I’ve been reporting about games and virtual entertainment for about eight years and in that time I’ve put up with some truly weird demo scenarios. There was the time I had to stuff myself in a cramped hotel room for a group of German devs who had failed to get space on the convention floor. The time I played an early Transistor build on Greg Kasavin’s laptop at a food court during GDC. The aluminum Devolver Digital trailers behind the Hooters at E3. And of course, countless demo parties where long lines, dramatic lighting, ear-shattering music, and free drinks made playing the game impossible and pointless.
But among the experiences I’ve had, playing Sometimes Always Monsters was a bit of a new one. Not my first demo on a vehicle, per se. That weird honor belongs to Adult Swim’s Duck Game, which I saw last year on a Seattle’s duck tour boats during PAX Prime. But the tour bus part, that was new. It added a certain rock star flair to the (poorly ventilated) atmosphere. There, in the dim lighting at a small table in a bus kitchenette, I got to play the sequel to 2014’s Sometimes Always Monsters, all while parked across the street from my condo.
To promote the game and allow critics a hands-on experience, the development team Vagabond Dog hopped aboard a tour bus and visited Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle, wrapping up during PAX West. They made a stop here in my neighborhood where I met with Justin Amirkhani, creator and designer, and Jake Reardon, co-creator and developer, to see what’s in store for the sequel.
I didn’t play the original game but having seen screenshots, the graphics on the sequel are much improved. In aesthetic it carries out like a text-based novel. Avatar pop-ups and dialogue prompts are the primary vehicles for the story’s progression. Like its predecessor, Sometimes Always Monsters is threaded on a multi-tiered web of player decisions, each creating a ripple effect illustrating the moral ambiguities and unpredictable consequences in the vast gray area of life. Whereas Always Sometimes Monsters revolved around the protagonist’s struggle to pull their lives together as they pursued a lost love, the sequel explores, as Justin puts it, “the inevitable decline,” reflecting on the many conflicting real-life choices made in the pursuit of self preservation. The game will pick up where the original left off, and players will experience different scenarios depending on how, or if, they finished Always Sometimes Monsters. With the massive amount of decisions the player can make, short or long term, some without any seeming consequence, no two playthroughs will be alike.
The full weight of the game is one that will be felt only with multiple hours of play, which means my perspective of its greater merit was limited during this demo. So I followed up with Amirkhani by email to dig at some of the deeper themes underlying the series, probing his perspective on issues of morality within the context of game mechanics and the responsibility of the developer in their role as the architect of a virtual experience.
Paste: So, Sometimes Always Monsters is the sequel to Always Sometimes Monsters, and both games rely on a multi-threaded web of player decisions to deliver a highly unique experience for each person who plays them. The game is a reflection and example of the “ripple in a pond”; many tiny decisions that seem otherwise insignificant can have a huge, unforeseen consequence later on. Let’s talk about how that is achieved within the limited space afforded in a videogame. Is it difficult to balance the myriad of branches the story can take? How is that facilitated within the system you’ve built for the game? In a game with so many different possibilities how do you give weight to each one?
Justin Amirkhani: Unlike a life in our own reality, all games start from a singular controlled point. From the moment the start button is pressed the experience begins its process of fracturing into an infinite array of timelines, but that unified origin makes all the difference in management. It gives us a tree to follow, and even though it has a ridiculous number of branches we can always find our way back to the root.
With the first game, we took great care to keep the linearity of each path from start to end – no matter how many we created. Eventually though, this process became an intense burden on the team as we fell deeper down the narrative fractal. Likewise, the framework of the new game would not give us the solitary origin necessary to charting guarantees at the scale of variance we had reached. With every player able to start Sometimes Always Monsters with their Always Sometimes Monsters save file, we were no longer tending to a little sapling and instead faced a forest over one hundred thousand strong.
This prompted a change in our approach to narrative, and an adoption of a faith in the player’s ability to self-guide their story. Almost everything in the new game is now opt-in, giving the player a more modular experience and greater freedom over their story direction. With a focus on more passive and long-term consequences, we were able to leave the player free to pursue their personal motivations. With this change, we found that players were more able to rationalize the unfolding events within their own story and build more complex interpretations of the characters they come across. Because the game has no voice acting, the player has no choice but to apply their own intonation and subtext to every line. Different players will very often read the same text in very different ways, influenced by the way they have perceived the narrative thus far.
