Helen, lovely recounting. I understand that aspect and to also reply to Babel, yes, there is emotional manipulation going on, but unevenly, even hamhandedly. That reply that I wrote is heartfelt and I don’t take back any of it.
I love stories. I live for them, and that is not an understatement.
I also work closely with the game industry and interact with a lot of indie developers, always trying to figure out how to bring the depth and array of emotion into gameplay.
What I felt after playing the Big Rat challenge and still feel now is – a sense of cheapness. Getting used.
Fallen London’s treatment to players is absolute parity at best and masochistic at worst (item conversion/economics system, Seeking the Name). Which is fine. There are people who love it, FB needs to pay the rent, etc., it’s rather brilliant mythos (for the latter Mr. Eaten). But there is always very felt tension in the game between the great content and the way it makes its money–or rather, that it has to make money.
Case in point: My Disgraced Rat Bandit Chief, slain in glorious battle. Gone forever, but his story lived and died with him, may he rest in peace. Right?
It would work if I had made the narrative choice to send him in. I didn’t. I was playing by the rules of Fallen London. A certain percent success rate, a clear warning that if I LOST, I might lose my rat (same as on previous rolls). I had my 8 Talkative Rats ready. Then I saw that my Bandit Chief would have 96% success rate, a "Straightforward" challenge.
I won the roll, but I STILL lost my dear rat.
Because the game design lied to me. That warning of losing my rats was not coming from a narrative space, it was coming from the meta game design space, which as far as I’m aware, is not specifically designed to be unreliable–and so it lied to me.
And even that might have been okay: "Okay, I see what you did there, I feel shocked and I feel the loss of a good teammate, and I REALLY LIKED HIM, YOU MOTHERFUCKERS–you totally got me. But he got what he wanted."
BUT. BUT. The fact that money comes into it.
Either give him a glorious send-off and retire with the memory of his name–but to dangle his return if I paid money to get him back–what the hell was the point of that story if I got another of him? That’s manipulating my emotions (in the ugly sense) for financial compensation. Is that doing justice to the nobility of "story"?
I felt like was deliberately yanked away from me so that I had the "option" of paying to get him back. What does this narrative sound like now?
Like I said, there’s a tension between the goal of the narrative and the narrative of the gameplay mechanics which are at odds with each other. That’s what I’m frustrated about.
[li]