thechineseroom
adventures in first person gaming
(the research page of dan pinchbeck, games researcher, uk)
Dear Esther
An interactive narrative built using first-person game technologies
Dowload the mod here.
(You will need to be running Half Life 2 in order to play Dear Esther. Unzip the file into your SourceMods folder. Exit Steam and re-start it and Dear Esther will appear in your games list. Get Steam here)
View a short promo film here.
Dear Esther puts traditional game technologies to innovative new use. Rather than a story told through the medium of games; a 3D environment has been constructed to disperse a story throughout. The user navigates the environment, triggering audio fragments of a narrative which, together with visual clues and codes embedded in the world, build to create a story which is inherently constructed around the innate slippage of meaning and fragmentary nature of interactive experiences. It is a fusion of original text, music and world within an existing media framework.
The relationship between the avatar and the player continues to be the source of study. Research into virtual environments is often predicated around the notion of presence; the re-location of conscious attention into the artificial world, literally the sense of being there or the “illusion of non-mediation” (Lombard & Ditton 1997). In first-person
games, the player is projected into the action with a minimally intervening visual representation of the avatar (Calleja 2007). This proximity to the action of the world, it is argued, tends to create a deeper perceptual relationship with what occurs (Schneider et al 2004). Thus, creating worlds and characters that are easily identifiable is core element of game design in this genre.
Likewise, although most first-person games contain plot ambiguities, as with the action of play itself, it is expected that players will understand both the narrative and their place within it, or at least, their avatars. This is, as far as story goes, a genre built on both simplicity and archetype. The action of first-person games predominantly occurs in short temporal spans – one gunfight to the next – and is strongly linear and fast-paced.
Dear Esther removes all of these game-orientated constraints. Instead, it presents a world where there is a heightened ambiguity between avatar and player – if indeed the term player is applicable to an experience where there are no goals, no winning position. The story is driven by a series of monologue fragments, where truth is deliberately destabilised, and the irreality of the virtual environment is made additionally complex by the repeated suggestion that the 
described world is equally false and artificial. This is compounded by visual symbols embedded throughout the landscape, some explicit but meaningless when first discovered, relying on later text to illuminate, and some hidden. There are codes in the musical structure, the geography, the placing of props and other elements. The very character of the narrator is fragmentary, his story full of omissions, contradictions and obscure symbolism. This is not a space the player can master.
Dear Esther is very slow paced. Little happens in any traditional game sense. Whilst there is an overall linear path to the experience, the player appears free to explore. Of course, as with any game, this freedom is illusionary. The core symbols and questions of the narrative fragments - who is Esther; is the avatar Paul or is this an external character; what is the truth of the events being described and when did they occur; is the island real, imaginary or metaphoric – are deliberately placed to elude the player. This is compounded by the fact that each narrative trigger randomly selects one of three fragments, making each visit to the island certain to tell a different story, with some meanings only being available with a ‘lucky’ combination of fragments.
In part, Dear Esther interrogates the very notion of interactive narrative itself. The experience is clearly interactive, in that the player orientates and moves freely, and their actions are fundamental to the progression of the story – it requires, in Aarseth’s oft-quoted phrase, “non-trivial effort” to traverse the text (1997). But at the same time, Dear Esther is clearly not interactive – nothing the player does will effect the narrative and, indeed, the randomisation of the story further destabilises this notion. However, countering this, the abstract nature of the plot, the deliberate obscuration of clear character, timeline, reality and characters means that the experience drives the player towards a highly active role in the interpretation of what is occurring. In a very real sense, the piece challenges theoretical assumptions about interactive narrative whilst attempting to deliver an experience that is neither game, nor film, nor short story, but something entirely new: an environmental narrative that draws from several media but refuses to settle into the schema of any one of them.
Dear Esther was launched on 29th July 2008 and has been downloaded nearly 5000 times. It was selected for exhibition in the prestigious 2008 Ars Electronica animation exhibition, and was given an honorary mention for Best Music at the 2008 Machinima Awards. You can read player responses at the Moddb page.
| Dear Esther | Antlion Soccer | Conscientious Objector | Blackout | Project Staff |
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