Space Engagement: Tacoma‘s Steve Gaynor on Designing for Curiosity
“The challenge with creating something where the point of it is supposed to be engaging with the stuff itself is if you give the player an additional reason, an extrinsic reason, to engage with the stuff, then it actually encourages them to disregard as much of it as possible because they’re only looking for the important thing.” That’s Steve Gaynor, project lead of the upcoming Tacoma, talking about the specific design challenges of the game. Over the course of my half-hour Skype call with Gaynor, we chatted about a lot of different topics, but we kept coming back to something close to this: How do you design a game where the reward is in the engagement itself? How do you ground an entire game experience in the exploration of a space and a story?
Tacoma takes place on an evacuated space station. The player is tasked with retrieving the station’s artificial intelligence by the company owning the station. In doing so, the player encounters 3D recordings of what happened to the crew before the player’s arrival. “As you explore and go about your mission,” Gaynor tells me, “you’re also finding out about who the crew was, what happened to them, and why you were sent here.” Crucially, though, this isn’t told merely through audio recordings or text accounts. Instead, the player is “sharing the space with these characters via 3D recordings that you have control over.”
This is the stuff that the player interacts with. It’s recordings, the positions of people in the past, and the line of causality itself. Like Gone Home before it, developer The Fullbright Company’s previous game, the design challenges of Tacoma seem to center on how one makes the past, and an already-determined future, interesting.
This was the flaw that Paste Games editor Garrett Martin pointed out in his review of The Chinese Room’s Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. That game also takes place after an event, and the things that the player sees are all in a kind of retrospective flashback as vague 3D figures, but Garrett had this to say about it: if the developers “trusted fully in these characters and their lives, or the audience’s willingness to be fascinated by them without a sci-fi hook, Rapture would have been stronger for it.” Rapture spent too much time pointing at a cause, a science fiction plot hook, rather than making sure that we had an intrinsic interest in what was happening in front of us.
