As we’ve heard via Bogost in his preface to Play Anything, games are appreciated because of their confined nature. “Games aren’t appealing because they are fun, but because they are limited.” (x) Huizinga’s Magic Circle (a graspable shape with a firm border) speaks to this idea of a game as something bordered (i.e., constructively confined) as well. And (most) novels offer a similarly bordered thrill — a confined word for a reader to discover and conquer. Not Tristram Shandy.
TS is an unwieldy (conceptually) unlimited piece of writing and hints at the interconnectedness of all events and things. Our narrator, Tristram, finds more and more causal and temporal connections between his life and … everything else. And he willingly opens the door for everything else to enter; he invites the sprawl via digressions. (This is why even 20 volumes would not have been enough.)
Faced with the task of making the TS sprawl playable, we had to make a decision (although, in the beginning, we didn’t know that this was the most consequential decision). We could go one of two ways: We could either tame and straighten the sprawl, and create a clear circle so the game would conform to the expectations of play as clearly bordered, or we could NOT do that. The NOT had no clear precedent.
In group discussions (and as Bri mentioned in her post), we found that all ideas pointing to the straightening of the narrative strands and leading to a more traditional game didn’t feel right. And so we trusted our instincts, which led us to imagine a play experience that re-creates and amplifies our reading experience of Tristram Shandy and would offer the player a digressive, tenuously bordered, and interconnected journey into the text.
In the game’s introduction (which the player has to traverse to enter the “actual game”), we tried to achieve something similar to the reading experience, namely, an opulent, fatiguing, but hopefully also entertaining dedication + training module/s. Here, the soon-to-be player has to read sequentially, and after accepting a dedication, they must acquire knowledge and skills that will let them play the game consciously. Each time a player completes a module via a checkmark, a new one opens. The modules lead the player into digressions on game theory, the maneuvers of clicking and scrolling, and the times and life of Lawrence Sterne, e.g.
Finally, once the player enters the actual game, disorientation rules. Instead of repeating the original’s horizontally sprawling nature and our introduction’s digressive nature, we aimed to create something vertical. I say vertical because the discovery of the text invites scrolling, which registers as a vertical activity and suggests a deepening.
By obscuring almost all (or large parts) of the texts, the player has to scroll and click through layers to finally reveal the whole text. In her blog post, Bri described the layers we developed. I would add that the layers unveiled themselves to us in layers. Meaning we didn’t make a list of layers and then implement them. We discovered them incrementally in conversations during the design process. Additionally, aspects of the text’s humor, which we had perhaps reduced in redaction, found new modes of integration: GIF popups tied to any mention of Hobby Horse, a Morse Code movie, and other Easter Eggs interrupt the vertical experience while re-capturing and momentarily foregrounding the humorous elements of TS.
As Bri described, the process was truly collaborative; everybody participated in the conversation, and we collectively felt our way toward what seemed right. During my first reading of the text, I was trying to untangle the plotlines and was especially intrigued by Tristram’s direct commands to his readers. I tried to lift out these commands. Initially, we thought that the commands could be player instructions (and we used some in our introduction), but as our concept of the game shifted, we realized that they would serve better as their own layer. In addition to lifting out the meta-discourse and commands, I wrote the introduction with Bri. As she explained, we initially divided up the task but ended up working simultaneously, inspiring each other to evermore Tristram-esque flourishes.
I am particularly proud of the way the game resists readers’ (myself included) desire for quick intellectual graspability and yet precisely offers Tristram Shandy’s essence.
Thank you, team Tristram.
