While playing Destroy/Wait, I was confused at the initial goal of the game. I didn’t totally process what was going on with the initial noun and the choice to destroy or wait. What was I destroying or what was I waiting to do? Eventually, I figured out what was going on after pressing wait a couple times in a row. I found it interesting how it started off with physical things to decide on, such as cities or trees, but then moved to love and then eventually yourself. I played this game a couple of times and was interested if there were numerous outcomes, like some CYOA, but it seemed that the game always ended in the world ending with nothing left, which I found intriguing, yet dark. It seemed like there was an inevitable end to everything as even if you waited to destroy something, you were just prolonging the end of it anyways.
The second game, Howling Dogs, was even more dark. It seems like every time you enter the activity room, darker and darker “dreams” occur from strangling someone to death, to eating someone alive, to even being burnt alive. This game was a little hard to navigate in the beginning but I found it interesting to keep playing the game to see what the next “dream” may be, however dark it may have been.
I found it interesting as well how other people, like myself, found the game confusing, yet cool and kept them playing, like Emily Short cited. Being a hyper-text game, she found that this one was one that kept her thinking, which I agreed. I wondered, why were there so many different realities for this person to explore and what were they escaping from? It almost seemed like the person was using these dreams as a way to distract from sort of inner trauma, as the dreams they were interacting with were extremely dark and graphic. To me, it could almost be a sort of prison-like sentence, where someone is sent to spend the rest of their life living out other horrific acts and events. This made me think of Ashwell’s thoughts when he talked about protagonism as a way to drive player agency. In every dream, the player becomes a “new” protagonist and is the center of attention within that event, or at least their actions contributed to the story.
One thing that I questioned was why Howling Dogs had limited choice in the actions that you could take within the narrative. Salter talked about how games that had limited choice tended to increase user empathy. Were we supposed to feel empathy for the main character that is stuck experiencing all these dreams/VR interactions? Additionally, I felt it interesting to have such little choice for the user. If empathy was not the goal, was limited choice more of a style choice? I came away from this game with more questions than answers.