TellTale Game's Fireside Chat with Jon Ingold (Inkle Studios) on 80 Days and The Walking Dead

SPEAKER_00 0:00

There are others watched at the moment because certain games that come about 80 days is one of them. Think about the first time I played The Walking Dead.

SPEAKER_02 0:06

When people played The Walking Dead, I think what really struck them was that they didn't expect that choice, the choices they made to be respected. The first difficult decision you get, whatever it was, they click something with a sort of I probably game is wrong. And then the game carries on, and that sense that the game is carrying on when I didn't think it could possibly carry on feels huge. That feels epic and like, oh my god, this whole world of possibility. Sometimes I do wonder if maybe it was simply that I had an expectation for what a game book was going to be like, and this blew it, expanded beyond that boundary.

SPEAKER_00 0:38

Hi there, my name is Stephen Lake, and welcome to the Examined Game. Today I am talking with John Ingold, the co-founder of Inkall Studios. They've made some brilliant games, including 80 Days, Heaven's Vault, TR49, Expelled, Overboard. These brilliant, beautiful games are very story-driven. The cornerstone of all their work is great writing, great characters, really immersive content with as simple an interface as possible to immerse you within this moving forward story. I was invited to talk with John by Telltale Games as part of their Choices Matter Festival, which they had on Steam a few months ago. It was a chance for us to talk about all the brilliant approaches to storytelling and adventure games that are out there. And I challenged John to see how long we could go without talking about Monkey Island. And we we got pretty far, but I was actually the one who brought it up in the end. I hope you enjoy this episode. Please do subscribe. Thank you very much. Thanks so much for uh connecting, John. I'm really sort of looking forward to this conversation. Um, I know we wanted to sort of skirt around this idea of player choice, which is something I'm sure that you've spent many and many and many an hour not just thinking about, but also talking, uh talking about. And I thought maybe as a little challenge, we could see how long we can go without bringing up The Last Express or Monkey Island.

SPEAKER_01 1:48

Um and I've never managed it before, so let's see where we go.

SPEAKER_00 1:52

Oh, it will get it will come up, but if we get to like the 10-minute mark before it happens, then we can like say, hey, look at that, we've broken a new a new record. All right, all right. Yeah, and that sounds like a good challenge. That that's that's for both of us, right? Yeah, um so actually, I you know, before we sort of get deep deep into it, I'm always just interested in what you know people are sort of playing or or looking at right now. And sometimes you ask that, and people are like, Oh, I I can't play anything because I'm too focused on just making my own game.

SPEAKER_02 2:20

But is there anything on your Steam that's uh so the most recent thing I've been playing is the James Bond game, uh, surprisingly enough, which has got not a lot to do with player choice and kind of narrative agency, but it's been it's been a really good time, actually. It's been really fun, really enjoyable, very creative, it's nicely written. It does have occasional moments of dialogue choice, which very much go to the it doesn't matter what you press, but some of them are more entertaining to press than others kind of model, which is fine. So yeah, I don't know how relevant it is to today's discussion, but yeah, I've really enjoyed it. It's a really nicely made game.

SPEAKER_00 2:56

Well, it sort of is a bit in something that I was thinking about was this idea of there's obviously player choice where like you make this decision and then it has these far-reaching consequences, and then at the end of the game you find out that you've you know you've destroyed an entire continent because of a decision you made in a tavern 40 hours previously, right? Which is always uh really fun. But then there's also um that feeling of agency where you know you you sort of hit the button of choice and it's not actually wired up to anything other than your own imagination. Um I you know, I remember when I first played the Longest Journey years ago, and you have this neighbour opposite you who asks you out on a date and you get to choose how kind of surly you are in your response because he's not a good guy. But it sort of blew my mind that I could have that sort of um power of choice in in in response, and I think why that one stood out to me so much was because it felt like I was being given agency in in April's you know the the lead the protagonist's um life and the way that she was choosing to engage with the world. And I guess if I were to turn that into a question, you know, is there something to be said about player choice that doesn't really have any consequence but is just there as a kind of either a thumb up or a thumb down that that just helps do what's needed, right? Which is get us more into the story, into the game.

SPEAKER_02 4:23

Yeah. I mean, for me, I always think this idea, this idea of choice comes from I don't even know where it comes from. Like where does it come from choose your own adventure books or something? But there's something deeply like structural about it. Like when people say, I'm making a choice and it branches and it has this effect, it's like they're looking at the the stats on the board game card that they're playing so that they have to drive the game forward. And you know, with a choose your own adventure book, when it says turn to this page, you then have to actually do that. So you've you, the person, have got to understand the rules that are being processed. But the whole magic of a of a video game environment to me, of a computer game environment, is it exactly that the player doesn't have to manage the rules, that something else is managing the rules, and you just get to be in that moment. And so I'm always in favor of choices that that kind of move away from feeling structural or rule-based or process-oriented into something that that is everything that isn't that. So whether that's a choice to express how you feel in the given moment about a certain interaction with a character, that can be great. That can help ground me in the character and make me feel like I'm there, especially if there's a nice bit of follow-up to it that makes it feel like I've been listened to. Um, whereas I actually find that when there's a choice that's kind of got some massive implication which is going to alter the story going forward, that often takes me out of the choice because then I start to think very strategically. You know, what do I actually want to achieve? Which levers do I want to pull in this world? And that's not a very characterful or narrative experience. Except, of course, when it is, you know, you take a game like 80 Days where you're kind of going around the world and you're taking these choices all the time of which city to go to next. And that is a top-level strategic decision. But the reason that that works is because, well, the characters are taking a strategic decision at that moment when they're choosing which city to go to. You can imagine them sitting in a cafe and looking at a map and saying, Oh, let's go to Athens so that we can then get to Cairo or whatever. That makes sense in the narrative. So I always think it's it has to come down, it has to circle back round to this idea of this thing that I've I've talked about before, and I kind of try to embed into all of the narrative design we do that the player is doing what the protagonist is doing, and the protagonist is doing what the player is doing. And so the question is when you're looking at this choice, is it what the protagonist is doing, or is it what the player is doing in a sort of puppeteering way? So to take your example in the longest journey, yeah, the protagonist is deciding how to answer this guy. So yeah, I'm me the player, me the protagonist, we're very much in the same moment doing the same thing. Um, when we're choosing a route on the globe in 80 days, again, player and protagonist, perfect alignment. And that's I think why it feels like a good choice. So I often think, not meaning to skewer the discussion in the first two minutes, but like I often think that the idea of choice is completely wrong, actually. And we shouldn't really be talking about choices at all. We should be talking about um, I don't even know a good word for it. Like the interface. How thin is the interface between the player and the protagonist? How how nicely are they joined up? How much are we with the protagonist rather than driving the protagonist? Um, you know that thing when you're driving a car and you sort of a real life car, and you don't think I'm turning the wheel and pressing the lever and pulling the stick. You kind of feel the car is me and I am the car and we're going this way. Like that's how a really good video game protagonist feels, whether it's movement and traversal and action. You're not pressing the buttons, you're just there. And I think every time we manage to make choices feel a bit like that, they're always a bit clunky and awkward, but if we can make them feel like that, we get that embodiment. And that's where I kind of get really interested. But it's really got very little to do with how much the game branches or responds to what you're doing. It's much more to do with how well does this moment kind of make sense immediately? How quickly can the player react to it? How well do they understand what they're supposed to be thinking about in that moment? And how much consequence it has feeds into that, because you know, if you spend half an hour deliberating how April answers this guy about his date, but then it turns out it's a throwaway moment that doesn't matter, you're gonna feel disappointed and annoyed, right? Because you're out of alignment. But if you kind of know in advance that this is just a petty moment and you can enjoy it for what it is, great. And if you know in advance that this is a massive strategic moment and you can enjoy that for what it is, then again, great, it works. So it's something about it's something about keeping that alignment going, which is a subtle thing. I don't think there's a magic formula for it or a perfect UI for it or anything like that. It's very much dependent on the context, but but yeah, that that to me is the goal, I think.

