The Soft Animal of Your Heart

DESIGNER-CHOICE GAME

This interactive narrative is based on the poem Wild Geese by Mary Oliver, from my obsessions list. I chose this poem to push me out of my comfort zone and try to create a game that would evoke the same feeling in the player as Oliver's poem did in me while playing it.

 The story leads the reader through a series of landscapes inspired by Oliver's poem, each scene offering a new opportunity for reflection or meditation, and it should be approached as an "interactive poem" rather than as a true text-based game. Thematically, the game is meant to help the reader work through their own mental burdens while providing a judgement-free space for introspection.

 I was outside of my comfort zone with this project, as I didn't have much practice with writing poetry, but I enjoyed the challenge. Further, I struggled with the technical aspects of Chapbook a bit, and I wasn't able to include as many coded elements as I wanted. However, in the end, I think that the simplistic format was a merit of the poem, as it allows the reader to focus more on their own imagined landscapes based on the text, rather than forcing a certain perspective. I decided to colour the different passages based on their content, and the colour of the ending depends on which passage precedes it. Still, I think that the story could have also been very well represented in the default Chapbook formatting due to its simple nature, but I didn't want to give the impression that I was too lazy to customize the look. 

I playtested it three times, once with my mom when it was about 70% finished, once with my poet friend when the first draft was done, and once with my friend once I was completed. The main feedback I took was from my poet friend, who appreciated the simple look of chapbook and suggested I work on clarifying my intentions and being more consistent with my world-building, which was very helpful. 

I tried to think outside the box regarding the definition of 'game,' instead focusing more on creating a piece of interactive fiction. My mom, when playtesting, commented on how when she hears the word 'game' she thinks that she's going to have to solve something and that my game didn't fit her definition. I took this comment in stride and decided to try to clarify my intentions a bit further while still preserving the ambiguity of the narrative.

Regarding structure, I was focusing on creating a narrative that focused more on the illusion of choice rather than a "branching infinity." Originally, I wanted to use Nat's advice about interface games to create a sort of artifact to be interacted with, and in a way, I did sort of do that. I struggled a bit with the bottleneck created by my 'Carry on' passage, but I was able to overcome it by creating a variable called 'despair' that accumulates throughout the first half of the game, and the message displayed in 'Carry on' is different depending on the value of 'despair.'