steampunk top hat, a racing helmet, and a Victorian-style lady’s bonnet with a frying pan on top.

The overall design of this chapter follows Huizinga’s idea that “play is the direct opposite of seriousness”. While serious games can have educational value today, we did not want this to become a vessel for conveying educational concepts. Instead, we saw the book as an act of resistance against seriousness—much like many games themselves.

An overview of our game: Cheshire is a digital game that animates the story of Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll through a new focal point: The Cheshire Cat. Assuming the role of the mischievous character, players shape Alice’s adventure throughout Wonderland. Through banter with the story’s conventional protagonist, players (as the Cheshire Cat) decide whether to guide Alice further into her adventure or draw her back to reality. Will you wake her up or keep her dreaming?

The development process of our group project can be broken out into four key stages: ideation, narrative mapping, visual storytelling and production.

Our ideation approach was expansive at first, with the team offering up a range of different general ideas for our game — a mix of tactical thought starters (such as “erasure storytelling” and AI chatbots) and conceptual ideas (such as exploring Alice’s relationships with each of the Wonderland characters). Eventually, we landed on a game concept that centered on the Cheshire Cat. Alex had initially suggested an incredible idea for developing a Cheshire Cat that the user (as Alice) can actually dialogue with, which would insert the character into new parts of the story. Inspired by this, I shared a provocation that had the potential to transform the source text even further — what if the playable character wasn’t Alice but instead, the Cheshire Cat? 

As Alex & Leila led the narrative mapping (and the writing of net new dialogue) of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland — identifying the inflection points across the story where the Cheshire Cat can influence Alice — I went ahead and began working on developing visual assets for the game, while Brandon and Leonard started experimenting with game flow, user interactions and the coding of it all.

Only as I began developing the visual language for the game — primarily with a typographic title (a logo of sorts), the illustration of characters, and the presentation deck — did I begin to recognize how consequential the decisions that I was making would be on the final product. In some ways, visual design can often be seen as an afterthought for a game, especially one with such attention to narrative structure and decision trees. But in turning to John Tenniel’s illustrations as inspiration, it dawned on me how important the images in the original text are to telling the story and immersing the readers. Moreover, in considering ideas like “representational play” or “mimicry” or even “quantification,” it’s clear that visuals are a critical stimulus in both world building and player feedback.

In hopes of transforming the text further, guiding my design process, and perhaps taking a bit of a risk, I proposed to the group a “narrative wrapper” for our game, Cheshire. Thankfully, my group was willing to “play ball” with my zany suggestion of setting our game in the distant future. Considering that the motivation for the player to “wake [Alice] up or keep her dreaming” doesn’t explicitly show up within the game itself, I wrote a narrative that situates our game as an early invention of a society rebuilding in space — our game is essentially the interface of a device controlled by a doctor or nurse that serves as an anesthetic for surgeries that didn’t require any chemicals. Our game Cheshire, now an outdated digital artifact, was once a dream simulator that leveraged the immersive storytelling of classic novels to keep patients unconscious during various surgeries.

I know, it’s a bit of a stretch…creative writing is not something I do very often. But that narrative then propelled the futuristic illustration style and (matrix-esque) color scheme of the game itself. It also gave us permission as game designers to incorporate and view the NYPL’s scans of Tenniel’s original illustration proofs (and Carroll’s story) as the source material for the game itself (while still within the “magic circle” of the play experience).

To conclude, I found that building the game was an experience that allowed me to reconsider many of the texts we read. A specific example being, Whitson’s “Foucault’s Fitbit: Governance and Gamification.” After reading this text and revisiting the designs I put together, it became clear that I was emulating a kind of data visualization or quantification aesthetic that’s reminiscent of FitBit and health tracking. In fact, I’m sure that my own (and the group’s) familiarity with tools like sleep tracking made the game that much easier to conceptualize and put together. Unsurprisingly, a feature that I would add to Cheshire, if we were given more time, would be additional visual feedback stimulus while the player navigates the game — perhaps, Alice’s vitals, some kind of decision map/tree, how close she is to waking up, etc. — as a means to further guide the player.

