For the past few weeks, we've been getting our fix of nostalgia (cut with a big dose of futurism) from an online text adventure game called North Central Positronics. It's been years since we played any sort of text adventure game, but find this one to be very unqiue in its design and moral message.
While traditional text adventure (alternatively called interactive fiction) games usually have a discrete set of commands and paths to follow, North Central Positronics (NCP for short), uses a combination of behavior-driven devolopment and machine learning to continually evolve and adapt to what players have input.
Unlike other choose your own adventure-style games - a-la Lifeline or Netflix's Bandersnatch - the game intends to give the player limitless choices into what can be written into every command - creating an 'open-world' of limitless possibilities.
The game starts by placing you in an ambiguos laboratory as a research assistant in the middle of an experiment. From there, all you have to do is type something and press 'enter'. The game analyzes your response and tries to produce some response.
If you follow the instructions prescribed by the prompts, you can quickly progress through the game and reach one of the only real endings of the game:
While the standard storyline is rich with sci-fi storytelling, the real fun in the game comes when you "get weird" with your responses. Deviating from the expected procedure can often lead to dead-ends or non-starters (a common experience in text-adventure game), but can increasingly lead you down winding paths that range from the mundane...
...to the extreme!
This type of deviance is exactly what the game's creator Caleb Ferguson intended to inspire by making it.
"My goal with this project is to create a ever-sprawling world that encouraged a less results-based, more rhizomatic way of playing. I wanted to create a diverse and random set of experiences that reject utilitarian constructs like as order, classification, and hierarchy that are so pervasive in our culture."
Ferguson elaborates on this perspective in the projects sister-essay, as well as through his other work and writings.
NCP was created with the Inform7 interactive fiction tool and published to the web using the an interpreter called Parchement
Beyond the moral of the game, what we find most interesting is how Ferguson approaches building and expanding the its contents. From its inception as a game with a single path, Ferguson published it and asked "literally everyone" he knew to play the game - encouraging free-form interaction and dead-end discovery.
Ferguson would then manually add triggers and content based on the the input, and repeat the process by encouraging (or "begging" as he states) people to periodically replay the game.
This style of development - coined as 'Behavior-driven Development' (or BDD for short) - is lauded by developer communities, but often not implimented for fear of lackluster results. Luckily for Ferguson "any results are good results" and the community remains engaged with the project week-after-week.
Core to the developments success are the students and faculty at NYU's ITP program - a creative technology program within NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. ITP members rose to the occasion in droves.
"Every morning after meditation, I would hop on NCP and play around for a little bit. It is a huge part of my life." says the school's chairman Daniel O'Sullivan.
Herein lies the beauty of North Central Positronics. NCP is not the product of a single entity, but rather of a decentralized group of individuals. The game evolves as individual players define the context and paths that are created.
"The creation of the project is an accomplishment I share with everyone who played with it. It's a great testimate to our community and changed the game from a single story to a truly user-generated one." Says Ferguson.
To compliment this development and expansion, NCP uses Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning to increase the flexibility of the results - extending the possible paths and results of the game - sometimes in very quirky or obscure ways. Three cheers for North Central Positronics!
This combination of manual and automated extension was not only successful, but also highlights the theme within the content of the game itself: the continued integration of humans and machines. Whether intentional or not, Ferguson creates a contradiction between the game's means and ends by using this methodology.
In our world where games augmented by high-definition graphics and advanced features often serve as an escape, this text adventure game made us take a step back and consider our future without so much as an image.
North Central Positronics is available today on the web for both mobile and desktop environments.
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