Barfly
My MFA thesis project, Barfly, is an original PC role-playing game where the player enters into a bar to engage in conversation with a variety of potential partners, the bar’s patrons. The player’s dialogue choices will determine whether he or she will find romance or get the cold shoulder.
Barfly uses a simple, accessible mouse-based interface and stylized 2-D graphics to help its players navigate the difficult task of finding a soul-mate. Each session of the game begins with character generation. By choosing from a set of personality traits, players can determine what sort of person they are, which in turn defines the sort of patrons that will be good matches for them.
Once the newly formed character enters the bar, he or she has until the bar closes to find a suitable romantic partner. By engaging the bar's randomly generated patrons in conversation and choosing from a variety of humorous, pop-culture-inspired response options, the player can determine if each patron is the right fit for him or her. Their responses will, in turn, either repulse or attract their potential mate.
This game involves the use of a large database of film quotes, generously taken from movies courtesy of IMDB. Each statement is tagged with all 18 possible traits, topic keywords to maintain some sense of conversational cohesion, and markers indicating whether the statement belongs at the beginning, middle, or end of a conversation. The details of the project can be read in the paper that I submitted to my department for review.
NOTE: This game will work provided you have Flash Player installed. When you decompress the file, please make sure that you have the SWF, TXT, and XML files all within the same directory. To start the game, simply double-click “Barfly.swf”. No installation of the game itself is necessary to play it.