I’m very appreciative of my group, what a talented and kind bunch!

One thing that struck me about Alice in Wonderland is that despite its playfulness, it is incredibly rigid. Wonderland is Wonderland, and Alice is Alice – neither will compromise. Carroll will play with conventions and expectations and scale, but his characters are resolute. They will not grow or change at heart (ironically), and that’s where his sense of play takes hold. Alice and Wonderland (both the place and its inhabitants) are the magic circle for the readers, so long as they are together. The White Rabbit is still the White Rabbit whether he reads the indictment or the Dada Manifestos, so long as his appearance is sharp and he fusses and frets over protocol. So, what’s the best way to show the reader the unchanging nature of the outcome and the inevitability of the plot? A Choose Your Own Adventure game, of course!

We were inspired by Murray’s concept of the kaleidoscopic narrative to intrigue the audience with their own entrances and exits, wondering what they had missed. To take it further, by keeping the overall plot the same but changing the specific words the character’s say or the specific actions they may take, we called upon the Lev Kuleshov technique, allowing the reader to juxtapose the same characters and plot with the differences from scene to scene. When faced with variations of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat”, does the original take on new meaning? What if Alice recites the words of Pink Floyd or Rush rather than the text You Are Old, Father William? We use this technique to ask: How can we keep the reader on their toes? How can we bar them from taking the text for granted? Furthermore, we sought to emulate her method of “Simulation and Destiny”, granting the player supposed agency and variation while having the end be inevitable.

In creating this game, we decided to host our own website (https://ahutnick.github.io/alice02/) powered by JavaScript (specifically JQuery) rather than use Twine or a similar software simply because Matthew and I were already familiar with web development and JS, and we wanted to make sure that we had every element of the game easily at our disposal. We each contributed our own chapter, adding our own forks in the road along the way (mine was Chapter VII). My other task was to assemble the backend of the website. I wrote the JQuery script to call the route that the player takes on the screen, bit by bit. Each screen has its own object in an attached JSON file, which contain: if the screen has a random event, the chapter name, the text (including HTML tags), and the corresponding choice or choices for that screen. The choice(s) would populate buttons at the bottom of the page.

If we were to have more time, I would personally love to add a chapter select menu as well as the ability for the player to randomize not only the chapter order, but the screen order, shuffling them like a deck of cards. Imagining hopping from Alice growing in the court room to Bill the Lizard being punted into the sky to the Hatter singing Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat. I feel like this would be an excellent way to open up the text, but unfortunately, with loading everything in, testing the JS, and deploying the site, I didn’t have the time. We definitely had to narrow scope over the course of this project. I personally had wanted to add in a mini-game of my own with the Dormouse’s story, but the existing structure made it more effort than it was worth. Instead, I looked for ways for the existing choice structure to break apart the storytelling experience.

I was impressed by how differently everyone’s chapter plays out. Melissa’s Chapter IV focuses on Alice primarily being Alice – there is a right and a wrong choice, and the player is mostly led to make the right choice after making the wrong one (so long as they didn’t pick that Alice woke up). Matthew’s Chapter V focuses on not only the advice that the Caterpillar gives Alice, but also Alice’s lack of control over what she can say (along with some amazing musical references). My Chapter VII focuses on the illusion of choice and replay-ability – there are a lot of silly variants and random text, but in the end, no matter what, the tea party will be a disaster. Wiktor’s Chapter 8 mini-game captures the frustration exactly. Wandi’s Chapter XI embraces the chaos of the courtroom with modern and meta references without upsetting the delicate balance of Alice or Wonderland. I genuinely enjoyed playing through everyone’s routes while testing the code.

