Atmospheric messages as conversation

Recently, I was playing an RPG-style IF game called Glik I, and every turn while your character is outside, the game displays one of these ten messages purely at random. Every. Single. Turn.

• Dust seems to rise like footprints in the distance.
• It suddenly gets cooler.
• Nausea overcomes you momentarily.
• The hairs on the back of your neck stand up.
• You hear a soft rustling behind you.
• You hear a twig snap.
• You hear the whispering of voices somewhere nearby.
• You notice the distinct lack of life.
• You see something in the corner of your eye flit past you.
• You swear the shadows move on their own.

Okay, so, obviously, most authors would know to turn that down a notch and at least make the messages show up at most a third of the time, and perhaps tweak the randomness so the player doesn’t see the same message twice in a row.

Or maybe, the author could add more messages to the mix. If there were, say, thirty messages instead of ten, then maybe the messages wouldn’t seem quite so repetitious.

And yes, maybe those methods would be sufficient for most games where you want to establish a sense of menace or unease. But wait. Look at this message:

• You notice the distinct lack of life.

Which isn’t quite true. There are trees and even flowers, but what the author means is that there’s no people, animals, or insects. The backstory, when you discover it, is that a curse was laid upon the land, and as a result, gradually, everyone who used to live here died. The curse increases misfortune, causes crops to fail, and what does grow is sickly. And that sense of desolation and emptiness is very different from the bog-standard twig-snapping someone’s-creeping-up-behind-you sort of menace.

Anyway, I do think atmospheric messages are the way to convey the appropriate unease, but as I thought more about it, I don’t think just rewriting the messages to be more appropriate is the best option. What if the messages weren’t random, but sequenced? Or better, what if the messages were like a conversation, responding to your current environment?

I seem to remember an article by Emily Short that touched on this general idea, where you want to convey information to the player, but you’re not particularly fussy on who tells you that the prince is hosting a masquerade ball, for example. If you go into the bakery first, the baker can tell you about the ball. Or if you see the fishmonger first, she can tell you. It doesn’t matter who it is as long as the information is conveyed. So I’m actually reworking her idea, except instead of people telling you the plot points, the general environment is.

In Glik I, as you wander outside, you will find an orchard sign, a rope bridge, an abandoned hut, a newspaper, and a burnt tavern, all of which are clearly man-made. It seems to me that you could cue up a list of things to say about the lack of people, triggered to possibly display a message whenever you encountered or interacted with a new man-made item.

And when you first encounter the witch, perhaps there should be a sense of relief on seeing another person, even if she’s ugly, even if she’s mocking you?

How to speak about the lack of animals or lack of insects is less obvious, but I would target places where you might reasonably expect to see some. No fish in the river. No bees on the flowers. No ants on the trees. No twig-snapping animals in the forest. No birdsong.

You’d want to build this sort of thing up slowly, in layers. It’s difficult to notice something that isn’t there, after all. After the PC has reached certain levels of awareness of the problem, new messages can be offered based on the new awareness. They might even just be subtle variations on some of the previous messages, where nothing’s really changed to the landscape, but the PC’s reaction to it has.

Anyway, just my two cents on the issue. Much more work for the author, of course, but sometimes the payoff might be worth the effort.