Fish! Update - Part 3
In this final part of this update, I’m going to write about things we’ve observed during the first seven sessions, things that we’ve talked about and ways that other people could get involved - scroll to the bottom to see the four levels of engagement!
Observations
Game choice & pacing
Firstly, a few thoughts on managing the game: one of the things I was very worried about at the beginning was whether we’d make fast enough progress to keep the players entertained and involved. Most of the players have never played a text adventure before, and even though Fish! is at the later and most sophisticated end of parser games, it’s still a very old game that ran on hardware that’s almost inconceivably slow and basic by today’s standards. People have very different expectations of games nowadays, and of the ability of computers to understand our instructions! It’s very important to me that people feel included and listened to and engaged enough to make suggestions and follow along with the story. Which is also outside of most people’s familiarity - written in the 80s by young men with strong Adamsian (Douglas, not Bryan) and Pratchetarian influences, and plenty of contemporary satire.
Seven episodes in, I think it’s really working! Most of us playing are in our late 40s and 50s, but Lucas is 16 and appears to be enjoying it. The story is convoluted and weird, but also interesting despite the fact it plays on so many tropes and stereotypes, and the writing is excellent, and not just in terms of its prose but also the way it works in clues and hints as to what the player should do, not just what’s happening in the game world. I think we chose well.
Player names
I should also talk about names. You may have noticed that no one says their surname, nor do I mention my own anywhere on this website or during the stream. It’s not that I don’t want people to know who I am, or that I’m in some way embarrassed about what we’re doing. It’s partly that this is my private hobby, and I don’t necessarily want people finding this website when they search for my name professionally and partly that I want this to be inclusive and players might not want their full names associated with it, especially young people who don’t want their schoolmates finding out. These are the concerns you get when you have a slightly unusual name, I guess.
One thing that does occur to me is that I spend too much time on camera - I would like the players to take more of a starring role, perhaps changing how the audio is recorded will make a difference here:
Recording audio
I decided, as this is an experiment, not to record each person’s audio separately but to just take the combined track from the stream itself, which therefore also includes Zoom’s audio suppression. This does make editing the podcast easier, and includes the game sound, which, apart from the opening title music that I now skip anyway, only consists of the disk access noise but I think that’s important, nonetheless. (So far at least, there might be more audio in the game that we haven’t encountered for all I know).
However, I do think the podcast would sound much better with individually recorded audio tracks, and it would mean I wouldn’t have to edit out some bits where people talk over each other. I worry that’s going to make what is already quite a big editing job even bigger, however I need to do it to find out for sure, and there might be quicker ways of editing using an AI tool such as Descript.
Anyway, as mentioned, I also hope that individual audio recording will encourage the players to say more - I think they are currently super aware not to talk over each other currently. On the other hand, if players did talk over each other a lot, Zoom’s speaker view would try to switch between them rapidly which might also be a bit confusing, on the livestream at least.
Reading out loud
The podcast aspect is interesting in a few other ways as well. I don’t know whether it really works or if people like it. Very few people appear to be listening, and we’ve had no feedback on it so far, but I think it’s an enjoyable listen. I also think it works to follow the game via audio only - of course people are not used to this, but, as I said at the beginning, that’s what this experiment is about. It also forces me to read pretty much everything out, and explain what’s going on to an audience who can’t see the screen, especially the occasional location images. I’m no voice actor, and I am usually reading the text for the very first time, which is a bit anxiety-inducing, but I think it generally works pretty well in the edit (if anyone fancies watching a bit of the livestream and then listening to the same bit on the podcast to compare, please let me know what you think! 😂).
Presumably reading everything out loud also benefits livestream viewers, who likely have it on whilst doing other things at the same time, and can’t always read the text on the screen themselves.
Producing the podcast
One area we could also work on more are the podcast intros and outros - at the moment Lee and I knock these up very quickly after each livestream session. We’ve started to get into the habit of part writing a short script and then surprising each other with things we left out of the shared document. We think this is quite fun, as we’re riffing on a format and making each other laugh, but maybe it’s just daft and a bit in-jokey. Maybe we should do more to explain what the podcast and the whole experiment is actually all about? On the other hand, we’re knocking one of these out pretty much every single week, alongside our busy lives, so in some ways I think it’s more effort than is really needed and maybe we should just ditch them entirely!
I mentioned the lack of podcast listeners, and this shouldn’t be surprising, we haven’t exactly promoted it and it’s not exactly familiar or similar to anything else out there; but we also imagined more people would listen to it well after the end of the game rather than using it to catch up and join in. In fact one of the things we like about all this is that the recordings remain as a record of our time together playing the game and can still be enjoyed by people discovering the game and the experiment for a long time to come.
Is this legal?
Finally, a quick word on intellectual property rights: We presume it's legal to play this particular version of the game and publish ourselves doing it, but I don’t actually know for sure. Obviously lots of streamers publish themselves playing games and it’s classed as fair use. For games that are still available to buy it presumably serves the publishers as promotion.
To this end we include a mention and link to Strand games, the firm set up by former Magnetic Scrolls developer Hugh Steers and Stefan Meier, who curates the Magnetic Scrolls Memorial website, that has been remastering the games and making them available on modern platforms. I don’t know whether they are still actively doing this, but I really hope they are and would love for our little experiment to bring some attention to their efforts!
How we would love to see other people get involved
We think there are four ways to get involved, each one requiring a different level of effort 🙂
The first way is to watch and/or listen to some episodes and let us know what you think of the experiment - do you think it’s a good idea? Is it something you’d watch or listen to? Could we do aspects of it better? Etc.
Secondly, by all means join in by watching the livestream and commenting in the chat. Obviously don’t drop spoilers if you’ve played it before, but, if we appear stuck, by all means make a suggestion! Or just let us know you’re there: say hello; crack a joke; ask a question - it would be nice to know that people are out there taking notice.
Thirdly, let other people know about what we’re doing. One of the things that has occurred to us, and I think this probably deserves a whole separate post, is that we think what we’re doing might be more interesting to people who like puzzles and escape rooms but have never played (or even heard of) text adventures, rather than text adventures and IF aficionados. I think adventure fans would rather play the games themselves, or maybe watch someone who’s an absolute expert on them and can illuminate the gameplay beyond what they themselves would experience, rather than watch a random group of people struggle through a revered classic. So tell your families, friends, and followers about it and let them know that perhaps by watching what we’re doing they might understand what text adventures are a little better and realise just how much fun they are. Especially when played together in a friendly group!
Fourthly, and finally, another way to get involved is to copy what we’re doing and run your own live-streamed collaborative playthrough - take what we’ve done and improve on it; make it more fun; get more people involved; figure out your own way of doing it! We’ll happily support anyone who decides to do this. This experiment is about seeing if there’s a whole new format possible for playing these games, it would be wonderful if other people joined in and conducted their own experiments to find the best and more engaging way to do it!
