![]() ![]() Until, quite suddenly – finally, miraculously – it came undone all at once. More than that, they didn't want to relate, didn't want to be around the weird, scared, desperately earnest kid who was hurting all the time for no reason.Īnd I tugged at that knot for a long time – tugged at it for my entire life. When I had tried, no one ever seemed to relate to it. It wasn't even the one I had been tugging at the longest, nor the one that seemed the most intractable.īecause for as long as I could remember, there was something wrong. It wasn't the only tight, messy little knot I was tugging at. And so I spent a long time tugging in vain at this tight, messy little knot, hoping that if I managed to loosen it a little, I would catch a glimpse of the whole design, but that glimpse proved elusive. The solution for all three would have to arrive at once, or not at all. Which brought it back to the question of how much agency the player should have, and in what ways would they exercise it.Īs is often the case with games, these three problems fed into each other in such a way that I couldn't really solve any one of them in isolation. Which left me with the question of, how feasible should the historical result be? Which once again brings it back to the question of how the player's success should be measured. Historically, all twenty-eight men survived. And with a story like this, that would feel ghoulish.įinally, there was the problem of probability. The problem is, once you gamify something – once you assign it a numerical value – players are incentivized to treat it numerically. It would need to communicate the misery and suffering at the heart of the real-life experience. The game, then, would need to be bleak and downbeat. This is not a heroic story, not an adventure it's a very bleak, downbeat thing. They lived these months constantly on edge, never knowing when a sea leopard might attack, when the ice underfoot might give, when frostbite might turn gangrenous – all things which happened and easily could have proven fatal. These were merely the more mundane horrors. During a three-day lifeboat journey, having failed to bring potable water, they sucked on pieces of frozen raw meat so that its juices could slake their thirst. When they ran out of toilet paper, they wiped with ice, which chafed. Malnutrition and starvation wreaked havoc on the men's intestinal systems. The expedition was an agony in a physical sense. Second, there was the problem of suffering. ![]() I needed a way to model this limited agency that didn't make you feel like you were just along for the ride. This isn't a game about you making things happen, but about things happening to you, and how you and the desperate men you're responsible for react to that pressure. A very basic carrot-and-stick model of leadership.īut none of that really applied to this situation. The actions that you took then directly impacted how your subjects felt about your rule: aggressive actions bred hostility, conciliatory ones quieted things down. The previous solitaire games I had done saw the player on the move, winning battles, solving problems, building infrastructure. At the outset, I identified three problems I'd have to solve.įirst, there was the problem of agency. ![]()
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