I choose question 2.

Consider the work you created for project 1. Is this work actually a game? Why/why not?

Our group did ‘Scarytales’ for our first project, a spoof of fairytales. Although I wouldn’t consider our group project a game, it is pretty obvious that there were some aspects of gaming and play in it.

In ‘I Have No Words & I Must Design: Toward a Critical Vocabulary for Games’, Greg Costikyan defines a game as ‘an interactive structure that requires players to struggle toward goals’. Many of these points he used were similar to that of other writers such as Zimmerman and Caillois. Though Scarytales wasn’t meant to be a game, many areas in our project fulfilled the requirements of a game according to these authors.

Our group started out with the goal of creating a piece of interactive fiction (IF), something exploratory, using the same concept as ‘The Afternoon Story’, only done in flash. However, as our brainstorming progressed, we felt that adding game aspects would probably make our ‘IF’ more interesting. Thus, the first modification we created in our project was to add a goal- to collect all the necessary ingredients to finally defeat Sadako and save Fairytale Land. Users had to follow set rules (e.g. ‘Do not go to the mountains. YOU WILL DIE.). If users decide to go against these rules (if they try exploring the mountains), they die, and the game is over.

Besides these intentional modifications to the project, Scarytales started out with some aspects of game which also fulfilled requirements of an IF. For example, the project is interactive. Users have to interact with it to fulfil goals and explore the whole story. However, as Costikyan goes on to say, even a light switch is interactive. I feel that Scarytales is interactive primarily because it is greatly influenced by works of IF and secondarily because it’s adopted some aspects of games.

To conclude, Scarytales wasn’t created with the intention of making a game. However, through the various adaptations, it managed to fulfil much of what the professionals consider games. Ultimately, Scarytales is a piece of Interactive Fiction influenced by techniques used in games.