if/underground/notes.txt

as part of a submission to method et. apparatus, i am keeping a braindump here
as i go. 

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i am interested in exploring the relationship between a reader and the
perceived characters in the text. interactive fiction should have some sense
of narrative, but the narrative only exists so much as a reader encounters
parts of it. the way in which that happens is through a character that is
controlled; that character exists somewhere on a spectrum running from an
avatar that the reader steers through a world, to something that makes the
reader feel as if they *are* the character in question.

i want to write a game that deliberately calls attention to this relationship,
with text that explicitly brings the reader in and out of the feature
character.

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premise: you are a victim of a zombie outbreak, and have been chained up in
the basement and abandoned because your friends didn't have the nerve to put
you down. you flicker in and out of consciousness. you have the ability and
the option to escape.

mechanics: randomized periods of unconsciousness; during that period, the game
drops into third person, and you 'control' the character by giving it commands
that it may or may not be able to obey. during consciousness, the perspective
is first-person, and you have more control over the body.

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i'm using a puppy as my test object for interaction, but this gives me the
immediate task of trying to establish some sort of moral code for the player.
the zombie character can easily not display any sort of morals, only obeying
the whim of the player controlling, but if the human character shows any sense
of reluctance or behavior changes that are not what the player wanted, then
the player will feel separated from the character.

an interesting question is that if the zombie is a mindlessly obeying entity
while the human displays its own character, how does that effect my initial
intent to play with the relationship the player has with the character?

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after working out some actions and objects, i'm trying to figure out a
narrative difference between zombie mode and human mode. in zombie mode, the
player can't always cause the character to act, but can still examine the
world and meta-think. in human mode, the player has far more in-game agency.

so, a part of gameplay i want is for the player to spend more zombie time
examining the world and figuring out puzzles, and take advantage of human time
to perform actions. i want the human time to gradually shorten as gameplay
continues, until at point at which the character will remain in zombie mode.
so, if the player wastes a lot of time just flailing ineffectually, eventually
there will be no way to escape.

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yes, this is just another escape-the-room scenario, i guess!