When confronted with the prospect of turning Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland into a game, I was fascinated by the idea of the reader-as-player introduced by Upton in The Aesthetics of Play. As everyday readers and literary scholars alike have engaged Carroll’s text in their own analyses of feminism, Victorian culture, British imperialism, narrative lens, and various other interpretive angles, what sorts of reactions and observations might be opened up through an interactive telling of the story? How can a “game” version of a literary text reveal new modes of meaning-making? Like Upton, I was interested in using play to examine “how meaning-making play is not merely a feature of play, but permeates virtually every aspect of human culture — how understanding the structure of play helps us to understand the structure of books, of music, of theater, of art, and even the structure of critical theory itself” (Upton, 12). Upon a second reading of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, I thought about how the structure of the text might lend itself to a picking-apart and piecing-back-together in the form of an interactive game. In Derrida’s Writing and Difference, he presents (and subsequently rejects) a conception of structure that relies on its center: “The function of this center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure — one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure — but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the play of the structure” (Derrida, 278). With this in mind, I wondered what the interpretive “center” of Carroll’s story might be; and could this center be revealed through a reconstruction of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland? How might “play”, as experienced by the reader, contrast with the sort of “play” initiated through my group’s project?

My group determined that an interactive, decision-based game would be the best way to adapt Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. To begin our project, my group decided to map out Carroll’s original text in order to determine where we could insert decisions points for the player while moving through the story’s plot. I read through the story, and plotted each of Alice’s most consequential decisions — like drinking and eating things that changed her size, initiating conversations with other characters, and asking questions that led to more information about the world she’d found herself in — in a flowchart. This schematic allowed us to read Alice’s story in almost a Borgesian way, as a “garden of forking paths”; and separated Alice’s actions from the chronology of the original text. Because of this, my group deemed the narrative sequence of the story less important as an organizing logic than the modular interactions Alice shares with the rest of the book’s characters. Typically, I think of time as a crucial element of narrative: things need to happen in a certain order and at a consistent (or justified) pace so that readers arrive soundly at a story’s conclusion. While other themes and symbols can be subject to various interpretations, I’ve always considered the linear structure of a work of fiction to be universal to the reading experience. However, I was thrilled to find that reading took on a new (and rather timeless) dimension through the playing of my group’s game. Depending on the choices a player/reader makes, one moves through the story at a unique pace. Some decisions will result in an abrupt end to the story; while others bring Alice towards new experiences and interactions, regardless of their order of appearance in the original text. 

Given the news of Robert Coover’s death last week, I was reminded of “The Babysitter”, his short story which elegantly toggles between past, present, and future while moving the reader through a turbulent narrative. Unlike my group’s retelling of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Coover’s story is not actually interactive (although it sometimes feels this way, what with Coover’s repeated making and unmaking of his characters’ decisions); but I think that both our project and Coover’s story are good models for allowing the reader/player to respond to narrative time as it is liberated from the “center” of a story. As a result, players of my group’s game can respond to time as a variable in Alice’s narrative, interjecting their own hopes and expectations about the narrative’s pace into their experience with the game text. By understanding the structure of the game as independent of time — and instead centered around decision-making — I was able to better understand how time and linearity are used in Carroll’s original text.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlzrlzlH2QI?si=cUoN7lSgN0eY4U2G&w=560&h=315]

An overview of four popular series of detective games using Janet H. Murray’s “Hamlet on the Holodeck” concepts and Roger Caillois’s aspects of game theory from “Man, Play and Games,” and an example of horror mystery gaming using Hunt-a-Killer’s Blair Witch: Season One game.

For Jeff Allred “Building, Playing, Thinking: Theory and Practice of Play in the Digital Humanities, Fall 2024,” CUNY Graduate Center, Sept. 26, 2024.

Clue/Cluedo:

Clue

Catch the culprit of a crime by identifying who did it, with what, and where.

Chronicles of Crime:

Chronicles of Crime

Lay out the case, interrogate suspects, and investigate crime scenes with your phone.

Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game

Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game

Collaborate in an FBI unit to solve cases using high-tech & traditional techniques.

Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective: The Thames Murders & Other Cases:

Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective: The Thames Murders & Other Cases

The game is afoot as you and your irregular friends search Victorian London for clues

Hunt-a-Killer: Blair Witch

Hunt a Killer: Blair Witch

Detectives work together to solve an epic 6 episode case.