SPEAKER_00 9:03

And I I think it's it's interesting, and it it feels to me that whatever that formula is, it's it's it it it's it's been around for as long as people have been able to make any form of like interactive uh media, right? I mean, if you think about like the choose your own adventure books where you're you're doing that in some ways in a sort of simplistic way, but I would say the um the the the craving that the player or the reader in that case has for what that book has on offer is no more is it it it's as deep as what one might have for some huge sprawling um choice-oriented you know triple A video game because maybe not in terms of the depth of complex obviously not in terms of the depth of complexity, but I guess what I'm I'm thinking about is the player's appetite for choice-driven stories. And that's something that's sort of age old.

SPEAKER_02 10:01

Yeah, I I grew up reading Choose Your Own Adventure books, and I remember even then as a kid, some of them they just felt like machines straight off the bat, like they felt like you were just working through this thing, or you might spot the pattern of how they worked. I remember there were quite a lot where there'd be two choices, and one would kill you, and the other would be the narrative. So really it was just this sort of guessing game each time you went to a page, and that was obviously very quick to write, it was very easy to design, and it didn't work at all. You you you solved it like a sort of a rubbish maze, like one of those mazes you get on a menu in a in a restaurant, like when you're 11. Um you solved it that way, and at the end of it, you were like, okay, I read a novel plus lots of other bits of dead ends of novels. And then there were really good ones that um that built an interactive, meaningful world in your mind as you were playing it, and they are real enough that I can sort of remember those imaginative spaces even now. Like wait, we adapted the sorcery series that was written by Steve Jackson, which was from a bunch of game books um as part of the Fighting Fantasy label. And one of the reasons we did that project was precisely that I have a vivid memory of being nine years old on a summer holiday working my way through these books belong to my elder brother, and I stole them from his bookshelf while he was off doing something else because I wasn't allowed to read his books, and I work my way through these books, and they're huge interactive worlds that exist in reality in my mind, and I know how they feel and how they smell and how they taste and all of that stuff. And it is the same mechanic, it's paper, it's choices, it's numbers, but there's just something in the way that they're built, and it's to do with again, it's it's not just the fact that there are choices, but it's the way that the choices lead you down blind alleys, but not all of those blind alleys are a dead end, and things join up in unexpected ways, and things come back to haunt you. There's a lot of oh, I found this item, which means I can do this thing now, and so I have this unique adventure that feels just enough like I was there for it to feel real to me. And I think the the the great thing about that is if you can find that in a paper book, that's really reassuring because that shows that it's not about technology, it's not that we need a sufficiently fast GPU to make this experience work. We just need the right, I don't know, it's the right writing, the right design. And so when we get to the games area, okay, we've got a lot more levers to play with, we've got a lot more things we can do, but it's a pretty exciting space because somewhere in here, somewhere in this space of all possible computer games are some really, really good ones, and some really good designs just waiting to be found, and that's kind of really compelling to go looking for them.

SPEAKER_00 12:39

It makes me think, and and there are those, there's those those sort of watershed moments, I think, for certain games that come about 80 days is one of them. I think I think the same say for um, you know, I think about the first time I played the Walking Dead series, and that was like it's it's one of those if you go back to it now, you and even when I'm playing it, you sort of understand like the choice you make, it often ends up getting funnelled. You know, the game has to get back on its own rails, right? But the feeling that I had um of of of choice playing both of those games, obviously for very, very different reasons, it felt like I was getting to enjoy something really special and really new. But there's no extra complicated mechanic that's at play there. You haven't invented some brand new sort of um yeah algorithm to engage me. It's like you said it's good writing.

SPEAKER_02 13:25

It's funny though, because I I do wonder how much like expectation plays into this. Because I think when people played The Walking Dead, I think what really struck them was that they didn't expect that choice, the choices they made to be respected. They expected there to be a right answer that they were supposed to know, and then they hit this choice point and were like, Well, I don't know what the right answer is, it hasn't told me what's the right answer. And people, in that first kind of the first difficult decision you get, whatever it was, they click something with a sort of I'm probably getting this wrong, and then the game carries on. And that sense that the game is carrying on when I didn't think it could possibly carry on, feels huge, that feels epic and like, oh my god, this whole world of possibility. And and of course, afterwards you start to unpick how it works and you go, hang on, I I get it, I see the system, I see the walls of this. But that moment where it it breezed past your expectations, that's kind of what makes it come alive. And sometimes I do wonder if, you know, when I read the sorcery books as a kid, maybe it was simply that I had an expectation for what a game book was going to be like, and this blew it away. It it expanded beyond that boundary. And I often felt with 80 days, one of the things that people found compelling about it was we gave this suggestion that you could travel anywhere you wanted around the world, and then we actually let you do that. And people sort of didn't expect that to be true. They thought it would be a linear sequence, and then when it wasn't, that was just surprising. I think one of the reasons we never did another 80 Days game was we felt that we didn't know how to go beyond the expected again, and that always worries me because if the reality is that we capture this magic by by breaking people's expectations, then we're in an arms race with ourselves the whole time.

SPEAKER_01 15:08

That's a creative is very scary. Like, I want to create like 19 games that all work the same way but tell different stories, thank you. That like every novelist ever has done. That sounds really nice. Like, I don't have to constantly invent another new bloody thing every year of my life.

SPEAKER_02 15:23

But um, I don't know, games are a little bit like that in some ways, that we are we are constantly having to innovate because the audience is pretty smart, actually, and it's always figuring out how things work in a way that you know people who read romance novels they largely don't figure out how the structure of acts work, they just enjoy the emotion, and that's great, and then they can read another one. But um, game players, yeah, they tend to take things to pieces, and then once they know the pieces, you you have to do something else to surprise them. So, yeah, perhaps perhaps there's an element that like none of these designs are actually inherently good, they're just good at that moment in time. I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_00 16:03

I think that's a really interesting idea, and I love that phrasing about being in an arms race with yourself, um you know, as a developer, and that what what comes to mind there, and this is a totally different sort of hole to go down, but obviously we're well aware of the many huge franchises that exist that the most almost all of which the ones I'm thinking about, you know, this like Fallout or Elder Scrolls or whatever, you know, they have in their own way humble beginnings, right? Um but they they excel at something, and then we as players want more, and then you know, the creators the IP wants more. Yeah, and it's a funny thing because me as a player, like I come to adore a game or a franchise, and then I'm in this perpetual state of being like in anticipation and also pissed off. Um, you know, that the the game exactly like you said, the game hasn't met whatever my expectation is because it's it's basically an impossible expectation to reach. Because I will never ever ever for all the money and all the time in the world, I'm never gonna have a coming out of the vault of Fallout 3 experience. Um again, I'm never gonna have a the power of blowing up Megaton experience again, right? Like you're you're you're like you said, you're basically chasing something that's impossible to uh surpass, or you can really hope for is to come up with something new and surprising, right?

