The second Playpod Discusion session was held on 12th February, 2010.  Attendees were Kow Wei Man, Joshua Wong, Alex Mitchell, Anne-Marie Schleiner, and me, Zhou Xuanming.  The topic for this weeks discussion, proposed by Alex, was to play and discuss an alternative form of game storytelling as presented by the experimental Half-Life 2 Modification, Dear Esther.

The game attempts experimental storytelling in the form of player exploration.  As the player walks around a deserted island, he or she triggers audio clips narrating the content of letters sent by a dying explorer to a certain lady named Esther.  We played through the entire game in about 45 mins and proceeded to discuss our experience, which garnered the following points:

• Much of the storytelling involved wasn’t concrete, which left it open to several interpretations.
• The experience identified the question of self in a first-person shooter.  We found ourselves asking the question “Who are we playing?” more than once in the playthrough.
• Connection to Hypertext novels – a bunch of loose pieces of audio that can be encountered in any order.  Gives possible motivation for replay.
• As players , we like to test the boundaries of the game.  One of the first things we did was try to die.
• The game was devoid of visible characters.  This was intentional, but we questioned whether this makes the game more or less entertaining as a story.
• The ambiguous nature of the game left us wondering whether some parts we encountered were actual bugs or intended.  There was a car in the middle of the cave coming out of stone, which could have been indicative of the surreality of the space or simply a texturing bug on the stone surface.
• Being set in a first person shooter environment like Half Life 2 made it a challenge to see what FPS conventions to follow (jump, crouch, flashlight, etc) and which to go against (useless mouse buttons)

Some additional critiques in the design of my own:

• The “use/pickup” key was featured, but never actually used.  A simple use would be to remove the torchlight and have the player actually find and hold a lit lamp or something to explore dark areas.
• The juxtaposition of visuals and sounds were not explored fully.  A lot of potential here for reading between the lines, for example: Dying author talks about seeing something amazing, and then player finds empty hallucinogen bottles on the ground.
• Author didn’t really play with the identification of the player.  Very interesting area to explore, making the player convinced he IS someone, then twist it and make an Ohhh! moment somewhere towards the end.
• Not much incentive for exploration.  Discovering hidden ghosts, letter, soundclips, readable scrawlings (like Portal), visually interesting areas (underwater museum) will add to my ooh-whats-around-this-corner.
• Whole game has the interactivity of a museum after office hours.  There are stuff to see, stuff to hear… but I’m not really sure if I’d rather play this than an interactive adventure game like Myst.  Again, “use” key might be further utilized.
• More consistent guide.  The author switches guides too often without recognizable pattern – writings, beacons, birds, ghost, etc.  Might be better to just settle on one and use it tactfully, I propose the ghost.

Hope I have all the points covered.  Please add on in the comments if you have anything I left out.  Cheers.