Video also excerpts clips from:

The Blair Witch Project (1999) Trailer #1 | Movieclips Classic Trailers

The Blair Witch Project (1999) Trailer #1 | Movieclips Classic Trailers

Check out the official The Blair Witch Project (1999) Trailer starring Heather Donahue! Let us know what you think in the comments below. ► Buy or Rent on FandangoNOW: https://www.fandangonow.com/details/movie/the-blair-witch-project-1999/MMV2F2ED0F3AA0D634B6AB62ED65FF8FC013?ele=searchresult&elc=the%20blair%20wi&eli=0&eci=movies&cmp=MCYT_YouTube_Desc Subscribe to the channel and click the bell icon to stay up to date on all your favorite movies.

The Dice Tower: A Comprison of Chronicles of Crime & Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game with Chris Dias

A Comprison of Chronicles of Crime & Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game with Chris Dias

Chris from Dias Ex Machina takes a look at and compares Chronicles of Crime and Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game! Check out the friendliest conventions on Earth! Dice Tower East! – www.dicetowereast.com (July 1-5, 2020) Dice Tower West! – www.dicetowerwest.com (Feb 26 – Mar 1, 2020) Dice Tower Cruise!

The Dice Tower: Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective Review – with the Game Boy Geek

Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective Review – with the Game Boy Geek

Dan examines this deduction game 00:00 – Introduction 01:20 – Game overview 05:34 – Final thoughts Buy great games at https://www.gamenerdz.com/ Find more reviews and videos at http://www.dicetower.com

First, who knew that Alex had his finger on the pulse like that? The COMMENTS section following the article is a fascinating window into some of the issues we’re playing with this term (sorry): some commenters see an enjoyable and subversive “hustle”; some see a counterludic structure of gamified exploitation being exposed by canny performance artists; some see a fascinating metagame at work; others see what Huizinga calls the “spoil-sport” ruining the Bike Angels game in a “this is why we can’t have nice things” vein.

Second, as we look at Montfort and Strickland’s project, I wanted to alert you to an important precursor, Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes (1960), a paper-based machine of sorts that generates 100 trillion sonnets and was the founding act, more or less of OULIPO, a collective of mostly French avant-garde writers (the acronym translates to “workshop for potential literature”) who experimented algorithmic and other hacks to play with words. Montfort and Strickland are quite aware of this legacy and I think the Spar project is an homage of sorts.

Here’s a cute early Web transposition of Queneau’s project (the Interwebs used to be fun, folks!). If anyone is interested in histories of the avant garde, there are lots of final project possibilities re: OULIPO, Surrealism, Fluxus, etc. etc.

Oh yeah: one more thing. I shared an open link to the NYT piece, but in case you don’t know, all CUNY folk get free digital access to the NYT! And the WSJ (Whomp whomp).

While examining some of the theories of play by Johan Huizinga, and Roger Caillois, there are various lenses through which to view the practice of playing board games. Board games, as an instance of structured and often communal play, show many of the theoretical principles of play that we use and discuss often, revealing how play operates both as a formalized system and as an escape into a different kind of reality.

Huizinga’s concept of the “magic circle” is a fitting way to begin this analysis. In Homo Ludens (1938), Huizinga argues that “play” takes place in a “magic circle,” a space separate from the real world where the rules of ordinary life are suspended, and new rules—those of the game—are enforced. Huizinga put it best when we choose to use the board game reality instead of the one we currently exist in. When engaging in a board game, players willingly enter this “magic circle,” agreeing to follow the game’s rules and inhabit the reality in the world that is manifested. Whether you’re playing chess, or your own Hide and Capture game, the game’s mechanics construct a separate realm of interaction, competition, and strategy. Within this space, actions that might be inconsequential or nonsensical outside the game gain importance. Rolling dice, collecting cards, or moving tokens becomes meaningful because all players agree that to progress, we must adhere to the game logic and rules accompanying the space.