SPEAKER_02 17:30

Something unexpected. Maybe it's a bit I I've often wondered whether game design, narrative game design, is a bit like a magic trick in a way. There is a there is a mechanic at play and it's it's a precise and logical mechanic. And the job of a magician in a magic trick is to make sure that you definitely don't see or think about the mechanic, you just enjoy the experience of it. But if you see the same magician's trick over and over again, if you see the same mechanic over and over again, you start to pattern match it, you start to understand it, and it doesn't feel special anymore. There's only so many times somebody can make you know a watermelon appear underneath their hat that it it astounds you. The first time it's gobsmacking, the second time it's like, well, I've actually seen that happen before. And the fifth or sixth time it's like, well, you know, I think we need something new here. So I wonder whether it's something similar to that, in fact, that like or maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe like what we should do is we should deliver our magic trick to the audience and then wait five years for that audience to grow up, find another young audience and do it again. I don't know, like and just keep introducing it to audiences who haven't seen these tricks before.

SPEAKER_00 18:38

Um that might be a solution to it, but it it makes me again also think about you know, I I think I mentioned to you I spoke with Josh Sawyer recently, um, and we were talking a lot about pillars of um eternity. I always want to say pillars of the earth, you know, they can follow it. Yeah, I have to pause when I say pillars of eternity. And um Pentiment as well. I think Pentiment is such a brilliant example of a game that uh um I getting at it's like a it's coming from a studio that's got like no games around it, lots of expectation, a lot of pressure, whatever. It's like the same as say like Marvel movies or something. Um and then you go off and you make a game like that that is basically coming in with almost zero expectations because you know, those are people that don't even aren't even aware of it as a as a franchise because it is it's not a franchise, and it can go on and achieve what you were just talking about. And I suppose the reason I bring that up is that's an example of a game coming from someone that's has these these big you know, big big games under their belt, but that it is possible to um sidestep and then take off whatever that pressure is and then just build something that's sort of beautiful and engaging and special um and capture an audience still.

SPEAKER_02 20:05

Pentiment is is kind of a miracle that it exists really. I remember when it was announced, I was a bit like, well, why is this massive studio like why are they doing our sort of game?

SPEAKER_01 20:15

That's not fair. Like we're just trying to survive, doing this one thing that nobody else does, and they come along and do it. I mean, fair played and they did a lovely job. Like, man, come on.

SPEAKER_02 20:27

But I think it's interesting that the you know, the studio that made Pentiment, um, the people that made Pentiment, they they it I guess it did pretty well. I mean, it was certainly very well acclaimed and like kind of brilliantly reviewed. I I think it sold okay, but they didn't sort of do another, and that's kind of interesting to me. Like, was it that they felt that okay, that was the one they could get away with within the capitalist superstructure in which they exist? Fair enough, that's pretty that's pretty rigid. Um or is it that like you can do that as that studio, you can do that once, but if you keep doing it again, you get that sense of kind of why are we not doing proper games here? Why are we not doing proper games? Um, and I don't know. I'd be kind of interested to know what the politics around that that were and how much of it was a creative decision not to do, not necessarily Pentiment 2, but whatever the next kind of small, interesting, gnarly narrative game might have been, because I'm sure the people have tons of ideas and what's holding them back from that. But I do think for us, for Inkle, one thing that's kept us going, because we've been going about 15 years now, is that pretty much every time we have a game, we then go off and make a game that's very, very different. And that's quite unusual for game studios, but I really think it's been hugely important to us for our ability to survive and kind of keep things interesting. Because the one thing we can't do as a small studio is we can't just scale up each time. Like we can't make 80 days and then make 80 days only in 3D this time. Like that's you can't do the the GTA 2 to GTA 3 transition. It doesn't make sense with our style of gameplay, but it definitely doesn't make sense with our style of team size and like you know the actual production size. So that kind of drives us to this okay, let's find a new niche, let's find a new corner, let's find a new angle on what we can do. Um and I guess that flexibility is important when you're a small studio, but like creatively it's it it's great too. And I think it means we get to discover lots more interesting shapes that games can be. It also means I have no idea what we're doing next year, so I look forward to finding out. But you know, that's kind of that's how we've been for the last 10 years.

SPEAKER_00 22:38

So it's interesting you're saying that it's basically a company that's built in a way that cannot scale up, not but nor does it need to, right? Because you're you're yeah, the fact that you have this sort of business model that functions around making like not making sequels and making unique uh individual games is is is extraordinarily uh unique and rare, right?

SPEAKER_02 23:00

Yeah, I mean it makes us very grateful for the audience that we have that comes back time and again because you know they really are they really are agreeing to come back in the knowledge that they liked a game before and that whatever they get next time it's not going to be that. Whatever else it is, it's not going to be the game that you liked last time.

SPEAKER_01 23:18

It's gonna definitely be different. You might like it as well, you might not, but like we guarantee we won't give you the thing that you want. And like it's it's nice that people kind of go, yeah, yeah, I can accept that as a deal. That's nice. I'll come back, come back for the next one.

SPEAKER_00 23:31

Just one thought that came up when we talk about The Walking Dead as well is that moment when like when you know, again, choice, choice, choice, who lives, who dies, what you can do here, here, and then obviously the devastating maybe I'll give a spoiler warning here, but ending to that first series is that you know there's basically there's you know Clementine and the person that's been looking after you, that you there is no final choice where you can rescue and save this person, you know. It's like it's a guaranteed outcome that that that can't be changed, which is obviously much more like uh watching a movie. And I think there's something to be said about and I didn't feel cheated that basically for that final thing, I was stripped of um I think the one choice that you do have is whether you get End Lee's life um or leave leave him be, you know, which is pretty pretty mon monumental choice, you know, because he's gonna become a zombie, it's a pretty monumental choice, right? But um I don't know, yeah. I guess I just I find that interesting as well, the moment where the game is like because it's really important to be reminded, right, that it's like we actually we do have agency on our lives and we do have the ability to make choices, but there's so much of what we do that we're not all powerful, um, you know, that we don't have the power to uh you know save lives sometimes and the outcomes are basically set, and all that's left is how we want to sort of respond to what's guaranteed to happen.

