living ☆ALMOND DREAMS☆ (Designer-Choice Game)

What obsession does ALMOND DREAMS focus on? Why?

The obsession I worked with for this game was inspired by one I have worked with my whole life — self-image. Both in my personal life and the list of obsessions written for my Magpie book this idea manifests in my hyper-fixation on body-image, food, and nutrition and extends way beyond. I realize that some of my very personal experiences as a young woman stepping into adulthood are very far from special, if not universal. 

ALMOND DREAMS takes place in the arbitrary space of building relationships — relationships with parents, friends, and partners — inevitably stained by social, generational, very real injustices. By making the player embody a character that is very much physical, gendered, and contextualized, the game suggests player agency in their own story as it thematizes the idea of determining fate through everyday choices. The narrative alternates between real situations and imaginative dreams that open access to perspective – a window to happy and dark possibilities. Things get complicated as human emotions and feelings of love, desire, and need for acceptance enter the picture.

The idea of using dreams as a fabulist invention came from my first twine — the cycle game Illustrated Dining — and was pushed further in this project. 

How is this an interactive game? What structure and craft elements did it employ?

According to Greg Costikyan, an interactive game is goal-oriented, and achieving victory is important to the player. ALMOND DREAMS complicates this definition by offering a gaming experience, where victory is not meant to be arriving at a correct passage/outcome. Victory here is defined by what the player themselves deems important throughout the story, their priorities. Based on the described reality, would you prefer this drink or another, dealing with a matter right now or sometime later? One of my playtesters mentioned: “It’s interesting because internally you might suspect what would lead you to a ‘better’ outcome but as you embody the subject and make the character your own, making realistic and honest choices is more meaningful.”

The game is an extension to the "key nodes" structure. As offered by the original method, the reality is contained in a series of pivotal passages that all readers face. These passages suggest ‘normal’ circumstances that construct the universality of the protagonist – the player. The space connecting the nodes is flexible, allowing for the player to explore outcomes and determine their own storyline. I took the idea of multiplied traveling from one node to another further by giving the players more than one chance to doubt themselves and switch paths. This feature allowed to emphasize the irrelevance of other characters in the final outcome and agency of the main subject. In other words, the player has multiple chances to change the final outcome, but they have to stay mindful in making ‘small’ everyday choices. 

Playtesting. How did I work around feedback?

This game is built upon an idea — an abstract image of a contemporary young woman — I collected through personal experience that I knew is reasonably universal. Regardless, since my game aims to be immersive I could not cater it solely to myself. To improve it, I asked three people closest to me and two people I am only lightly familiar with to playtest to ensure my personal connection to the playtesters was not required for a valuable gaming experience. 

ALMOND DREAMS involves quite a few references to diet culture and popular culture of the millennia in general. Player feedback, especially outside of the perspective of a woman, pointed at these as sometimes inaccessible and limiting to the immersiveness. While I do consider women to be the target audience for the game, as one of my playtesters has pointed out: “When you realize where the game is going with its argument, the story that you first expected to feel healing reveals itself as quite triggering.” This comment made me ambitious in my reach of players who would not naturally relate to the story’s protagonist. Taking upon this feedback, I broadened the way the game embeds cultural references while still keeping them as a vital technique in building the story world I was going for. This strategy helped the game to interact with player expectations on a deeper level; the importance of expectations was highlighted in our lecture with Nat Mesnard. As one of the playtesters put it: “Seeing the title, I assumed that the game would follow an ‘almond’ influencer of some kind. It’s not as though a story based along those lines would be inherently bad, but I was definitely surprised by the actual content of the game. …I was confronted with a meaning gap that juxtaposes this satirical terminology with the visceral reality of those it labels. My expectations were met and then subverted as the story progressed, I felt forced to embody the subject.” 

As the creator, I was worried about inserting ‘interactive features’ such as variables, images, and links in a justified and effective way that goes in line with the broader themes of the game. Upon playtesting, I put emphasis on getting specific feedback on making the transition between the text of the game and the mechanical activity of engagement as imperceptible as possible. Finalizing the project, I received an extremely valuable review from my last playtester: “Seemingly quotidien activity may be foreign to some users, and closer to others. But both subject-positions are umbrellaed under the guise of fun (you are told that this is a mental break): seemingly normal and everyday actions are atomized and reconfigured to show that what is natural or easy for some, is a war ground for another.”

(the game was updated on Oct 29 to embed a trigger warning)