![]() The game had made me complicit in those actions. I (as Vella) used the death ray to attack the spaceship/evil monster. The game had presented me (as Shay) with the controls for rescue, and I happily tapped the arrow buttons and lowered the grappling hook to rescue/capture the creatures/maidens. My actions were just and honorable, and I was acting the hero in both situations.īut of course I wasn’t. Apart from vague misgivings about Marek, I thought both stories were above board-I was killing a dreaded monster and rescuing innocent victims. None of those actions-to kill Mog Chothra or to rescue innocent creatures-was presented as an optional choice to me. I had an inkling that Marek (the wolf on board Shay’s ship) was a dubious creature and not to be fully trusted, but the storyline demanded that I follow his lead, augmenting my ship and then instructing ‘me’ as Shay to engage in moving those tentacles and ultimately swooping in and rescuing-or rather capturing-those maidens. And those dangerous tentacles? They were really controlled by me via Shay just minutes before, shooting downward and grasping around in a mistaken attempt to ‘rescue’ poor creatures caught in some vague interstellar war. At the climax of her narrative Vella used a death ray to sever the tentacles that were grabbing maidens, and then disabled the monster via a shot into its mouth. Each story is separate and you can move easily between them, but like most players I spent time thinking about how the stories connected with one another-were Shay and Vella ever going to meet? Was one narrative really a part of the other protagonist’s history and therefore a distant relative of some kind? How was the game going to tie them together?Īnd then the ending came along and made things (somewhat more) clear-Mog Chothra (Vella’s village- and maiden-eating monster) was really Shay’s spaceship. The storylines themselves-the game has two protagonists, Shay and Vella-center on taking risks and trying to change the status quo. Instead it’s an adventure game for fans of the genre, heavy on narrative, puzzles and beautiful artwork, sound and writing to keep the player’s interest. ![]() Just a warning-I’ll be discussing the cliffhanger and actions that led up to it in detail, so if you haven’t yet played the game and want to, I’d recommend going off and doing so before heading back here to read more.īroken Age doesn’t bill itself as a game that relies on player choices or tough decisions as a focal point of gameplay, unlike games such as The Walking Dead series from Telltale Games. After playing through it and reaching the cliffhanger ending, I wanted to write about the game and some issues that it raised. Although I didn’t back the original campaign I found game trailers to be intriguing and bought the game when it launched. Or rather, the first act was released, with the promised conclusion to come later this year. I’ve been looking over the data and there are definitely some good papers ready to emerge from our findings.Īll of that has served as an unintended backdrop for my recent playthrough of DoubleFine’s Kickstarter-funded adventure game Broken Age, which was just released to the general public in late January. The research started informally at first with students doing class assignments, but then Carolyn Jong and I conducted in-depth interviews with players a couple of years ago, and more recently Thorsten Busch has been going over those transcripts to see what kinds of common themes we can identify, or where points of disagreement or discrepancies occur. I’ve written about my own play experiences, taught classes on the topic, and have started a research project exploring how a variety of players think about game choices. ![]() For a while now I’ve been interested in games that include ethical dilemmas or moral choices for players to explore.
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