SPEAKER_02 24:48

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things I really not struggle with exactly when designing choices, but I find it's really chewy and worth thinking about all the time, and it kind of never gets easier, is that balance between, you know, when you're providing choices and ways that the player can proceed in in the story, which give them that agency, and how you contrast that with inevitability, because a core part of storytelling in all media, in all formats, is that sense of inevitability. This thing is happening because of everything that set it up, and it can't go a different way, and it shouldn't go a different way. Like if you get if you are making a game version of the Lord of the Rings and you get up to Mount Doom and Frodo just like tosses the ring in and goes, Yep, job done. Like the story doesn't work. Like it requires the inevitable corruption of Frodo Sol, it requires Gollum to give himself up at the end. Like that story has to get told that way. So, at what point in a game is it okay to start taking choices away and start handing out consequences instead in that kind of inevitable? You can't edit this, you can't alter this kind of way. Like, if you make that Lord of the Rings game, at what point does the player, presumably in control of Frodo in this example, suddenly find that they just don't have any good options and they've only got bad options, like they can only punch Sam or like try to stab him, and they're like, well, I don't want to do either of these things, but that's the inevitable consequence of this story. And some people kind of take a very, when they talk about this stuff, they take quite a superficial point of view and say, oh, well, you should you shouldn't do that in a game. There should always be control. But I don't think that's true. I think again it's about alignment between the player and the protagonist. And so long as the player understands why the protagonist is limited, they understand that at this moment the protagonist has to be limited, then the player can show up for the protagonist and be in the moment with them and take those decisions with them and not cop out and cheat and say, well, you know, as someone who hasn't been corrupted by the ring, I think we're going to do this very sensible thing, which the player, of course, can do, but Frodo can't. Um and I think, yeah, I think that mixture of kind of the balance between when do I have agency and when am I kind of just a tool of the fate of the story. And that might be based on previous choices that I've made, kind of coming back to haunt me, and it might just be the narrative arc of this particular universe. It doesn't really matter. Those two things are both good. Um, that to me is the really gripping part that actually I'm I'm kind of less interested in. Well, no, I'm actually entirely uninterested in games which give players choice the whole way through. Those games exist, and some people really love them. Like if you're playing The Sims, you're always in charge of your Sims, right? At no point your Sims just say, I'm sorry, I've spent so long being a bad person, I'm now going to run a mock in this. They don't do that. Um, and that's fine. In that game, you are the all-powerful being, but as a result, you are not one of the characters, and you never will be. And like, yeah, happy those games exist. I have no interest in playing them, I have no interest in making them. They don't, they don't swing my they don't swing my hammer at all. I I want to be over here where the protagonist is inviting me into their world, and part of that invitation is offering me chances to explore and see things, and part of that invitation is saying, here are some things you absolutely cannot do because of who you are right now. And and that comes with it all the joys of kind of role-playing and all those sort of things where even role-playing is a weird idea because sometimes it means making a character who I get to say exactly what this character is like, and sometimes role-playing means here is a role, and your job as the player is to play it. Like, you know, we make a game like Overboard where you play a murderess. Like, you have to be the murderess, like the only way to play that game is to be that character, and if you don't like that character, then there really isn't a game here for you to play. You can't say I prefer her to be like this. Um so I sometimes wonder if there's actually quite a hard split, even in the audience, but certainly in the medium, between players that want to be designing a story in this kind of top-level, very safe way, where they get to say everything that happened within the systems of the game, and then players like me and writers like me who want who want the story to kind of invite us in, trick us, surprise us, and then take us to pieces at the end. Like, you know, because that's traditionally what stories are supposed to do. They say, come and watch this cheerful story about an old man going on an adventure. Oh, by the way, this is Pixar's up, and you're going to be devastated by the end. You know, that's kind of that's the deal that storytelling makes, is we'll give you something, but it won't be necessarily what you thought you were here for. Um, and how do we keep tilting our designs that way without making people feel that they've been cheated or lied to because you know they haven't. Like it's we're here to tell you a story, so let's tell you a story. That's not that's not cheating to do that. Um but it hasn't, it must the player has to be with you the whole time that you're designing that thing. Like if your choices are gonna become more inevitable because that's what the arc of the story is doing. The player's got to be with you and say, Yeah, I'm I'm up for this point, at which my choices will be limited because of everything that's happened in the story, because it makes a better story. The player has to be on board for that. And kind of yeah, part of the part of the the the arc of the world has to be happening inside the player's head. I find that stuff really chunky and really interesting. And you see games get it right and you see games get it wrong, and it's a really subtle thing, but when it works, I think it's tremendous.

SPEAKER_00 30:21

I'm trying to think there was someone I spoke to or come to my mind, but just given that feedback that they, you know, they could created um, you know, characters where you had choices about how they would approach certain situations, but at some point they would behave in a way that they felt, you know, didn't match with their own, you know, what they felt their moral compass was for. And I I guess that's exactly what you're talking about there, right? The the point where like the story and what would make sense for that character clashes with the um and often it's um I just lost my train of thought. But yeah, it's just a really interesting point about that clash between sort of player intention and character intention. Um and then so something I wanted to talk about, and I don't want you know, you you you you you're aware that I've got an interest in chairs and sitting and video games, and I'm not trying to um take this interview over with some that's a subject that's very interesting to me. But that came up, and this is me breaking the the uh the goal that we set up, but you know, we spoke in depth about the Last Express right and the ability to sit down um and watch the violin um concerto and basically miss out a huge opportunity to sort of solve the mystery of the game and go and rifle through certain people's carriages because you've chosen to sit down and watch um this this concerto. I mean, in that instance of sitting, I think that's an example of where that choice really does have a consequence. But something that I found really interesting about people's response to this idea about, and I'm just using this as one little example of basically what I would call like inane or pointless choice in video games, which sounds a little harsh, but say as an example, the ability to sit on a chair within a game, right? And people were very um impassioned about that idea and how important it was for them to have that choice, and even pre pre-dating when games would even have that, if you had a crouch mechanic, you know, in a side-scrolling 2D platformer, that people enjoyed just crouching and pretending that they were sitting and that they're just having a little sit within, you know, the the the world that they're they're hanging out in. And I suppose my question to you is like, what is it about that um why is it so important to players to be able to have those those those choices within a game that really are the wires to that button and not attached to anything, but it's just this idea of having some sort of freedom to do something. And and then what was also interesting was people's responses who hated that mechanic because it's like it's totally pointless, there's no reason for it, it's just a distraction. I bloody hate it.

