Okay, for the long overdued blogging exercise, I am using the classic Sierra graphical adventure series, particularly Roberta Williams’ King’s Quest series (from 1-4).
Let’s take the first one, Kinq’s Quest : Quest for the Crown, released in 1984 for the personal computer. King’s Quest is set in a fantasy medieval kingdom ‘Daventry’.
The plot is simple really; the old and frail King Edward was looking for a worthy successor to his Kingdom and for it, he sends his bravest knight, Sir Graham to retrieve three magical items: the magic mirror, shield and chest, all which have been stolen. If Sir Graham succeeds, he will become the next king.
So we take the role of Sir Graham, and the game environment is sort of three dimensional in a sense that you’re able to move him in any direction and the maps are continuous (if you keep going west by exiting the screen from the left hand side, you will eventually appear in the same screen again from the east). Freedom of movement is definitely the revolutionary thing about this game, and the other thing is the concept of ‘Text Input’ as a means of interaction. Just like we saw in ‘Façade’, you interact with the game universe by typing things like “Look around”, “Open door”, or “Talk to the Lady” etc. The game has some sort of natural language processing for recognizing the player’s intentions through interpreting the text input, and I must say although it is somewhat restricted (like you can’t actually do funny things such as, well, whatever you imagine you can do with the f-word…), it is quite consistent and reliable, and they do give you a sense of freedom and interactivity.
I played this game back in 1989 and I was totally blown off by the concept of being able to roam around in a fantasy universe and try to get as much interaction with the environment as possible. The idea of the game is to gather up as much clues about what you need to do next, and by exploring things and talking to people (or creatures), you can sort of work out what needs to be done and how to do it. For me, I was lazy and I just got a walkthrough (they somehow came together with the copy of the game when I bought it, hmm…), and just follow exactly what to do, what to say, and how to do them.
Discuss the tension between agency and narrative structure within the game. Do you agree that narrative and interactivity can never co-exist? Why/why not?
Okay, so this game definitely has strong narrative elements. There is an initial state (equilibrium) of a peaceful Kingdom with an old King Edward, and this equilibrium was disrupted when the magical items’ gone missing, and we take the role of Sir Graham in order to retrieve the items and restore the disrupted state back into a new equilibrium where he assumes the position of the King.
The game seems to offer a high level of interactivity with the 3-d universe and text input. The objective of the game is to retrieve three magical items: the magic mirror, shield and chest, and they can be individually done in any order. In a sense the game is divided into smaller quests, in which to retrieve each of the items, a number of tasks need to be performed and a number of supporting items need to be gathered first. For instance, to get the magic mirror, I need to throw a bucket of water to kill the dragon guarding the magic mirror in the dungeon underneath a hidden well. So we need to figure out, where the hidden well is, and once you found it, how to get into the dungeon and how to kill the dragon.
Sometimes you also find items whose purpose are not clear until later in the game; for instance, you collect some pebbles near a pond somewhere only to realize that they are to be used to kill a giant with a slingshot later on. So “items gathering” is sort of the abstract design tools behind this game (maybe in a sense it is also like a puzzle because you gather items and information to solve a particular situation in order to proceed). But the interactive part of this game only comes from carefully getting the sequence right in gathering the items necessary and performing the actions required to do so, all of which eventually, lead to a predetermined set of results. The game is really an interactive puzzle with a story.
In a sense, yes I do agree that narrative and interactivity can never co-exist, because like in this game, interactivity is sort of limited in which you are not given the ability to explore anything else in the game other than the predetermined goals of the game. There are times in the game when I wish I could have done more, such as, why can’t I just trade the magic items with a witch in the game, cut a deal with her so that she could kill Edward, and made me King instead? Or why can’t I use the magical items to enrich myself and don’t care about inheriting the kingdom, or start my own Kingdom? Given the hope of full exploration of a fantasy universe and interactivity through text interface, King’s Quest seems to offer a potential in delivering both good narrative while offering full interactivity at the same time, but I guess it’s just a story book waiting to be ‘played’.
How is time represented in the game? Is there a separation of story and discourse time? How does the game’s use of time allow for interactivity?
Time seems to be standing still! You could turn the game on for 24 hours and the color of the sky in the game doesn’t change a single bit. The game has a “Save/Load Game” feature, and it’s kind of beating the purpose of full immersion because now you can save at one point of the game, and when you realize you have done something you didn’t intend to do or something which resulted in unexpected outcomes, then you can always go back to that saved state where you can start again the next course of action, making sure things get done right this time around.
Time in this game is represented as a ‘parallel universe’ kind of concept, in which the story time is completely separated with the discourse time. So long as you have a saved game at that particular state of story time, you can change the outcome of the future in the story time by going back to the saved state. Interactivity is made possible by the ability to explore the consequence of an action, and allow the player to decide whether they want to continue with that course of action or restore the previous state to try out another.
Some people call this save/load feature as cheating, or destroying the flow of the game, or even enjoyment of the game, but some people can’t live without it, but I guess it depends on how people set their expectations on what kind of experience they want to get from the game, like, for people who wants some challenge, they can choose to completely isolate themselves from the outside world to be fully immersed in the game, play the game until the character dies, and start again from the beginning, or people like to experience the story to the end of it by making sure they don’t always get killed half way…
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