The “magic circle” concept becomes especially potent in cooperative board games like Pandemic or Arkham Horror, where players must work together against the game’s mechanics. In these contexts, the boundary between the game and real life becomes more visible. While playing, participants temporarily inhabit roles like virus-fighting specialists or supernatural investigators, and the stakes of success or failure exist only within the game’s world. Yet, this play often has emotional or social significance outside of the circle, such as fostering teamwork or bonding among players.

Caillois’ structuralist divisions in Man, Play, and Games (1958) offer another useful perspective, particularly in classifying the types of play that manifest in board games. Caillois categorizes play into four main types: agon (competition), alea (chance), mimicry (role-playing), and ilinx (disruption or dizziness). Most board games feature a combination of these elements, though some lean more heavily toward one category. Competitive games like Monopoly or Risk emphasize agon, where the primary drive is outwitting or outplaying opponents. In contrast, games like Candyland or Snakes and Ladders highlight alea, where success depends largely on chance. I enjoy games of agon more so than games based on chance purely for the competitiveness

Games like Dungeons & Dragons incorporate mimicry, as players assume roles and immerse themselves in narrative worlds. Ilinx might be less common in traditional board games, but certain party games, like Twister, introduce elements of physical disorientation and chaos that fit this category. Understanding how these categories of play intersect in a given game can offer insight into the player experience. For instance, Hide and Capture likely balances agon (through strategic decision-making) with mimicry (perhaps in the form of hidden roles or bluffing), creating a layered and dynamic play experience.

In conclusion, board games provide a rich site for examining various theories of play. Huizinga’s magic circle is seen in the way players step into the game’s world, and Caillois’ categories of play help break down the mechanics of different games, Ultimately, board games are not just a form of leisure but a structured way to experience alternative realities, practice problem-solving, and build social connections, all while navigating the fine line between play and the “real” world.

There’s an undeniable pleasure found in the act of creation within an enclosed system that elicits the fun in many famous games. To take a blank canvas and use only what’s available to you, to make whatever you can push the boundaries to allow yourself to make. To go about things one step at a time to eventually end up with a massive and satisfying end product. People are building entire cities or computers in Minecraft, vast interconnected narratives in D&D, or brand new games and experiences within Super Mario Maker.

“The structures, limits, and materials of the world are not enemies poised against human creativity and experience, but rather support creativity and experience,” as Ian Bogost claims, and it’s clear that this is particularly true when giving players any method of creation. They will take your rules and push them to the very limit, working within your framework to make things you never even considered possible, and this is fun for the players. Creation under strict limitations elicits clever problem-solving from the user, which makes this a game.

In this sense, can one consider a game engine such as Unity to be a game? In many ways, the act of development elicits the same pleasures found in these other games: chipping away at a product to eventually make something massive and grand, streamlining the efficiency and output of your code (akin to the programming-like pleasures derived from Factorio), and then taking the game objects you’ve created and placing them in interesting ways to make interesting levels or stories.

Though it’s clear why the general public has never considered a product like Unity to be the sandbox experience of their dreams. As Bogost states, “The pleasure of limits arises from the experience of deliberately working within them,” and in a product like Unity, there simply aren’t any limits or rules to constrain the user. You can make, literally, ANYTHING. That amount of freedom is daunting and paralyzing, leaving many who start game development overwhelmed and unsure of where to start.

Perhaps this is why the practice of “game-jams” (making a game based around a certain theme under a timeframe) is so common in the field, especially among beginners. Having full, unrestricted freedom is so paralyzing that the only way anyone can truly appreciate the game-like qualities of game development is by finding any kind of box to stay inside of

Understanding the daunting freedom of a game engine like Unity makes me wonder if this is truly the best place to start for those interested in game development, as many in the profession tend to recommend. Of course, once you get past the initial paralysis and understand how to self-impose your limits, you can eventually find the similar pleasures found in creative-building games like Minecraft. Still, I consistently see people on game dev forums who just started and have no clue what to do after learning the program, and many outright give up.