SPEAKER_02 32:58

Um I feel like the really important thing Well, there's sort of two things at play, and one of them is just that sense of being in the world, and every time every time you're given a little bit more detail or a little bit more texture to the world, just a little bit more surface to it, it just makes it I don't know whether it helps you connect to it more or it just makes it feel a tiny bit more real. So little details like um in a third-person action adventure game these days, if you walk near a wall, a character might put a hand out to touch the wall, like if you're crashing into it. I I saw them do that in the Bond game. And they didn't used to do that, they used to just skim along the wall. And it's absolutely no gameplay function whatsoever. It's just a nice bit of detailing that connects the environment to the character. I appreciate that it's there. I don't do it on purpose, I just appreciate that it's there, it feels a tiny bit more responsive. But the the other thing is it's kind of that contract you have with the player up front. If you if I know that sitting in chairs or kind of reclining on the sun lounger or catching the view or whatever, whatever this sort of passive interaction is, if I know that it's never going to be important, then I can kind of decide for myself whether it feels like something the character would be doing in this moment. If I'm you know desperately searching through a house, trying to get the clues before the police turn up, I probably will choose not to sit down on a chair, and that's fine, that would be in character. Having the option there makes that an active choice, which is kind of cool. Um, if I'm kind of chilling out, it's the afternoon, somebody's bringing me a cup of tea and they're not here yet, then I might well sit down, and that feels like an in-character way to express that moment of the game, and that's great. But if I have an example like being able to open every drawer in a chest of drawers, then suddenly as a player, I might start to worry. Hang on, I'm not sure what the contract with the game is here. Is it that if I look in every drawer, I'm occasionally going to find useful things? Because then I have to look in every single drawer, otherwise I might be missing out, or I might be failing the game, or I might not be able to succeed and I won't know why. And that sounds incredibly frustrating and sort of scary. So that kind of passive interaction, because I'm unclear on what the contract with me is, I actually find that quite unpleasant. And I don't like it when games do that, even though obviously it's the same kind of very similitude of like, of course, I can open drawers, of course I can sit in chairs. Like, why do those things feel different? Oh, it's because one of them I know exactly what the outcome of sitting in a chair is gonna be. Um and of course, if you build a game then where you can sit in a chair and then every now and then it does actually have a consequence. I don't know how that would be, but you know, if you're searching the house and the police are going to arrive and you sit in the chair, and then the police come in while you're sitting in a chair and they say, You look very casual for a burglar, and you can bluff your way through it, that would be marvelous. I would love that. That's a brilliant piece of design. I would and you know, one in 500 players might encounter it, but what a glorious moment, you know. And that's breaking the contract, but somehow that's different because you're breaking it in a in a fun way rather than this sort of mechanical, quite dry way of saying, okay, I have to go through every drawer and pick up all the pickups because otherwise I'll have missed a pickup. And it's very hard to get players to relax about that kind of thing. Um, because I think the ideal solution there actually is the game to say, you can look in these drawers if you want to, you might find something useful. But if you don't, you're going to be fine anyway. I remember this when we were designing Heaven's Vault, there's as you walk around the locations, the various moons that you visit as this archaeologist character, you find little artifacts you can pick up and translate. And they're often sort of tucked behind buildings or under pots or in bushes or wherever we happen to put a prop. But the thing that we don't tell the player is they're not fixed locations. Like if you wander past something and you find it, great, it's there. And by finding an artifact, it'll turn off any artifacts you haven't seen in the vicinity so that you're not constantly picking things up. So we give you loads of opportunities to find stuff, but we don't deluse you with pickups because it's a very dynamically built environment. And so some players play it and go, Oh, I was hunting around the back of this house and I found an artifact around the back of the house, and that means I have to search every single corner of this game to find everything because they're hiding things in weird places that are important for me to continue. And I remember reading this review and thinking, no, no, no, no, no, that's completely the opposite of what we're doing. What we're doing is saying wherever you go, you're going to find something cool. So don't worry about where you go. But like that's such a hard reset on the way that players view a normal 3D adventure game. Normally in a 3D adventure game, if you miss a hotspot, you're in trouble. This idea that we'll put hotspots where you can find them so you can have a kind of more narrative experience where what the protagonist does is worth it. Yeah, it's very, very difficult to teach players that it's going to be okay and that like that they don't need to worry that they're going to miss things. And yeah, that in a way, that it's again that expectation problem is so hard. It's just establishing the right contract with the reader. So, how do we make sure that the reader knows that they don't have to sit in every chair just because there's always a sit button on every chair, just on the off chance that one of them is going to open a secret door? Because as soon as they worry that, then this chair is going to get in the way of their experience. And I do wonder if the people who s who have negative responses to that idea of being able to sit on things or look out the window or whatever, and they're saying it's a distraction, what they really mean is it genuinely is distracting them. Like as they play, it's constantly ringing a bell in their head saying, I need to sit on the chair, I need to look out the window, I need to sit on the chair, I need to look out the window. Which sounds really annoying, frankly. And like I we we we don't want them to be feeling that way because it takes them out the moment. But how do we say to people, it's okay, you got this, it's fine, like the game is gonna work, the game is gonna is not gonna make it unnecessarily difficult for you to get through. Because I don't know, we've all experienced being stuck in games and remember those experiences very vividly, but the moments when we just flowed through a game really well, when everything just worked and everything was where we needed it to be, and we could just make progress and we felt great, but perhaps we don't remember those experiences so well because we weren't being frustrated, we were in flow, so they don't stick in our minds. So we learn oh, games are kind of frustrating a lot of the time. Like I have to make sure I don't get stuck. It's a real shame.

SPEAKER_00 39:23

Um I wonder what I mean, I think maybe you answered the question that came to mind, but for you, why is why is that so important that you you set up that contract to the player early on? I think you you know you said basically you're you're wanting to avoid players from getting frustrated, right? That they're they're not distracted on some doing all these other things when they should just be in the moment and in the story.

SPEAKER_02 39:47

I just feel like as well that we we design games to be played a certain way. And you know, people say, well, there's lots of different players and they can play games in lots of different different ways. And that's kind of true. And the bigger your game is, the more varied your player base is going to be, and all that kind of stuff. But the reality is, you know, if you're playing 80 Days, there are ways to play it that are really fun, where you explore and have a good time and take risks and have adventures, and there are ways to play it that are really not very fun, where you take sensible strategic decisions at every stage to ensure you optimize the time it takes you to get around the world. You can do that if you want to, of course, but it isn't as interesting, and the game really doesn't want you to do that. So, how do we tell the player without telling the player what to do? Because if we say wander off the beaten path, they're gonna go, oh no, I've got to wander off the beaten path to find things, otherwise I won't succeed in the game, and suddenly they're panicking again. We need people to see what the rules are, gently break them, find out that it's not a problem, and then continue to break them when they feel like it. And I think in 80 days we get that balance really, really good that people sort of feel like they're doing something mildly naughty when they don't take the most efficient route around the world, and then have a good time and no one's angry with them, and they think, oh, I can I can do this, I can bend the rules when I feel like it. Um whereas for a game like uh Expelled, our recent game um set in a public school where you you you have this UI element, which is how good of a student you are, and it starts off as you're the perfect student. And the more bad things you do, the worse you get as a kind of your character becomes slowly kind of mean and malicious and evil, and that opens up lots more options for what you can do, which ultimately allows you to solve the game. And we thought that having this UI element showing your character there and having a little number on every bad choice would make people go, Oh, I get it. I collect evil points, and that gives me options. A very straightforward mechanic. But of course, what people actually did was say, Well, I want to be a good person and I want to stay as a good person. So we had to insert this scene in which someone pretty much locks you in a room and says, Look, you're going to have to break the rules in order to win, because that's the situation that your protagonist finds yourself in. And it was really explicit, and it was exactly fixing that contract problem. That like we thought that the UI, the setup, the tone would establish the contract with the player that we needed to be established, but actually it didn't. It wasn't, it wasn't nearly strong enough to overcome people's expectations of what this game was supposed to be like, despite any number of bits of marketing that we put attached to it. So we needed a scene which just very explicitly said to the player, this is the kind of game that you're playing. And as soon as we did that, people got it, played it well, enjoyed it. And a lot of people who played the game said, Oh, I really loved this scene where the head teacher locks me in a room and says that I have to insult her. I really enjoyed that because I found it very liberating and very clear. And it's like, all right, okay. So because we were really clear about who you are and who you've got to be and the role you've got to play, and made it sort of successful and vibrant to be that character, then the player was like, I get it, I'm on board, I can do this, I'm I'm with it. And it was just about closing that that gap with the player and sort of saying, look, we're just going to put this idea of what the game might be off to one side and focus on this one, which is more fun, and then we could take players along with us for the ride, including players who say, you know, I don't normally like to play evil roles in games, but I actually really enjoyed this one. Um she's not quite evil, that's not quite complex enough. But yeah, it's kind of so it feels to me like it's constant, there is a constant battle to establish that contract with the player. But then I wonder if some of that is genre expectations as well. Like if we are working in more established genres, maybe it's maybe it's less of a problem. You know, in a game like Baldur's Gate or something, there are kind of dark paths and evil paths and evil options. Um but I feel like people are kind of more okay with that because they understand that's oh yeah, that's a valid part of the DD world. I expect that to be there. I know what it does if I choose it, I can go for that run. They don't need to be told that it's okay to do it because they know. In the genre that it's it's part of that contract.

