To reiterate, with visuals...
This is a prototype of a new sort of narrative, a fully explorable environment fixed in space and time. Each page shows a map. As you flip forward through the pages, time moves forward by fifteen second intervals. The game covers four floors of a space (each represented by a colored oval) over four minutes of time.
The back of each card narrates a Moment, a particular 15-second chunk in a particular room of the space. Sometimes there are people moving through the spaces, other times you act as a camera, surveying details of the space itself.
The artifact you're looking at isn't really a game... there's no way to win or lose. The reason we've been running this test is to see how people interact with this sort of story space. How do people read when they can move through space and time at will? What do they want to DO with this power?
Already, with a mere four tests under our belt, we've gotten some very interesting results.
10/30, 11:30 pm:
Around midnight, the cards were assembled and organized in their pockets... in theory, the game was ready. So I decided to try it out. Belinda was the first victim... we played a round of the Cache that took about 1.5 hours. While there were aspects that she enjoyed, I immediately I regretted pitting a loved one against this game... it was VERY hard to follow characters when all you had to go on was an empty map segment on the front of each card. This unneccesary game of hide and seek compounded whatever inherent difficulty there was in searching through this kind of narrative. Belinda and I spent the next hour making small sticky markers for the fronts of cards so that characters could be more easily followed through time... with that done, I thought the game was ready for "official" (i.e. "non-girlfriend") testing.
10/31, 12:30 pm:
Tracy and Kurosh were our next victims. We explained the rules and set them to play, Tracy controlling the game state and Kurosh listening and observing. I have never gotten such excellent and complete in-session feedback as the two of them gave... clearly they have a deep understanding of how valuable it is for a designer to know the thought process of a player.
Despite the excellent feedback, however, it didn't feel like this playtest was a success. Or, more accurately, this successful playtest reflected a potentially unsuccessful game.
A big part of our initial setup and goal design revolved around a set of Questions, either abstract or concrete, that we randomly assigned the player at the start of the play. Our aim with these questions was to guide the player's experience, to give them a direction at the beginning of the game. The problem with this question-based goal is that, with the purely exploration based system and mechanics we designed, there were no optimal strategies for completing it. This is especially true with the more abstract questions, such as "what went wrong?". If you're looking for hard evidence of a single objectively correct answer, you're going to be frustrated.
Tracy admitted up front to being a very goal-oriented player, so she focused on the questions... and consequently, I sensed dissatisfaction and frustration in her playtest. When she finished the game, she reflected that she didn't really find a story, just the skeleton of a situation... and she felt the experience was too aimless to be truly engaging. I'll admit to being temporarily demoralized by this feedback, and I wondered for the first time in months whether the entire concept would be a bust... until our next playtest inspired a new focus for The Cache. Finally, we found an activity that matched our artifact, the "spacetime narrative", perfectly.
10/31, 2:00 pm-ish:
Up until now I haven't mentioned that players have a page of cards that they keep from the story. They add to this page at a rate of one card every turn, keeping whatever they think is "important". Both Belinda and Tracy asked me about this page, and I responded that they could use it to bookmark important events, save clues or hold onto cards they think are interesting.
My next playtester was Maya Churri... as I described the game to her, she also asked about the page. I was too tired to go through my bookmark shtick, so this time I just said, "oh, you use it to build your story".
Maya, who comes from a writing background, took this idea and ran with it. She didn't focus on the questions in front of her... she focused on her page. Turn by turn, she carefully chose which card she wanted, following the story that she thought was interesting to her and even cleverly editing it so that certain events were compressed or changed to her liking.
She used our game as raw material, and stitched together a short story.
Son of a bitch, I thought to myself when I realized what she was doing, I think I accidentally made Tales again.
Maya played the game in a totally different way than anyone else had before... but it WORKED. The questions we had posed were just static, getting in the way of the real task at hand... making, not locating, a narrative in our little textual chunk of reality. Watching her do that was really satisfying.
10/31, 2:30 pm, maybe 3:
Steve Anderson was our last playtester for the day. Based on the positive experience of the last playtest, we didn't start him out with any cards... we simply gave him the task of searching through our story and making a story himself.
Steve's experience was different than Maya's, and rewarding for different reasons. Steve (it seemed to me) was really interested in the cards themselves, the micro-narratives that made up the game. He sorted through them and kept his favorites, trying (sometimes failing through our own fault) to follow threads and keep different stories going. We noticed, in Steve, a theme common to all our players... he was frustrated by the inability to follow what he wanted Quickly. "You're fucking with me," he exclaimed, several times. "You guys are fucking with me." He had a point; it takes one mini-turn to flip a page forward or backwards. We were sort of fucking with him by making this temporal process so slow.
His story was an interconnected series of dialogues. It was really positive, as the writer of these 256 story-bits, to hear him read his narrative out loud; I could tell that he really appreciated the characters and events he'd found in his cards. The day ended with this fuzzy angora feeling of satisfaction; Mike and I agreed that it had been a rollercoaster, but a job well done.
11/1, 7:45 pm:
I am getting tired and our attention spans are both limited, dear I-can't-believe-you're-still-reader, so I'll try to keep it this to a short suite of paragraphs about Sean's marathon playtest. Sean, as I've mentioned before, has been the beating heart of this project... without the thought, work and time he's spared for The Cache, this project would still be an underdeveloped pipe dream. So it was especially rewarding to bring this prototype back to him and watch him play for the first time.
Up until then, only Belinda had gone through a full round of the game: in the interest of time, everyone else had played eight turns. Sean played all sixteen turns, filling his sheet, and took an additional sixteen mini-turns in a newly developed editing phase to hone his story. From explanation to end debriefing, the whole thing took over three hours, but when he held up his completed story and said, in all honesty, that he had a real emotional connection to what he'd found and made, it was worth it.
We both agreed in that moment that the concept of creating, as well as discovering, will have to be an integral part of whatever the Cache becomes. Instead of using questions and puzzles to move people through the experience (asking them to "read" our story), we're looking at requiring artifacts of player experiences, or "edits", to unlock new portions of content. The emphasis should rest on their creative abilities instead of my creative vision.
So the course of the ship has changed, but there's still wind in the sails. We still need more playtesters to try out the prototype... so if anyone's available, please let me know. In the meantime, I promise more (but shorter) updates on this and other aspects of The Cache in the coming weeks.