Interactive Denouement – October ’09 Round Table Entry

Designer Denouements: How can the denouement be incorporated into gameplay? In literary forms, it is most often the events that take place after the plot’s climax that form your lasting opinion of the story. A well constructed denouement acts almost as a payoff, where protagonists and antagonists alike realize and adjust to the consequences of their actions. Serial media often ignored the denouement in favor of the cliffhanger, in order to entice viewers to return. Television has further diluted the denouement by turning it into a quick resolution that tidily fits into the time after the final commercial break.

But the denouement is most neglected in video games where it is often relegated to a short congratulatory cut scene, or at most–a slide show of consequences. This month’s topic challenges you to explore how the denouement can be expressed as gameplay.

Since I’ve recently started learning Inform 7, it seemed like a good idea to focus on an IF design that incorporates denouement. This design is beyond my abilities at the moment, but hopefully as I continue to learn the software, I’ll attempt coding this at some point.

Denouement as gameplay is the challenge for this month, so I decided to skip the other elements of dramatic structure and try to design a game that exists purely to unravel a plot. The player starts at the end of a high school dance, as the final notes of the last slow dance fade away. The lights turn on and the DJ shuts off the disco ball. Students, chaperones, and the few odd college kids still dating high school girls head for the exit.

All that remains are piles of glitter, scraps of shiny ribbon, and the aftermath of a complex web of teenage love, betrayal, and heartbreak. A cluster of girls comfort a crying friend in the corner. A young teacher holding ice against a black eye is glaring at a football player leaning against the doors to the locker room. The school principal is scrubbing graffiti off the wall behind the visiting team’s hoop. And so on…

The player exists outside of this situation, and is even described as “the player” within the game. The player’s inventory is located inside a large trashcan. The janitor, tired of kids and eager to get home, began sweeping up all the crap under the gym bleachers during the final dance. The trash consists of a torn love letter scribbled during Algebra class, two promise rings with matching initials, an unopened package of birth control pills, an empty can of spray paint, a deflated basketball with white powder inside, and “The End,” a mysterious object that the player can’t use until he sends each of the characters home for the night.

Everything has already happened, but it’s the player’s job to decide how the characters got there and how their nights will end. This may seem like a mystery game, but instead of figuring out what happened, the player will unravel the plot by setting up relationships between each of the characters and the various items in the trashcan. Here’s a relatively simple example of three commands the player might enter:

Jessica liked John, John gave Jessica promise ring, Jessica loves John.

After setting up the relationship, the player can ask each character about items or other characters, and examine characters and items for additional description. The information given is determined by the commands, so the player controls each character’s final state.

The easiest denouement for the game would involve pairing up all of the characters, and associating each pair with one of the items, but the solutions would become more interesting if the player complicates the web of relationships (also, undoubtedly, making the game increasingly difficult to program). At any time, the player will be able to use a history command with a character’s name or an item to see what relationships have been set up, and will also have the ability to erase the histories and start over. The order the commands are entered will affect the results.

So a potential web of relationships could go something like this:

Principal disliked John, John gave Principal basketball, Principal loved John, Principal found spraypaint, Principal hates John.

Using like/love, dislike/hate to indicate level of emotion will affect the outcome. After entering the commands, the player can ask the principal about John, the basketball, the powder, or the graffiti and the principal would respond with the appropriate sentences:

“I’ve always thought John was a bad apple, but he did a good thing bringing that deflated basketball to me.”

“Of course I had to find out what the powder was. It could have been dangerous. So I took a taste and suddenly I felt like a college student again.”

“I haven’t been that high since I spray-painted genitalia on the mascot statue the night before Homecoming.”

“You can tell I haven’t painted in years. That looks more like a peeled banana than…uh…just wait until I get that delinquent John in my office on Monday morning.”

Obviously different outcomes would occur if other relationships were set up (present tense would denote the character’s final emotional state):

John loved Jessica, John gave Eddie love letter, Jessica hates John, Jessica gave John unopened birth control, John hates Jessica, John found basketball.

So players could set up all kinds of romantic and tragic endings for the characters (apparently I prefer tragic, or comic?). Once all the character histories are set up, the player can either ask each character about the outcome, or simply examine “The End” object to watch the histories unfold in order. Based on which order the characters were given commands, the denouement could change, with one history affecting the next, which would build to a final conclusion (if feasible).

Since each of the characters positions are set as the dance ends (the falling action is complete), the player’s options are limited to a certain extent. The amount of back story available to the player by examining the scene and the characters before setting up relationships could be altered based on whatever constraints are needed to actually program the game. The player’s ultimate goal is to provide a denouement for the scene set at the opening of the game. For the game to end, all of the conflicts suggested by the scene must be resolved.

Hopefully this counts as both denouement and gameplay. I’m sure it could be argued that the player is setting up the entire plot, but the initial scene would be set up in a way that both allows the player a certain amount of freedom and also suggests a dramatic structure that simply needs to be finished.

Please take a look at the other entries submitted to the Round Table this month using the dropdown box below.