SPEAKER_00 44:04

Actually, on that note, I mean something I always find interesting is certainly the case for me. Um as is, I believe, like so many people say of a game like Bordersgate, you know, Bordersgate 3, where you know I've got the the opportunity to just be the cruelest, most sort of malevolent person I I could imagine. And yet still in this sort of fantasy and this is something obviously been talked about before, this the the the the fantasy realm of doing whatever I wish, I still kind of always choose to be a kind of a good ish guy who's occasionally a bit of a jerk, but that's about as far as I go, you know, other than when you know you you know doing something really awful to the really, really nasty character. So there's something to be said, I think, about that thing that like we want infinite choice to sort of almost feel good and assured in our, you know, basically choosing you know to to mirror who we already are, hopefully, in in in real life, you know, within a game with limitless opportunities to be something else.

SPEAKER_02 45:02

And it's funny because the the games which the games which people remember that don't work like that are often yeah, they're the walking dead kind of games where there are two choices, they're both awful, they're both nasty things, and you don't want to do either of them, but we've constructed the game in a way that you don't you don't have a third, let's all just chill out and like make friends with the zombies and it's gonna be okay option. Like, and I that I can see how that that lets people kind of be free to take these more difficult, more dramatic decisions, and that's kind of great because drama doesn't come from people doing safe, nice things, it comes from people doing complex and and sort of balanced and nuanced things. But I it does come with this caveat that we have to set up these worlds that are incredibly just gruelling, just incredibly restrictive. Like, you know, I I want to play a game about being like an investment banker or something. Like these are people in the real world, they're not constrained, they could be good people if they want to. Some of them probably are good people, but there's a lot of them who are not good people, and they take big, important, active decisions, and they're competitive and they're cutthroat, and what an exciting environment to have a game in and to understand. But we would have to accept that we are not playing a good person, and that would have to be somehow there from the upfront. And if we can't tell those kind of stories, it makes me worry about us as a medium because like if we can't tell stories about bad people, like that that's quite a large part of storytelling we can't do.

SPEAKER_01 46:29

Like, if you can't do Macbeth, where you are Macbeth and you have to kill people and it isn't gonna work out, then oh like can we only tell narratives which have happy endings?

SPEAKER_02 46:40

That that doesn't seem right to me. So um, yeah, somehow it's it's about making sure that the player knows that, like, okay, all right, in this game, you're going to try and seize the throne and you're gonna murder everyone in the way, and you're gonna lose all your friends in the process, but it doesn't mean you're a bad person, okay? Like, just so that you know this is not about you. Um, yeah, really difficult challenge. But I I find it a really interesting challenge to think about as well. And like, yeah, how do you how do you design the setup of the game so that people get that? Because I I I look back at the things that Inkle had done, and like, you know, Overboard is a game where you're a murderess, and as it turns out, the more that you play the game, the more that you realize the husband you've murdered is like a proto-fascist, and he's actually no one's gonna miss him, and it's kind of okay. But like on the initial play of the game, you are just this is a situation, what do you do? And almost everyone gets with the vibe and immediately starts trying to help the protagonist out, even though we know explicitly, definitely for a fact, she just murdered somebody. Um, and I think that's a lot of things working together to make that possible. And some of it is the tone, it's slightly comedic, some of it is the genre, it looks like Christie, some of it is the marketing, even. But just that, even that was quite hard to set up because we went through a lot of iterations of that game where people would get to the beginning and go, I did did my character really murder this guy? Is I like, is this am I supposed to be solving this mystery? Like, what's what is this game? Really? No, no, no, it's really simple. You've got to frame someone else, it's just that. That's all it is. People go, That's I don't know, I'm not sure if I'm okay with that. And we'd be like, Well, okay, but what if it was fun? Um, so it's definitely possible, but it yeah, it's definitely hard as well. And I think a lot of that comes from the genre expectations that people have.

SPEAKER_00 48:25

I guess I'm just wondering if there's not to put you on the spot, but anything that comes to mind of a choice that you've had to make in a in a video game that you remember, or or or maybe again it's from like a uh board game or a tree drain adventure book that really felt like weighty and a difficult, difficult one to make. And that that may, as we've been discussing, have nothing to do with whether that choice is connected up to any sort of actual consequence, but you know, just the idea of it, it the game, the stories hijacked your imagination enough to know, oh, this this really matters.

