03 | Games built around powerful questions

The unmatched power of games as a media is their interactivity and the ability to grow with and within their player. Some games may essentially limit the player’s choices by design, but imposing a specific perspective on the player is often a battle lost before starting. 

Because of this, I believe it’s fair to say that every game somehow proposes questions to its players to be answered, and the game I make indeed falls into this category. And if Andre Gidé is right and everything that can be said has already been said, then a good question it’s perhaps even better than a good answer.

I like questions because truth and knowledge are more valuable when discovered independently rather than handed over. I often talk to people really interested in the teaching aspect of role-playing games, and more than one claims that every role-playing game can be used as a teaching experience. I’m not really interested in this aspect of games (although I sense it may change soon), but I agree with them because every game brings up questions. In this sense, questions hold a specific kind of power.

I explicitly search for the powerful questions in my games because it’s not like I’m putting into them. Instead, it’s like they are forming inside them like a pearl does into a clam. You may sense this metaphor a little off since a pearl is forming around a foreign body, but in a moment, I think you’ll see what the external element I’m referring to is.

The questions I’m talking about are powerful to me because I cannot give them an answer myself. Part of the reason is that designing a game requires playing it a lot of time, and doing it with something already solved for me may be very dull. The other and bigger portion is that I’m hoping someone else comes up by playing with an answer that also enlightens me. It’s a slim hope since giving yourself these kinds of answers is usually part of inner playing and not really the part of a game that gets shared with strangers. Still, it would be an interesting byproduct nonetheless.

The powerful question at the core of Little Katy’s Tea Party is: “What does it mean to be a good example/parent figure of a kid?”. Coincidentally, but not very surprisingly, I recently learned that this is the primary motivation behind Inside Out, the script's inspiration being a daughter on the verge of becoming a teenager.

However, the question at the core of For Thy Lich is different: “What would you do when the power you’re unwillingly tied to starts to crumble?” I’ll probably dedicate a separate occasion to exploring that.

Yours Truly, a Nuclear Manatee