Case Study: Tricky Towers & Papers Please
You may be asking yourself, “what do these two games have anything to do with one another?” So would I, had I no context, and yet Tricky Towers (Weird Beard, 2016) and Papers, Please (L. Pope, 2013) have both been crucial in my Critical Play project (A Day Well Spent), in an attempt to mix and mash them together.
A Day Well Spent was based around the colourful, joyful stacking of tetris blocks that is crucial to the gameplay of Tricky Towers, stuffed with the slow narrative message and goal completion of Papers, Please. A Day Well Spent’s original intended mechanics were to marry the two seemingly contradictory experiences into one, or more so experiment with doing so. Had I taken more time, and put more thought into it, the union of both would likely have taken place.
Whilst I do not believe to have adequately succeeded, we can still observe and analyse in what manner these two games have inspired and influenced the project.
Tricky Towers:
What is Tricky Towers?:
Tricky Towers is a competitive puzzle-racing game, where players race to the top by stacking tetrominoes into tall, ill-balanced, colourful towers. The goal is simple: reach the bright line. Complications arise when wind starts blowing, and towers begin to tilt left and right; or when the other player suddenly freezes a portion of your tower, forcing them to become slippery and the careful stacks of L blocks and squares slides away, giving your opponent the advantage.
Players can acquire different amounts of abilities (called spells as your character is a wizard) to thwart their opponent, or improve their own stack and reach the top. The physics of the game make it so that aligning shapes close to one another becomes a difficult task, and you often end up with messy stacks for towers that are particularly unstable. If a shape is not properly aligned, it has a likelihood of dislodging itself from its fellow shapes when a new one is placed, or simply drop off into the water. There are ways to prevent this, with spells that lock shapes in place, or bind them together, yet there is always the chance of everything tumbling down.
How does it relate to the project?
The first answer is obviously the stacking (I feel like this has been said too many times), Tricky Towers takes the Tetris formula and gives it a few twists. Aside from the competitive, it asks “what if your carefully laid plans could all fall and tumble down?” Taking advantage of the odd shapes of Tetris, Tricky Towers thrives on the player doing their best to balance what they’ve been given whilst racing against the clock, or against another player. Sometimes this means stacking impossible shapes on top of one another, or balancing them on the side of the tower you’re building, then rapidly going to even out your construction before it falls to its doom.
It was this balancing act that caught my eye and implanted the idea for A Day Well Spent. I needed a soothing wholesome experience that could still prove challenging to the player, the atmosphere of which could be found in Tricky Towers. There’s a sort of jubilation when a perfectly mounted pile of blocks stands in shaky stability, similarly to a house of cards. A Day Well Spent went on to ditch the idea of stacking games on top of one another, due to time constraints I had to opt for a slightly different game plan, closer to the original Tetris concept.
A game that may be closer to the current final rendition is Not Tetris, a physics based Tetris game that has all the benefits of original Tetris, with all the inconvenience of physics based collision, materials and bounciness.
I planned to create a game that imitated Tricky Towers’ tentative balance, adding a message about the troubles of time management, schedule planning, procrastination and organising daily activites. The game is great on its own, but lacks in its narrative aspect. I doubt one can find much substance or critical thinking throughout a session of gameplay. The stories emerge out of the rivalry between players as they shove obstacles and mess with each other’s towers.
What I took from Tricky Towers was its jolly flavour and the key mechanical gameplay of balancing objects on top of one another, and making them fit to reach a goal. Each shape has a purpose in A Day Well Spent and this form of gameplay adds the interactivity I was looking for the project.
Papers, Please:
What is Papers, Please?:
Papers, Please is a narrative document-puzzle game by Lucas Pope. In comparison to the previous game mentionned in this blog, it is a bleak, grim bureaucratic game taking place in the East-bloc dystopian country of Arstotzka. A facsimile of East Germany before the fall of the Berlin wall, Arstotzka’s borders are closely guarded and managed by a line of guards and checkpoints that require ever increasing documentation to step through. The player manages one of these checkpoints (the Greston border checkpoint), and has to deal with the various troubles and ‘isolated incidents’ (terrorist attacks, reluctant immigrants, non-Native speakers, persistant old men, smugglers and entrants with forged or stolen documents, etc) whilst trying their best to make ends meet and care for their impoverished family.
Papers, Please presents multiple sub storylines to your own, as the game itself is set on the tail end of an in-game war with the neighbouring country of Kolechia. War refuges and immigrants try to slip through the checkpoint with forged documents, in hopes to find work or a better life; Kolechian terrorists will try to smuggle bombs, drugs and weapons to insurrectionists within Arstotzka; a secretive rebellious organisation called EZIC will try to contact you multiple times through its agents to overthrow the Arstotzkan government; impoverished citizens fleeing disease will ask you to let their daughters/wives/sons through despite not possessing appropriate documentation. Papers, Please thrives on its substories that sprinkles glimpses of a greater world into the checkpoint’s confined space. The characters you face are like your own: tragic, desperately in need of income, and very much flawed. The only thing that seperates you from them is a ballistic glass window, and a sensation of control and responsability towards your fellow man, but also towards your family.
By the end of the day, the game summarises how well you’ve performed, and adds up what you’ve earned, what you’ve taken as bribes, and what you’ve saved before comparing it to the costs of your family. The goal of the game is to survive 31 days without falling into bankruptcy, or your entire family dying, but there are also different actions that can influence how the game ends. For example: do not shoot anybody without good reason, or you’ll be arrested for murder (or murder of an official if you kill a fellow guard). This will lead to a game over and you’ll be presented with one of 20 endings.
How does it relate to the project?
Papers, Please is the perfect example of the needs and struggles of daily life, to 200%. You’re presented with a daily need to make ends meet, and to organise each interaction with your applications properly, and quickly, in order to get through the day. It marries a basic gameplay loop with critical narrative that discusses the bleak reality of totalitarian regimes. It is, in effect, everything I was going for, but in reverse.
Rather than being a grim, dystopian story, A Day Well Spent was meant to marry its gameplay loop and the necessities of daily life with a more colourful, soothing atmosphere and message. It may be difficult to organise oneself on a daily basis, let alone across the week, or to get everything done, but there will always be a tomorrow to try again and do better. Whilst I did want to create a more detailed story, the introspective message is one that everybody can relate to. Sometimes, you cannot do everything in one day.
Looking into Papers, Please has helped me understand how to merge gameplay elements into the narrative, increasing requirements and showing the player’s success at the end of the session. It also inspired me to go for this ‘daily necessities‘ aspect, and to add more of a thematic instrospection to the project.
CONCLUSION:
Marrying two diametrically opposed experiences proved harder than originally intended, but from either two much was learned, though never successfully implemented. Had I been able to manage my time better, a more flourishing narrative would have emerged from the game itself.
Tricky Towers & Tetris proved the bulk of the inspiration with regards to gameplay, going for a funny, clunky and messy , however Papers, Please helped me understand how to implement a game that is essentially about dragging and dropping into a larger narrative scale. The methods of which I could have used storytelling tools such as Twine, or Ink.