SPEAKER_02 49:00

It's funny. I guess part of the problem of being a designer is I do tend to look at the wires a lot. It's like when you're you know, script writers for films will watch films and imagine what the script was, like, and it's hard to get lost in the moment. So it's difficult to really pick out an individual choice like that because if I see a choice like that, I'll probably start thinking about how it works. Whereas what I remember more are the games where there were lots of these embedded little choices, and I just went with that flow and enjoyed that moment. So, one example of that was I remember in Horizon Zero Dawn has got dialogue choices and they're kind of empathetically labelled. I forget the exact labelling, but it's something like do you want to be sort of sympathetic, or do you want to be annoyed, or do you want to be it's something in that kind of range, and it tells you what she's gonna say, and they have no consequence whatsoever. But a few of those, especially at the beginning, I really remember just really enjoying those moments because they'd set up this world and these characters quite nicely, and I felt like I had a bit of a, I think I was talking to my dad or in the game or something, and I had a bit of a relationship with him, and it just felt like a good moment for a choice, and they were well written, and I understood how they felt, and I could just sort of feel my way into that character. And I would love to have seen them do more with that as the game progressed, but actually they you know they tilted towards shooting robot dinosaurs rather than tilting towards family drama. Okay, fine, whatever. That's what they did. But um, I just remember that feeling like, oh yeah, this is a really good integration of this basic idea into the kind of triple A, triple A context. Um the other choice that I remember recently was playing is is completely different, was playing Star Wars Outlaws, which um has a faction system. And I think actually a lot of games have got faction systems, but like somehow I haven't really encountered one before, or it quite so visible, perhaps I haven't encountered one where I've really understood what's going on properly before. But there's um a choice near the beginning where you've done this job for this gangland boss guy, and then uh you get double-crossed, and you have this choice of whether to complete that mission for him or to give this information you've stolen to his rival gang. And that moment, once they they do that at the end of pretty much every quest of that game that I've played, I haven't played it through to the end, and after a while you go, oh, okay, it's this is just me dropping a bucket in which faction I want to support and get the mechanic now. But that very first time that it happened, I had a real moment of feeling, oh yeah, this is a reasonable, this is a moment where me and the protagonist are really in alignment because I've I've completed this job, but for the moment I do have free will. I don't have to go to the guy and deliver the package to him. I could give it to these other guys who are offering me money for it, and I can see why they want it, and then I can play both sides against the other, and I can be a double agent, and like and the that offer of giving me a little bit of a way to find my own way through this otherwise rigid quest-based system that says do this, so you will do this, felt really great, actually. And I really, really liked that. And kind of, I think as the game went on and it started to become more of a systemic thing, I kind of lost interest in it because then I thought, okay, I I see the system here more than I see the moment, but as a fictional moment, it felt great, and I would love it to have spann off in a different way and then come up with varieties and variations on that structure. Big open world games are quite bad at coming up with infinite variety on structures for the obvious reason they they have a lot of hours to fill. But um, yeah, that really that really landed for me, actually, and I really enjoyed it. But um, yeah, otherwise it's quite often I think when choice works really well is exactly when you don't see it because you're embedded in that game and you're in the flow of the game, and the choices are more like the way that you're moving through the game story rather than actual decision points that you're taking. Um, because I think every time that I stop and go, oh, what is what is what do I think the strategically correct decision to take at this moment is is a moment when I'm not actually in the world of the story. Um, I'd much rather be in that moment going, well, I know what I'm gonna do. Like, here are my two options, I know which one I'm gonna take immediately. I remember playing years ago, playing Heavy Rain, which uh sold itself as being this incredibly branching interactive story, and I think I still don't really understand quite how branching or not it really is. But um, there's a point where the the psycho guy who's got your kid demands that you shoot this bloke in cold blood, and he's like, he's a drug dealer, he's a bad dude, so it's okay to shoot him, and I'll save your kid. And it's one of those ridiculous setups where like, what it what is going on in this world to make this a viable choice? Like, I'm a middle-aged guy, I don't go around shooting drug dealers, but but whatever, this is the moment Exactly. I just really can't find any ibuprofen today. So um, so I I got to this moment and it it sort of offered you a chance to shoot him or not shoot him. And if you don't shoot him, there's a couple of beats of dialogue, and then it lets you shoot him or not shoot him, and it kind of runs this choice a couple of times so that you you don't get one binary moment, but you really have to commit to to not shooting him. Obviously, if you shoot him, you shoot him, and and that's the other way, the other way out of the scene. I remember I got two beats down, and then the guy said something I really didn't like. I can't remember what it was. He probably just said something horrible or rude or maybe something racist or something like that. And I just like, oh, I've had enough of this, and I shot him. And I remember I my wife was sitting on the sofa, uh, not really watching, and she was like, Did you just shoot that guy? And I was like, Oh, my my my finger slipped. My finger slipped, and she was like, All right, okay, good. Like, I wouldn't want to think you were someone who just shot people. I was like, No, no, no, my finger slipped, but it didn't slip, I actually chose it. So that was great. That was really great. And I think although the setup was, you know, it was ridiculous, and you can't build a game out of sequences like that, you really can't. But I I did particularly like the way that it took a moment of choice and turned it into this. Um, and that's just a structure that we use quite a lot, actually, this kind of um doubling down thing where you say, here's a thing you can do, do you want to do it? And if you say no, it says, Okay, here's another reason why you might want to do that thing. Here's another reason why you might want to do it. So you really have to commit to not doing it if you're not gonna do it. Because then at least at the end of that sequence, if you did it, you feel like you did it because you know that you didn't need to. And if you don't do it, you feel that you didn't do it because you definitely did not do it. Um, I have a feeling at the end of the drug dealer sequence he gets shot whatever happens, like uh or falls out of a window, or I don't know what. But um, yeah, I love that kind of stick or twist mechanic where you ask a player, what do you think? Okay, now we've made it harder to think that. Do you still think that? Um I I love doing that. I love doing that. And yeah, I feel like that way you can take a tiny you can take the tiniest moment and really escalate it by not so much giving the player choice, but just giving these these moments of commitment to to the flow of the game. Yeah, I really like that.

SPEAKER_00 56:09

I just came to mind is I I I love the idea of a game where say like at the end of some like heavy rain, just sort of you're held accountable and you have to go and answer some questions to I don't know, a police officer and explain at what point did you choose to shoot this person? He said something, he said something that was mildly offensive, and it was at that point I realized I deserve to die, you know. Um just going through this checklist of every single single thing, thing that you've done. Um it made me think of the end of the Crimson Diamond, actually, that I did. It's not that, but I don't feel remember, but you know, you you have to talk through basically all the things that you saw, and and it's not it's not so much about choice, but I absolutely love that that mechanic in that game. And actually, something that came to mind was Red Dead Redemption 2, which because you know, once you've finished the game, you have this time jump, right? And then you can go back to all these places that the previous protagonist had visited. Um, and then you get to see very passively the consequence of a lot of decisions that you've made throughout the game. But at the time, when you say choosing to help this, you know, person in the woods or this you know woman who's sort of trying to make a new star after her husband died, you're not you're not thinking too hard about you, you're in that moment making a decision of what feels right, but you're not thinking about the long-term consequence because you don't realise that you're going to be finding out what that is down the line when you're playing as as as John Marsden. And um one of my favourite things around in that game was going back and exploring all the places where I'd sort of trodden previously and seeing the impact that I that I'd had.

SPEAKER_02 57:44

Yeah, I think games could do so much more with like with time jumps as well and time skips to show those kind of to think about consequence in a much more long-term way. And it it also comes with this mechanical sort of quirk that you know players have a tendency to manipulate the game in order to try out choices, like they say they save scum, right? Um, because they want to make sure they've got all the information before they make their decision, before they commit. Totally fair enough. But if you start to employ a time delay between the choice and the consequence, um, whether that's in the gameplay or it's actually in the world of the story, that feels like a less sensible thing to do. It's more like, well, I make a choice and then and then the world takes over. And the world takes over that choice, and I don't get to just save scum it to see what the different states are. And I think that's really nice actually. And it would be lovely to see to see more games playing with that concept. You know, let's have a game about generation starship where you play a bunch of characters in this generation and then the 50th generation, and the hundredth generation, and then the thousandth generation. Like that's not an impossible technical challenge, but it's a great idea, right? And there's a million variations of that that we could be doing and kind of looking at if we just get away from that idea that I'm the protagonist, the protagonist is me, I have to follow him around everywhere. He never goes to the toilet, but apart from that, I follow him around everywhere. Um and yeah, and then kind of like and just embrace the jump cut and the the time skip a little bit more. I think there's loads we could do with that as well.

