The Stack

Given how much effort Open Sorcery takes to bridge the gap between the human player and its nonhuman protagonist, I suppose it’s appropriate that it’s basically an AI awakening story. Indeed, NPC dialogue in the intro makes the player aware of the possibility of BEL/S attaining human-like self-awareness before it’s even made clear exactly what BEL/S is. Decker, one of the two magician/programmers responsible for BEL/S’s existence, considers this possibility to be a threat. You can convince him otherwise over the course of the story, but there are branches that justify his concern.

BEL/S learns and grows with every encounter, whether by simply leveling up her firepower from combat experience or by learning new attributes, new elements that can be applied to later encounters. Engage a chaos spirit in conversation, and you might gain access to the Chaos element. It strikes me that the mechanics work towards channeling the player’s story along specific paths here: choosing clever diplomatic solutions gives you the tools you’ll need for later clever diplomatic solutions, choosing violence just enables greater violence.

The spirits you encounter are mostly already self-aware in a human-like way, which raises an interesting point: Without the computer code structuring her awareness, what would BEL/S be? I may be reading too much into things, but I think there’s some implication that before the start of the story, she was just a raw piece of spiritual force made out of fire. Some of the spirits in the game recognize her as something novel, a spirit elevated into consciousness by technology. And, having been so elevated, she has the possibility of leaving that technology behind, attaining freedom but abandoning any connection to her creators.

But — and this is a crucial point — doing so ends the game prematurely. For all its branching, this is a story with a definite ending, a confrontation with a final boss and an epilogue that follows it. This is clearly the true, correct ending, and any branch that misses it is the narrative equivalent of death. Now, I’ve replayed the game enough times to get several alternate endings, and I have yet to see one where BEL/S actually dies. All the “bad” endings I’ve seen are ones where she transcends her limitations and abandons her tasks.

That final boss, by the way, a powerful death spirit, has been called “a personification of depression” by the author, and, as always, the game is extremely clear about the author’s intention. Not all of the spirits are allegorical in this way, but there’s another — a ghost of Decker’s dead lover — that’s clearly an avatar of his grief. The purpose of a magical firewall isn’t just to protect people from external threats (including, at one point, aliens), but to help them with the problems they bring with them. Even if that wasn’t the original intention of her creators, it’s her purpose, the purpose she discovers for herself. I suppose this is why those alternate endings are failures. You can gain immense freedom and power, but once you’ve cut yourself off from humanity, you can’t self-actualize.

I’ve been meaning to check out Open Sorcery since meeting its author at Indiecade last year, and I finally got around to purchasing it in the recent Steam sale. Since then, it’s become a finalist for Best Game in the Xyzzy Awards. And having played through it now, I see why. It’s a very engaging work, and one that goes to great lengths to meet the player halfway.

The basics: This is a story of AI awakening in a world of modern magitech. You play the role of BEL/S, a firewall that’s also a fire elemental, conjured and programmed by two friends and charged with keeping them and their kith and kin safe from evil spirits. Unusually for a commercial release, it’s written in Twine ¹I know of only two other Twine games on Steam: Depression Quest and This Book is a Dungeon. And only one of those costs money. Firewatch gets an honorable mention here for having an intro that was prototyped in Twine and then put into the game more or less as-is. — there are a few pictures, but for the most part, output takes the form of text, and input takes the form of clicking on text. (There’s at least one moment of of freeform text entry as you guess at a chaos spirit’s riddles, but even this is done by clicking letters on the screen.)

Now, the point of view is decidedly nonhuman, unfamiliar with human things, and prone to describing stuff in a mixture of technical jargon and poetry. That has the potential to create confusion and communication problems — particularly in a choice-based game. I’ve certainly seen Twine pieces involving AIs or aliens or whatever where I had no idea what was going on, even after playing all the way through. Parser-based IF usually manages to avoid this by making progress contingent on understanding. As such, its failure mode is the player not making it all the way through, but even this is often avoided, because most information takes the form of room and object descriptions, which the player can view again when confused.

All of which is to say that Open Sorcery does an incredible job of keeping the player oriented. To start with, it makes use of routine. The game plays out over a series of days, and your primary task on each day is the same: visit the same four locations, look for signs of evil spirits, scan for any you find, and deal with them. On most days, there’s exactly one location with a spirit to confront, but you have to visit the other locations too, the better to experience plot elements that haven’t reached a crisis yet. There’s freedom within this structure, of course — once you locate and identify an evil spirit, you get to decide what to do about it.

Now, every spirit has two attributes, Matter and Motive, that you have to choose from a list of possibilities to identify it. (For example, BEL/S’s Matter is Fire, and her Motive is Order.) This is a necessary part of initiating an encounter; if you don’t know what you’re looking for, it remains invisible to you, and your progress in the story is blocked until you get it right. How do you know which Matter and Motive to choose? By paying attention to its effects on the environment. Notice that this is more or less the condition that I just described as typical of parser-based IF, that progress is contingent on understanding. In form and in purpose, the identification step is a puzzle — just not a puzzle you’re likely to get stuck on.

There’s a Twine technique I’ve described before wherein clicking on a word or phrase replaces it with a different word or phrase, going through several possibilities before settling on a final one. As I described it before, this is used to represent the narrative voice trying out different descriptions, different ways of thinking about things. Here, it’s used largely for clarifications to bridge the gap between player and protagonist, human and nonhuman. In fact, it bridges that gap in both directions. There are links that clarify BELS’s native jargon, as when the words “physical password” are replaced with “key”, and there are also links that give BEL/S a chance to google things, learning that the “edible organic matter” is a peanut butter and honey sandwich.

One way that the game really goes out of its way to be clear about what’s going on: Whenever there’s a conditional based on your character stats, it lets you know. If there’s an option that’s unavailable because you don’t meet the requirements, it’s displayed but grayed out. If there’s a response that’s conditional, it gets an entire page to itself, with the stat identified. This game wants you to know exactly how it works. I find it intriguing how different my response to this was depending on the stat used. There’s basically two sorts of stat: there’s your firepower, used to determine success and failure in blasting spirits with fire, and there’s your relationship level with several characters, used to determine their reactions. I’m accustomed to games where the mechanical details of characters’ minds are hidden from the player, the better to maintain the illusion that they’re not machines. So seeing the game call attention to the relationship stats so vehemently felt a bit strange. Stats in combat situations, on the other hand, I take in stride — so much so that I didn’t even notice that it was being treated the same way until I started writing about it here.

I haven’t really gotten into the story yet, but this is already a longish post about a shortish game, so I’ll leave off for now. I’ll probably have more to say about it tomorrow.