![]() There’s also disconnected and thus further-isolated icons on the left and right margins, representing things like romantic entanglements, careers, and college, which can then spiral out further into sets of scenes that you access linearly, though each scene is STILL entirely unrelated to the previous scene. Every time you enter a new scene, it’s like you’re a blank slate, except for the occasional stat check. Scenes are isolated, they’re vignettes of notable events within a life, with fundamentally no enduring effects except those they have on your stats. Within those levels, which are sequenced in the obvious conventional way, you can pick things off the tree in any order, such that the character can be a toddler one moment and a pre-verbal newborn the next. As the game progresses through discrete stages of life that we might as well call “levels,” it provides different trees, and you can see at a glance the leaves change color before your eyes: an infancy spent mainly with family, a teen’s life full of peer socialization, and an old age alarmingly envisioned as, once again, consisting primarily of health problems with sudden death looming around every corner. These icons vaguely indicate what kind of scene they’re going to be. You click on icons, most of which are arranged on a branched structure that implies some kind of connective relationship between them that does not actually exist, though they are placed in fuzzy chronology. Choosing is the central verb of the game. Over and over, Alter Ego asks the player to make a choice between two or three, maybe four actions. ![]() There’s a straight line from here to Mass Effect. Like, sure, Pitfall lets you choose whether to go left or right at the start, and Colossal Cave Adventure lets you choose every little action and your overall approach to collecting all the treasures, but when a game is tagged “Choices Matter” on Steam, what it’s saying is that the player can directly and fully-consciously warp the explicit written narrative, not the implicit narrative of their own gameplay experience. This is the first game I’m covering to really put a premium on capital-c Choice, in the way that we usually mean that now when we say that a game offers you choice. Maybe interactive fiction developers were actively trying to duck the comparison. This was an approach rarely taken a small handful of times up to this point, surprisingly. That is to say, instead of having a parser and a world model, this work of Interactive Fiction has links that skip you around to different slivers of text like a computerized take on the Choose Your Own Adventure books. It also triangulates between Activision’s Little Computer People, another Life Simulator but more along the lines of Tamagotchi, and Activision’s Portal, which is, like Alter Ego, a hypertext story. It’s a step from Lifespan towards Princess Maker. It’s a “role-playing game” where the point is legitimately to play a role. Alter Ego is instead built on stats it uses to judge the player as a human being, which actually ends up making it even gamier a video game, since the stats are basically just more points. Also, its predecessors were built on an arcadey points-scoring model leveraged as commentary on your performance as a player and thus a human being. Most palpably, it’s far more grounded in the quotidian and the specific, where its predecessors had run wild with the archetypical and abstract. It differs from the likes of Lifespan and Deus Ex Machina in a couple important respects, though. Īlter Ego is yet another birth-to-death story, by now clearly one of the most well-precedented genres of the Art Game. Scattered in amongst movie tie-ins, sports games, arcade-style games, adventure games, and early LucasArts titles that actually were not adventure games were Web Dimension, Little Computer People, Hacker and Hacker 2, Portal, and today’s subject, Alter Ego. It made a lot of sense at the time for them to acquire fellow traveler Infocom, although by the beginning of 1987 Activision would be under new management by a serious businessman who not-so-secretly hated Infocom to the point of spitefully bringing legal action against their own subsidiary for not being profitable enough. ![]() ![]() By 1986, Activision had evolved from making sure Atari console game designers got paid and credited (as we saw with Pitfall ) into probably the leading commercial purveyor of Art Games for computers.
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