My feeling, honestly, is that adding much more to the ruleset in the form of greater ranges of response and even 3D environments is that I might like the piece less. It seems to me that that would make it even harder to discern the characteristics of the system. One of the things I really like about End of Life is that it’s short, which is what allows for the types of experiments I was enjoying.

To use a food analogy, End of Life is like a great wine; it’s best sipped a little at a time, so that the complexities reveal themselves through repeated experience.

Well, whatever you decide I think that you’ve made something pretty great and I look forward to your future projects!

If I had known anybody would play through this as many times as you did, I wouldn’t have done anything else but work on it the week I stupidly spent my entire life playing Demon’s Souls. Specifically, I probably would have doubled the number of emotional ranges for each character so you would have an easier time figuring out where their values were and a more enjoyable reading experience. I think that, after reading this, I might take this little school project to a UI designer and a real programmer and make it into something a lot more. Because really, I thought of it mostly as an extended prototype for an actual 3D documentary game.

After reading this, I now understand two things concretely that I only before pretended to in theory. First, I now see what Bogost and other thinkers on simulation meant when they explain how processes abstract out through interplay to create complexity. The rules are in fact a bit simpler than everything you gleaned through play. Which leads me to wonder which ruleset is actually more important–the one I made that was able to be abstracted, or the specific abstract ruleset you came to by testing the system. This actually informs a lot of the theoretical grist for my thesis, which argues something along the latter two (namely, that the “real” rule system is one that the player herself has added her own rules to, not the one that was procedurally authored).

Second, I can appreciate better your claims that intimate or repeated playthroughs, or mastery of the system (re the Shadow Complex speed running discussion), allow you to get rather near the heart of the code. Since I also coded and wrote everything, I can read your thought process and measure it against my own. In true MDA style, I thought a lot about the end result I wanted before I began coding. As I wrote pieces of the text and tweaked the code, I played through it again and again to make sure the feeling I wanted was building properly. I knew I’d succeeded when even I, who knew exactly how the value of each family member changed, couldn’t start out a game with the desire for X or Y result and know that I’d be able to attain it. Yet you were able to find patterns that I wasn’t (specifically the common decision patterns between pairs of family members).

This gives me a lot of ideas for how to iterate on the project. And thank you, for spending so much time with it. I hope I can return the favor someday soon.