Not A Game?singmetosleep started out as a broad story outline, a sort of "treatment" for a film or game project. A story without any definite beginning or end, which spanned generations, from several decades in the future to a million years or more from now. And possibly not just other
whens, but other
wheres: dreams, memories, and possibly parallel universes / timelines / causality chains. A story about two sisters, a story about a mother and her daughter, and a story about an only remotely imaginable level of sentience to which humanity may be heading.
Since the
public release of Unreal Engine 4 in March, I've been doubling down on building an "interactive narrative experience" -- something I hesitate to call a "
game" because it has no score, no dying, no win condition.
A "
notgame?"
Something more akin to an interactive movie or even a
Choose Your Own Adventure book, where you are experiencing the story through the eyes of the character, and directing the story arc, but in a subtle way there are greater forces at work, an ineffable inevitability. Like being in a partially lucid dream, where you are "present" and in control, but no matter how hard you try, you just can't run fast enough to escape whatever dark thing you fear.
Mood and presentation will factor heavily into the experience: careful attention will be paid to sound design, and bold stylistic imagery is intended to be more suggestive than representional. I'm building a world, not for the express purpose of realizing most of it, but to give the final interactive experience a rich context and self-consistency, and to provide more hints and signposts than actual exposition.
It's Forever In ThereThe story passes between times and places, touching on brief scenes in the characters' lives, any of which may be dreams or memories of the others.
The bridge looked the same. It had been so many years, but time seemed to stand still in places like this. The world lived and died on timescales orders of magnitude greater than the days and months by which we measure our lives: growth, decay, rebirth; a fluid, silent juggernaut of glacial inevitability.
She looked out across the rusted steel span, at the spot where her sister had last stood, where now there was only air. Stinging tears suddenly welled in her eyes and she squeezed them shut, her breath hitching. She hadn’t realized it would be this hard coming back here.
And there was the house, on the opposite side of the gorge. The opposite end of the bridge she’d never made it across.We experience the story as much as possible as filtered through the characters: colored by their thoughts and emotions and preconceptions. Unreliable narrators abound, though not to the extent that they are actively subverting our impressions: simply that we are all unreliable narrators who see the world through our own lenses, not videorecorders retelling events with cold objectivity.
But I'm searching for the right balance: If some of these experiences are truly memories, how much can these be tampered with / made dream-like (possibly bleeding through from other memories/dreams), before the "factual" elements lose credibility? E.g., if something jarring or clearly "unrealistic" happens, does it break our suspension of disbelief regarding everything else in that scene? I want to give the impression that the remembered events really happened, that they are completely credible, while they are still just remembrances at this point, and subject to mental revisionism (the mind "filling in the blanks" of imperfect/incomplete memories).
Some of these scenarios may seem harsh and gritty; halcyon and tranquilly dreamlike; or abstract, surreal, even alien.
She's in a dream, the old world that was. She thinks she's being watched, maybe followed. Uncanny things are happening -- she sees someone in a chicken suit across a crowd, a large plaza, and the chicken suddenly stops its routine and stares at her, the mask expressionless with its empty black holes for eyes, the person inside and their motives a mystery. Now that she's looking for it, she notices this uncanny regard from more and more people: just becoming still and staring, loss of expression/personality, even from small children. She stops, pressing her palms against her closed eyes, telling herself she's just imagining it, seeing something more than what's really there. She calms down a little, then she opens her eyes.
And everyone is completely still, staring at her. As far as she can see, what must be thousands of people, even blocks away, standing, sitting, in cars, in windows.
"What?!" she screams, equal parts bemused and terrified.
Her bemusement fades when she realizes they had all screamed "What?!" at the precise moment she had. When she realizes they are all wearing the exact expression she suspects she herself has. When she sees them all moving in perfect unison: subtle movements of an arm, slight tilting of the head. Breathing. Blinking.The Road AheadI have a lot mapped out, and I don't want to give away much at this point, for three reasons:
- for the most obvious reason, to retain some mystery to be revealed as you experience the final narrative
- because much of it will be better expressed non-verbally
- but most importantly, because I'm aiming not just to paint a picture, so much as to create a canvas upon which your expectations, your preconceptions, your memories and dreams and thoughts and emotions can influence the unique experience that you will have
I'm currently iterating on a working prototype as I've been getting up to speed with Unreal Engine. I'm using it at this point to test ideas and work on what is effectively "concept art," since I am completely unable to draw using traditional methods. I don't want to draw some pretty pictures that the final product couldn't possibly live up to, so I'm going the opposite route and creating concepts in-engine that if anything will be only suggestions of the final product.
"The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else."
- Eliezer Yudkowsky, Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk
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