PERSPECTIVE
Write it like you stole it
Today I played a game that wanted to teach me about Viking history and culture while I walked around doing odd jobs. It was Assassin’s Creed Valhalla’s excellent Discovery Mode, which has evolved from the tour-guide NPCs of Odyssey into the highest-budget indie game ever. But while I enjoyed the storyline, I found myself skipping past all the fact-panels about figurehead designs and such – which was odd because I’m generally pretty interested in history, culture and ships, as anyone who’s played any Inkle game could probably guess.
The shadow of edutainment looms large, it seems, with a curse that’s curiously peculiar to games. In contrast, I don’t mind when I’m watching Horrible Histories with my kids that the jokes are often thinly veiled fact-delivery mechanisms. (“Are you sure you mean ‘Joan of Arc?’” / “Quite sure. I wrote it on my hand.” / “Well, I can’t read, so I’ll have to take your word for it”, as opposed to Bill & Ted’s snappier but content-free, “Well, then, who is Noah’s wife?”)
Perhaps it’s that in games we lack the seamless integration of content and purpose that other media enjoys: there’s always this gap between the exposition and the action; between the thing you’re meant to do (go over there and press Triangle) and the thing they want to tell you (did you know that Viking houses employed turf roofs for insulation?). Or perhaps being educated is a breach of the player fantasy: ‘I’m the hero here, I’m in charge, so who are you to tell me about Viking longhouse design? Some academic expert? Get the hell out of my game!’
Whatever the reason, this problem was in our minds when, a couple of years ago, Inkle was approached by the team at Google Arts & Culture, which hosts digitised copies of paintings and artifacts from the world’s museums. We told them that making a game using their asset database simply wasn’t possible. The gameplay, we asserted, would fight the educational material. The two would pull in opposite directions. It was intractable.
If Assassin’s Creed games do anything well, it’s allowing us to learn about history by scrambling around on top of it
We were wrong, of course. We just needed to think of a different way of approaching the problem than the CD-ROM designers of 1995. You can take a butcher’s at our solution for yourself online at goo.gle/labyrinth. Entitled The Forever Labyrinth, it’s a run-based, procedurally assembled narrative adventure in the Inkle style (lots of choices, lots of characters, lots of replayability). It sees the player delving into a strange labyrinth filled with artwork as they try to find and rescue a missing professor. There are twists; there are betrayals; there are endings, super-endings and super-duper endings for the faithful.