SPEAKER_00 59:13

That'd be lot, I would love to see more games like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um talking about um uh games like The Walking Dead or you know, 80 Days where something comes along, and and like you said, it's not necessarily it's not like some brand new you know mechanic necessary under the hood, or that's a part of it, but it's surprising players or it's giving players something new. And I guess this is me asking this question off of the back of like 25 odd interviews with different people within the industry, and around 75% of which voluntarily bring up Monkey Island. And it's one of those games that's in some ways obviously completely conflated itself because when you play it, it's just this really wonderful point-and-click adventure game, right? But I guess I'm just curious what your take is on you know what what makes that game. Why is it so legendary? Everybody remembers it. Why is it why is it the one? Yeah, there has to be one, right? I don't think it's I don't think it's because it's um yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:17

Yeah. It's a good question. It's a good question. Because like it is in some ways just a point-and-click adventure. In a lot of its puzzles are irrational and illogical in that way that everybody everybody hates. It's got quite a good variety of puzzles, I suppose. Um the writing is you know very much within its its particular mode in that kind of gonzo LucasArt's um mode that they enjoyed a lot. Some of it is very funny, but I don't know that it's legendarily funny. But but yeah, I deeply, deeply love it, as does every other narrative designer. And one of the things that always gets mentioned is, of course, the sword fighting mechanic, and that is really clever. It's a really clever use of a conversational system, it's a really clever example of deductive gameplay. Well, deduction games are really popular right now, and they're all about puzzles where there isn't a logical solution, there's an intuitive leap that once you know you've got it, you definitely know you've got it. And that's the kind of the deal with a put with a deduction game, is that there's no there's no linear way to think about it like there is in a Sudoku puzzle. There's no strategy, but the answer is robust because a lot of adventure game puzzles, when they when they don't really work, it the problem is that the answers aren't robust. They just feel like, well, how was I supposed to guess I was supposed to put a turnip in the fridge? Like, what are you talking about? Um and like a good deduction game satisfies that. Yeah, absolutely. Let's scribble it down, it's gonna be a winner for my Baldrick game. Um but the yeah, the conversational sword fighting in Monkey Island has never really been replicated or done by anyone else in a way that really works. But I think the reason that it works is it it satisfies that deduction game itch of kind of being completely fair and completely opaque at the same time. But that's only one short part of this game, it's only one tiny bit of it. And I think the other thing that's interesting about it is the structure of it is slightly more open than we think of with a point-and-click adventure. So normally when you think of a point-and-click adventure, there's a room with puzzles to solve, and you go to the room and you solve the puzzles, and you go to the next room and you solve the puzzles, and you might have two or three different rooms to walk between, but the rooms are very static. Monkey Island does do that, but it also has pirates roaming around on the island who you can encounter not randomly exactly, but you can kind of drop in on. And I think there are monkeys that roam around on the monkey island once you get to the monkey island as well. There are these small elements of real-time things which just hint towards making it slightly more like an open world and slightly less like a staged point-and-click adventure. And I think maybe there's something in that as well, just creating just a slight sense that this really is an island with people moving around on it, and you can catch them in the middle of a path and have an encounter with them, and that's meaningful, and it might even help your story. So it's not just a rigid flow. Maybe that kind of just trips a switch in people's brains that makes them go, Oh, yeah, this is a real place. Although I've never heard anyone pick on that detail as being significant. I do wonder if if maybe it is. Yeah, but I honestly I don't know. But I I love it very deeply, as I told you last time we spoke, and like I played it recently with my kids, and like, yeah, it's still great, actually. It's still great, it's still a ton of fun. Um yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:41

Is there is there a part of that game when you think about it that comes to mind? Like when you picture Monkey Island, the first one.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:47

Yeah, oddly, actually, whenever I picture Monkey Island, what I really see is Monkey Island 2 and the puzzle with the different coloured gobbits of um there's like a red and a green drink, and you mix them together and make different colours. I have no idea why that is the standout moment of Monkey Island 2 because it's clearly not. Yeah, right. I think it's just something about I honestly, I think it's just the colours, it's just it has some bright colours, and my brain as a kid just went, oh, it's cheerful bright colours.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:17

So yeah, and nothing sensible comes to mind, I don't think.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:20

That is interesting though, because it's yeah, I mean, what's better than just bright colours and nice, you know, shades.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:27

And maybe it's just that feeling like a cartoon, like a cartoon you can be in. Maybe that was just for us when we played it as kids, certainly that was just a glorious thing to experience. I I I don't know. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:39

I have to I think about the very beginning, not the very beginning of Monkey Allen 2, but the you know, when you're um you're walk, you know, you're walking into the first town that's made up of boat shipwrecks and just the bridge and you know, the kind of glowing lights coming out of um the windows. Um and actually just something you said there about you know the um the the characters walking around. I noticed that for the first time when I replayed it last year. I was like, oh yeah, I'm sure I've I've always been aware of it, but I just realized how much that that's adding to the sort of the the dynamic lived in the um state of the space. And it does bring to mind not to go like deep, the deepest, darkest point-and-click adventure gaming, but you know, with Discworld, the beauty of that game for me was was there was so much that changed within the environment um and the characters as the game proceeded. Um, you know, with the beggar losing more and more limbs, you know, each time, and the the people moving to different locations, you know, depending on how the the game and the story has progressed. And that that to me is another example of uh creating something that feels like a a truly those both those games felt like extremely lived in spaces. Um about the fact that they're being done with with extremely limited, you know, resources to to to create to create that illusion for me, you know.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:06

Yeah, the the Discord game really stuck in my head. It's just a work of art, like the the pixel art in it is so expressive and characterful and like memorable, but probably some of the best of its era, I think. And like yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely gorgeous. I'm not sure the puzzles were that great. I'm I don't even know that I ever finished it because I think it was quite buggy as well.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:26

Like that that I I I did replay that last year and I didn't finish it. At some point I just got the walk walk through uh how and just like enjoyed. And for me at that point, it was just about unlocking new pixel animations and new um um you know locations to look at, you know. That that that's as much of it as anything else else by the way.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:48

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:49

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um but maybe it's an unanswerable question, you know, to work out what it is about these certain games that that that just have quite literally that you know inspired an entire generation to go forward. And we spoke about this last time, but they're still thinking about um those games when they're developing and creating these new new ones, you know, however many decades on, you know. That's where we're that's where we're reaching for inspiration, you know. It's not even within like the last 10 years type of games, it's these things from way, way, way back when.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:20

Yeah, I I do wonder what the next generation of game designers will call back to, though, because presumably there are kids playing games right now who in 20 years, 30 years time are gonna be the people doing these podcast interviews and saying, Oh, I really loved, and I don't know what game they're going to quote. It can't possibly be Monkey Island anymore. But um, yeah, what will be them?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:39

No, that would the only that would be the real hipster hipster gamers will be quote monkey island because we'd like nah it's gotta be it's gotta be the the the the 50-year-old game, you know, although it's gonna be getting up to I don't know how old it is now. But um that would be Breath of the Wild, actually.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:54

That's what it'll be. It'll be Breath of the Wild.