Our players value their continuity because it’s of their own rendering. We will never fully grasp what each moment meant to every player, but they do. Naturally, a game with this much possibility space can descend into utter madness if you’re looking at it from a mathematical standpoint but our players are not random number generators. Invested players think about their decisions in the game, they weigh everything themselves (because we definitely don’t), and they very rarely betray their role-play. They are the ones who bring choice to the game, and thus they are the directors far more than us. All we did was give them a world of responses to navigate.
Paste: I’m gonna get cliché here for a second. People like to talk a lot about the “illusion of choice” in games, arguing that because the experience is deliberately designed and orchestrated and all the options are predetermined for the player, there is no such thing as free will in a game. Do you agree? Or, on the contrary, does that reflect the lack of free will in real life? How does this apply to Sometimes Always Monsters and Always Sometimes Monsters?
Amirkhani: It’s kind of funny when people talk about the illusion of choice as if it were confined to games, when really all they do is present the limitations of free will within reality. Unless you believe in an indeterminable element (like soul or chaos), in all probability we are nothing but input/output processors. We take in sensory information, run it through our neurological network of memories and emotion, then derive a response based on the flow of electrons through our meat. There is no place for agency in this model of cognitive operation, only the deterministic flow of a guaranteed causality. We make no secret about this in the game, its opening is a proclamation of this as fact.
Despite this, our limited minds are incapable of calculating the future with certainty. There is too much information to process, and we are simply unequipped for the memory load necessary to hold a universe of variables. Our uncertainty is what makes the experience of living, and in a system as complex as our own reality it can never be lost. This is not true for games.
Every game is finite. Hard walls line even the most expansive titles because they are at best simulations within another. We may not be able to calculate the expansiveness of true reality, but we are clever enough to comprehend the limitations of a world simpler than our own. Displeasure sets in at a different tipping point for each person, but it’s generally in-line with their understanding of the game’s total possible outcomes. As developers, the best thing we can do to combat total awareness is create as much variance as possible and limit the player’s access to it all. By keeping an unknown amount of content hidden away, the presence of uncertainty remains and our players avoid the burden of true awareness.
Paste: As we’ve previously discussed, Sometimes Always Monsters and Always Sometimes Monsters reflect on the vast gray space between “good” and “bad” and how this pertains to the ethics of human survival. I mentioned in our earlier conversation that a recent interview I conducted with Walt Williams about Spec Ops: The Line, Williams said that games cannot be critical of the player but rather, must guide the player towards being critical of themselves. Thus, their role must be one that is one-step removed from telling the player what to think or feel. What, if any, is your responsibility as a developer within that role when allowing the player to make morally ambiguous decisions? Can the argument be made that by being permissive and allowing the player the option to make these decisions in the first place in the absence of direct comment, that you are facilitating moral ambivalence?
Amirkhani: As artists, we have no responsibility to the collective morality. It is up to each individual to decide for themselves whether an ethical stance is worth their concern. Our role in this process is merely to provide a safe playground for them to test their morality in a way that only hurts imaginary digital people. What conclusions they come to are their own, and we take great effort to leave the judgment of their actions to themselves. If we were to judge the player through the game mechanically, it would be an imposition on them that we are not interested in making. So, we leave all adjudication to the player – they decide who they are, and how they feel about it.
Allowing a player to fully explore their moral compass does nothing but inform them of their own ethical stances. Every time they make an honest choice in the game, they are putting their sense of right and wrong to the test. Each consequence they review makes them more aware of how their decision-making process affects the world, and they will form an opinion regarding its positive or negative effect. This level of introspection can only lead to true moral ambivalence if the player lacks empathy or the game lacks realistic consequence.
To suppose a game could transform someone into a morally ambivalent individual is the same as suggesting it could make someone a psycho-killer. It’s been proven in the supreme court that there is no correlation between a degradation of morality and the consumption of videogames, but this question persists. No game can change who you are, only reveal you to yourself. If that causes a shift in perspective, it was a self-guided one driven by a conscious choice to enter a state of self-reflection.