I received my Google Wave invitation last week. I’m still not sure I understand it in its entirety. I understand it’s possibilities but I’m still in the learning stages as to how to achieve them, like any new media really. One of the main reasons I was excited to get my invite was that I had read about the possibilities of playing text adventures online, as well as re-kindling MUDs and MOOs.

Today, after logging into my wave account for the first time in a few days, I saw that I had been added to a text adventure wave by a friend. The wave involves a bot called ‘Bardbot’. He/She/It has an avatar which in many ways is ‘normal’ as so do I and my friends on it. It feels a little bit strange having a bot with a face, it felt like an extra character guiding me along. It’s like having a third person carrying out the commands I type and realise them within the game, it’s like ‘Eliza’ having a face after all these years. The avatar intrigues me, which is why I thought I would mention it but it’s not the reason for this blog post.

So, there I am, looking at the wave, my friend had already started playing the text adventure ‘Hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy’. It contained a message asking if i’d played it before (i hadn’t) and that he hadn’t played it either, and was using the wave to play around to see where the text adventure would take him. I caught up on the story, and had a look at the various commands that had been used to see what had and hadn’t worked so far. It seemed fairly straight forward, with the usual commands such as ‘go north’, ‘pick up object’, ‘examine room/forest’, etc. I began to see myself wanting to get involved, trying out new commands and maybe progressing the story a little bit. There I was playing away, not able to go north or east, or look for cups of tea (i thought i may be pushing it with that one!), then all of a sudden the following dialogue appeared (CONTAINS SPOILERS!):

My heart stopped. I felt awful. I had only played/experimented for 5 minutes and I had ended the game! I suddenly felt really guilty, an emotion I don’t usually associate with playing text adventures. I felt like I had intruded on someone elses game. Although I had been deliberately added to the wave (presumably with the notion that I too could have a play), I’m not sure the consequences were ever thought through. We were now playing a co-operative text adventure. This isn’t something I had experienced before. I had sat and played ‘Zork’ and ‘Adventure’ many a time, enjoying mapping out where I was going, reading the consequences of my decision making, and progressing through the game, but it had been my game. If I made a mistake, no one else was affected, it didn’t really matter, I could try again.

To make matters worse, part of ‘end of game’ message asked whether I would like to restore the game from a previously saved position. I tried, but obviously it had never been saved (I think part of the trying was to log that I had made an attempt to resurrect what I had killed off). The wave had saved the narrative sequences but not the played out actions. Although the narrative is captured within the wave, the game only allows for a certain amount of turns per player. Again, saving the game hadn’t occurred to me (especially as I had a log of the game events onscreen), but is something I’m now a lot more conscious of when I attempt to play again. This is true of any game, learning to play the rules, learning the mechanics of what is and isn’t possible, and negotiating shared spaces with other players in a multiplayer co-operative environment. In thinking about this today, I was trying to work out what type of player I was in letting this happen. Whereas I have previously written about ‘aberrant players and purposeful players‘ , I had separated them into those players that deliberately seek to disrupt the game, and those that seek to contribute to the game through the hidden extras they might find. Here I was in a different play situation. Although I had disrupted the game state, it was not a deliberately act. At the same time I had not made a conscious effort to contribute to forwarding the game in any way.  My original play had been purposeful, yet I had unintentionally disrupted future play for another player, and this is something I haven’t experienced before. It did however provide me with a new appreciation for co-op play. In playing a multiplayer game, with all the characteristics previously associated with a single player experience, the social space of the gameworld needs to be re-evaluated. Therefore I ended my game with a message to the other player, and a new lesson learnt, so that when he came to play, he could see my distress of (what appeared to be) prematurely ending the game: “i broke the game! i’m so sorry! there i am playing around for 5 minutes and i died…damn it! …..I want to play again though, i didn’t have a chance to go south…. “