UC Santa Cruz

The game making up this thesis, Tracks in Snow, and by extension the underlying technology of Puppitor, began with a simple premise: what if instead of players choosing what they wanted to say they instead were mainly focused on how they were saying it? This approach has been heavily inspired by the work on theater productions, particularly when production started, seeing the actors and directors take the words I’d written in quite different directions than what I’d had initially envisioned. Also let’s face it, we call a play a play. Why not try to make the playing of a play the basis for digital character interaction? After all, it’s been working for humans for several thousand years. To reach these ends I built a computational caricature of theatrical acting practices, including Stanislavsky’s Method, Anne Bogart and Tina Landau’s Viewpoints, and Zeami’s Treatises on Noh drama as a way to shift players away from controlling the structure of a narrative and towards control over the details. Tracks in Snow is built in Ren’Py to wrap this novel interaction style in a more familiar format. The game’s story focuses on one character’s crisis of faith and another’s longing for a home that only really exists in the past. My hope is that the interface I have created gets players to focus more on role-playing characters than trying to optimize their responses.