"I Can Hold My Breath Forever" is a neat game created by Jake Elliott as an entry in the "10 Seconds" friendly game competition that I found in my daily browsing... You can play it here...
The game itself is not brilliant, with dodgy collision detection and too short of a time limit on the underwater breathing mechanism for a kid to play... and kids should play this!
It's the perfect example of a kid story turned into a game... It has a simple gameplay mechanic, and a moving story with a sort of moral into it...
It's one of those games I'd like to have created myself; it's moving, powerful and simple. And it got me thinking of game for kids, and specially in games for kids to play with their parents (or vice versa)...
Like a child's book that a parent read to their children all over the world, I can imagine a parent sitting his 3-year-old in his lap and letting him explore the game, reading to him out loud the letters and the story, both immersed in this small fantasy world.
Got me thinking on narrative-based games for children, and if I ever find the time, I want to do something similar: a game designed so that a parent and his child can play together.
Even the bad graphics add to the atmosphere, since they leave a lot to the imagination, which is one of the parts of human psyche that are more developed in a child.
Ultra-realistic graphics/sound aren't important for a child (just check the work of the well-known illustrators for children's books, for example), it's the story they "read" and create in their mind, sometimes with the assistance of their parents, sometimes by their own. The story should be loose enough so they can fill in the blanks and imagine their own story by giving them a "framework" to build upon... In the above case, it's just a series of letters and some underwater caves with glowy fish. In children's books, we have even simpler frameworks; for example, my wife (a kindergarten teacher) bought a book a short time ago whose framework was just a balloon and his travels! It had very little text, just some tidbits, and the child could create the rest of the story by itself...
I'll state again: I want to design something like this, if I can... I already have a base storyline for a game that has the codename "The Little King". It should take me 3 or 4 days to create the game as I'm envisioning at the moment... I'll probably grow it and make it megalomaniac (as I do to everything) and it will become a 2-year project, unfortunately...
Since I'm on the topic of storytelling, check out Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw's article on Betrayal on The Escapist here. Very interesting, and while he's focused on the "Betrayal" story archetype, it's really a good eye-opener for storytellers everywhere about the dangers of trying to make your story "surprise" and "have more stuff"...
Funny game :)
ReplyDeleteWith enough discipline you can limit your story line to less than 200 pages. :D
ReplyDeleteHi Diogo --
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing your thoughts. It's very nice to read this response because children's books are an important source of inspiration for me as a game designer. I think about them a great deal actually!
Really good children's books, for me, seem to focus more on providing the reader with a set of what we might call "imagination tools": easy to grasp, fantastic and playful concepts and images that the imagination can use to experiment (play) with interactions between ideas. So rather than "tell a story" in an imperative way where the writer leads a reader along a path, which seems to me to be the default literary storytelling tradition to which game designers often turn, great children's books are more like a sandbox game :)
The "imagination tools" language may or may not have been borrowed/adapted from Seymour Papert; the concepts definitely are :)
In "I can hold my breath...", I was specifically trying to give the player material to play with ideas of space+time; how the space of the caves maps to the player's time, the character's time and their friend's time, and also to play with ideas about relationships+friendships, what could be expected from a friendship and how far one could be expected to go in the name of friendship. So the uses of those concepts in the game are left deliberately open-ended or in some other way complicated by mechanics.
I'd also like to point you and your readers to the two other games I've made, both very much inspired by children's books:
"Beulah and the Hundred Birds" - http://dai5ychain.net/beulah/
This game was/is (I'm working on a new version now) inspired by the kind of really fantastic imagery I remember from 'Animalia' or 'Where the Wild Things Are': mysterious situations and environments that are presented as fully-formed and autonomous worlds that the imagination could dip into for a bit.
"Dog and Bone Are Friends" -
http://dai5ychain.net/dogandbone/
This game was named after "Frog and Toad Are Friends", one of my favorite books from when I was very small :) It's kind of a sloppy attempt at a puzzle game, but I hope it was at least evocative of a friendship between these two characters.
thanks again & take care!
jake
Thanks for your comment, Jake, I was thinking on sending you an email thanking you for that game, it was a real eye-opener for me!
ReplyDeleteI'm going to take a look to your other games, have great expectations for it!
Keep up the good work!