Fish! Update - Part 1
This is an update on a little experiment I am running with a few friends and family members, to see if it's possible to collaborative play a classic text adventure game online and in public, and keep it fun and inclusive while we do so.
Back in April, my friend Lee and I were talking about how much we used to love text adventure games, but that there were a lot of games we never got round to playing, or did start but got stuck on and never completed. I imagine this is the experience of many people who played these games back in the day - certain games still hold positions of high regard in our memories but we never actually played them or at least have no clear memory of doing so. Lee and I also live a long way apart, and we had been looking for something to play together regularly for a while. Initially the suggestion was that we play The Pawn, by Magnetic Scrolls, via Zoom. However, when we opened our conversation up to our families, our partners said they also wanted to play, and we wondered whether it would be interesting to stream it publicly so that other friends (and strangers) could join in and offer suggestions via chat.
And so, we decided to start an experiment to see if we could design a way for all of us to play a classic text adventure game together, no matter where we were, and make it a social experience that was open for other people to get involved as well, by livestreaming and producing an edited podcast.
We wanted to reproduce what it was like to engage in regular social events online during the Covid lockdowns in 2020 and '21, (apart from the constant risk of horrendous death), when we participated in quizzes, virtual escape rooms and family games like Jackbox TV and Uno, all via Zoom or Discord. Since things returned to 'normal', we haven't done that so much, and as a result relationships that became tight as we all shared in adapting to the realities of a global pandemic have loosened and, if my observations are anything to go by, have become even harder to maintain as people have increasingly drifted away from Facebook and Twitter over the last few years.
Our livestream of Fish!
We also took inspiration from the rise of other streamed collaborative games, such as Dungeons and Dragons, which gained in popularity during the pandemic and still hold large audiences with high production values and celebrity players. So many other videogames and and genres have large communities of players and viewers, and younger people are increasingly discovering and reviving old forms of media, from arcade games to audio cassettes, maybe there's a way of doing this in a way that provides a route to discovery for a whole new generation of fans, both players and authors? And maybe as well as turning adventure games into a social experience, we can make it more inclusive as well?
One method we've adopted to achieve this is to provide an edited and abridged audio-only version of each live session as a podcast, so that a) viewers can more easily catch up with sessions they happened to miss, b) so that our experience will still be able to be easily consumed, and hopefully enjoyed, by listeners well into the future, and in a more accessible format than a livestream recording, and c) we wondered whether it's even possible to follow a text adventure experience via audio-only, and whether this would be welcomed by blind and partially sighted people who rely on audio (we realise of course that text adventures are by their nature already very accessible to the blind and partially sighted community, but perhaps people would be interested in listening to other people play as well - the #LetsPlay videogame streaming genre seems so exclusively visual currently, after all).
We also decided to pick a different Magnetic Scrolls adventure, from later in their history, as we didn't want to alienate people who had never played such games before - we wanted to avoid the three biggest problems with text adventure games, which are, to our minds at least, as follows:
Walking dead scenarios - in which the player has either done something or not done something that means they cannot progress or complete the game, but it's not obvious that this has happened and so you spend hours wandering around trying to figure out what to do when it's already futile.
Arbitrary puzzles - in which the designers create puzzles with solutions that don't make sense or that no sensible person would think of, especially 30 years after the game was made.
Incantations - in which the player knows exactly what they need to do to solve a puzzle, but just cannot find the correct words or sentence structure to trigger the game to carry out the instructions.
We're hoping that the game we have chosen to play - "Fish!", the 5th of Magnetic Scrolls' games, released in 1988 - isn't too prone to these issues, and so far so good.
Taking stock
As I write this, we are now seven episodes into our little experiment and things are going pretty well. It's genuinely fun, we're not getting too stuck, all the players seem to be enjoying it a lot, and a handful of other people have begun to show an interest in what we're doing.
And so it's looking like this little experiment we started is not going to peter out quickly, but is going to keep going at least for the foreseeable future - especially as we suspect there's still a lot of the adventure to go. We can't be certain of course, as none of us has played it to the end before and we've all taken a vow to abstain from the temptations of walkthroughs.
At this stage, I thought it would be a good idea to take stock of things and publish my thoughts about things. To this end I’ll be covering the following topics over the next few posts:
How are we doing this?
What have I observed about the experience?
How we would love to see other people get involved.
Meanwhile, please check out the livestreams and the podcast, and do join us live if you’d like to help us figure out how to stop those dastardly anarchists, the Seven Deadly Fins!!