This thinking has brought my attention to the game development engine PICO-8. This program seems determined to provide an answer to the limitless freedom other popular engines offer, generating a “playful” alternative to game development.

PICO-8 is a “fantasy console,” a virtual system that mimics the limited graphics and audio of 8-bit systems of the 1980s. It forces the user to work with a 128×128-pixel display, 16 colors, 4-channel audio, an all-in-one development environment, 8192 maximum tokens of code, and many other limitations. 

I’ve yet to experiment with the engine myself, but writing this has made me grow more and more interested in trying it. Not only do its strict limitations allow for playful and creative problem-solving and a forced adherence to a smaller scope, but the “fantasy console” seems like it would elicit much of Caillois’ Mimicry, as you’re effectively role-playing as an 80s game developer who must make a game under the constraints of their technology of the era, adding an extra layer of playfulness to the development experience.

So, perhaps in the future, when someone asks me how to best start learning game development, I may tell them to save Unity for later and go straight to PICO-8, as the limitations and smaller scope it provides may help them find the playfulness in the hobby sooner than with Unity.

I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s near Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, home to the game company that originally published Dungeons & Dragons. D&D is generally considered the definitive first tabletop role-playing game, though I imagine more people have only heard of it through media (the 1980s cartoon show, various movies, references in the Netflix show Stranger Things) or by its cultural reputation (ranging from the Satanic Panic to modern streaming web shows). I personally knew a few of the designers and artists involved with the company back then, and I ended up teaching the game to many people over the years.

Much of the scope Roger Caillois borrows from J. Huizinga (voluntary activity, not “real life,” limited in time and place, rules to create order) can be used to fit such types of role-playing games. The notion of exclusivity (“This is for us, not for the ‘others'” [Huizinga, p. 12]) echoes in the D&D player culture; the genre is full of people willing to argue over the “correct” way to pretend to be an elf or a wizard. Fitting such role-playing games into Caillois’ “Classification of Games” table is a bit more challenging.

For those unfamiliar with the game itself, one player in each game of D&D – the Dungeon Master, or DM – starts by describing a scene set in a fantasy world. Each other player takes a turn describing their own character’s responses to this scene, often relying on one of six abilities (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma) and other quantified values (Armor Class, Hit Points, Speed, and so forth).

To determine the success or failure of a described action, players roll a 20-sided die (noted as d20 or 1d20) and add the value of one ability modifier and a character’s proficiency bonus (if skilled in the related task). Other modifiers may come from character features, special equipment, or magic spells. The higher the ability check total, the better the effort. The DM tracks minimum totals needed for successful results, including saving throws (rolls made to avoid character harm) and attack rolls (rolls made to hit and damage targets).

These descriptions and dice rolls continue back and forth between the DM and all the players as a narrative story grows. In this regard, it’s easy to place aspects of D&D in Caillois’ ALEA (chance) and MIMICRY (simulation) categories, using the different ability numbers assigned to each character and the results of dice rolls. However, I’m always grappling with the AGON (competition) aspect of D&D. The player characters are typically meant to be cooperating toward complementary story goals (loot the monsters’ treasure, or rescue a hostage, or do something about the latest MacGuffin). In this regard, the Dungeon Master – whose job in the game is to script or improvise obstacles, challenges, and complications – can too often be seen as the “competitor” in the experience, the person everyone else is “trying to beat.” The Dungeon Master player is actually trying to help the players craft their own characters’ stories, balanced with the necessary risk of failure (and even character death) to keep the experience engaging (the “tension” mentioned in the readings). “Doubt must remain until the end, and hinges upon denouement.” (Caillois, p. 7)

Many “fans” of D&D rarely play and instead focus on non-game aspects of Dungeons & Dragons (painting miniature figures, map making and world-building, theme-related home crafts). In this sense, how much of D&D is really “played as a game” versus what Caillois cites as “a special form of ludus,” just a hobby? And how do these aspects translate to single-player videogame versions of the D&D experience?