A Dark Room

I have recently become intrigued by interactive fiction, although I have yet to try it out. The semester isn’t over yet, and I don’t want to get distracted by what might be an immersive process. I should be focused on teaching my students to the best of my ability! To keep myself thinking about teaching in fresh ways, I read widely about education, teaching and learning. That’s how I stumbled on A Dark Room. (Warning: it could be an aptly-named black hole on your time!)

 

What is A Dark Room? Well, it’s hard to describe. I couldn’t do better than this 2014 New Yorker article titled: “A Dark Room: The Best-Selling Game That No One Can Explain.” According to the article, its forerunners are Colossal Cave (Adventure) and Zork, the landmark works that launched interactive fiction. There’s something mysterious yet addictive about it. One part resource management – you’re building up a village and its economy – and one part exploration which resembles a more open-ended version of a Choose Your Own Adventure book with simple battles and finding items. I haven’t gotten that far yet, so I don’t know what the goal of this game is.

 

I like the simplicity of an all-text game that harkens to the computer games I encountered in the 1980s – the only decade in which I played such games actively. I’ve never taken to the more complex graphics-intensive games from 1990 onwards, except for a stint with Sid Meier’s Civilization, the original version. Ironic perhaps because I study complex systems in my research using computational methods, but I shy away from complexity in other areas of my life. Neither have I understood the draw of the Tamagotchi or the obsession with Farmville, which require your constant attention to keep your pet alive/happy or build up your thriving farm. Yet A Dark Room uses a similar strategy to keep you engaged – you just want to press the buttons to gather wood and check the traps you have set to obtain meat, fur, and other goods that can be turned into other goods. There’s also the feeling of wanting to build bigger barns and optimize your resource production.

 

I was only planning to check out A Dark Room (on a web server) and before I knew it, thirty minutes had passed. In my second session, an hour flew by. I’ve played several more sessions although I don’t know how long I will continue. The village-maintenance repetition does get a little old, but I haven’t gotten very far in exploring yet; about twenty clicks from the main village in most directions. I’m not even sure how big this world is. That being said, I’m very impressed by the simplicity of the interface. There’s no rulebook. It’s not clear exactly how things work, and there’s a joy in discovering this for oneself. When educators talk about engaging through gamification, this might be the sort of experience they’re thinking about. It looks simple, yet it may belie layers that you, the reader or explorer, just can’t wait to peel off. Or I might be wrong, and this might be a shallow world.

 

I’m still entertaining the idea of creative an interactive fiction world about learning magic while teaching concepts of science, and especially chemistry since that’s the area of my expertise. A Dark Room has opened up my perspective of what one can achieve in a simple text-based creative work. It’s clever, at least that’s my assessment for now.