Posted 7 January 2000 to rec.games.int-fiction
Some thoughts on Stephen Granade's excellent COMMON GROUND. I have tried to minimize spoilers but especially with a short game I'm not sure what would and wouldn't be considered spoilers. If any players of the game have an opinion on this please post!
* * SPOILERS * *
There's something
to said for IF that is both short and easy enough for the time-pressed
and puzzle-challenged among us to finish at a sitting. When, as is the
case of Stephen Granade's COMMON GROUND, that sort of game is also
engrossing, insightful and uses the medium to create an effect that
couldn't be achieved as well in a short story the something to be said
has to be "Yay!" Some might say "Bravo" but let's not get too high
falutin' here.
COMMON GROUND is a
game about a teenager, Jeanie, who is, no surprises here, dissatisfied
with her family/home/life. The plot is simple (unless someone informs
me I should've moved the waterbed and went through the hidden trapdoor
into the 50 rooms of underground caverns). Jeanie gets her bag and
waits for a ride, while mom comes in with the groceries and Frank sits
in the den and fixes a toaster. The puzzles are so easy that even I
had no trouble solving them without hints.
What makes this boring
sounding game fascinating is that it is truly IF. In the course of
four scenes the player begins as Jeanie, then takes the role of her
dad and mom before returning to Jeanie's perspective. Each of the
characters, and hence the player, sees the family home, and the other
family members, from a different perspective. Obviously, this is not
something that could not, and has not, been done in regular fiction,
however, IF has advantages which Stephen exploits.
For one thing a
mundane family home becomes more interesting when it must be explored
rather than merely being described. It is more interesting to
discover, as Jeanie, that the posters on your bedroom wall are boring,
than to be simply told that by the author. More importantly the
player gets to experience "living" as each character. The device of
having the player, as Frank, tinker with the simple puzzle of fixing
the toaster, goes a long way toward allowing an appreciation of
Frank's outlook on the world.
Puzzles, I think, are
important to IF. They don't have to present a challenge, but one thing
that differentiates IF from regular fiction is that the player brings
a higher level of involvement due to the fact that the player has to
look and examine and manipulate objects and move around to experience
the story. Puzzles - however simple - are an important means of
creating player involvement without which IF becomes nothing more than
fiction on a computer screen.
COMMON GROUND does
point out that although IF benefits from requiring the player to take
active steps to discover at least parts of the story, even in IF the
author remains in control. For example, in COMMON GROUND, even though
we get to look through the eyes of each character it is Stephen who
has selected what we can and can't see. It is still the author who
designs the point of view we experience just as in a piece of regular
fiction. Consider that though we seem to be in Jeanie's head in the
first scene, we are not told specifically, unless I missed something,
what her intentions (revealed in the fourth scene) are.
A final note, COMMON
GROUND demonstrates quite admirably something that too many writers
forget - writing is not so much putting down words as seeing. What
(objects or characters, or actions) the author selects to tell a story
is more important than the particular words the author selects. If the
story is designed well enough the words need only describe it. If the
story is not designed well enough no amount of verbiage will save
it.
Stephen Granade has
designed an excellent, enjoyable, and medium-stretching game in Common
Ground.
This article copyright © 2000, Eric Mayer