Other Times

This week we're going to talk a bit about the various themes running throughout isoChronal Panic! When we started design on the game, we knew that all games need a conflict, something to engage the player. We had some more existentialist ideas at first, which we will get into in a future post, but for a while we were kind of stuck.

In most games, the bad guy is some sort of "other." A creature or life form that's abstracted away into being little more than a token representation of "bad." It's okay to kill these others, because they aren't like you, you know how it goes, "They stand for everything we stand against." Sometimes stories do a good job of humanizing the antagonists, giving them good reasons to do what they're doing and showing the conflict in terms of two groups caught on opposite sides of an issue where no one is at fault. That wasn't really going to work for us, though, we're making a little browser based game for hand-held devices, we only have so much time to dedicate to story and character development.

When we started playing around with time travel mechanics, and realized we wanted to really emphasize the cool gameplay mechanics over the story, we realized we couldn't spend a lot of time getting to much into the back story of the enemies. However, we didn't really feel like just making the antagonists the generic "others" as discussed earlier. For awhile the team was kicking around the idea of the only obstacle to your success being the environment, but that had sort of been done before. I mean, in the fiction of the world you have all of time and space at your command, (well maybe not space, but definitely time), so you could just pick your battles if you wanted. Why not just wait until the spikes in the pit had rusted over? Why not wait until those pesky walls surrounding your objective crumbled to dust before stealing your prize?

The breakthrough came when we started talking about how exactly players would interact with their past selves. We went through a bunch of "what if" scenarios, like "what it on this hop you get to someplace before your past version had pressed a button to let you through,?" Or "what if you somehow kill a past version of yourself? Wouldn't that throw off the entire chain of events you'd been building towards until now?" Finally someone out and said, "Man, dealing with your pasts selves can sure get annoying." And that's where we got our idea that your past selves could be the element in conflict in the game. Instead of giving players past versions of themselves as resources that are difficult for them to exploit, we instead exploit the fact that it's difficult for the player to foresee the results of their past actions and force them to deal with the consequences of not thinking ahead.

Using past versions of the player as antagonists also gives us an interesting opportunity to say something about game antagonists in general. The Other as used by most videogames is a way to pin the blame on someone else. Events within the game need to be fixed because of the actions of some outside force. All of your problems are the fault of someone else. Here, the enemy is you. You're going to have to take responsibility for your actions and acknowledge when you've made a mistake in order to fix it. The only antidote for the Other is the Self.