Introduction

Howdy everybody! I'd like to formally announce my new project, The Little Monster! This is a project that I am currently doing for school at the Texas A&M Visualization Laboratory for my Master's Thesis!

I shall tell you a fairy tale, the story of the Little Monster...

A quick shout out to all my friends who have helped me on this project so far: Sean, for help with design & levels, Megan, for help with design & art, and finally Devon Motola and Nifflas for help with music.

Form

The Little Monster is an interactive fairy tale in the form of a video game. It mimics the structure of a platformer, but that's just to start with. Really, the game is a morality tale that tackles standard video game cliches.

Plenty of people talk about how Grand Theft Auto makes kids want to eat babies or something, but that's not what I'm talking about. Let's take a much less controversial game, say: Legend of Zelda. How many times have you gone into someone's house without knocking, and smashed all their pots and then taken all their rupees, without even thinking about it? It rarely registers to the player or the designer that this is a bad behavior if translated to real life - because it's "just a game."

Legend of Zelda : Oh, don't mind me, I'm just stealing medicine from the house of a deathly sick child

I know what you're saying, and I agree. Why is smashing pots a big deal? And am I really stealing from that sick little boy? Everyone knows those magic hearts only work for the main character, anyway. And it's not like playing this is going to make me break into hospitals and start smashing earthen vessels. All of this is more than true. However, such a pat answer keeps us from coming to grips with that issue: what does "It's just a game!" mean?

Well:

NPC's (Non-player characters) are not really people, and can be treated (and/or abused) as such.
Everything belongs to the player. Every last resource, item, and valuable thing in the game is for the player to use, in the end. Why put it in there otherwise? Only the player has property rights.
Everything revolves around the player: even time and space! Time often does not advance until the player hits the next trigger, and the layout of towns and cities are explicitly designed with the player's needs in mind.
Everything is a game. Even moral systems are a game; if you play them right, you will be rewarded with a great prize. This leads to a twisted brand of macchiavellian utilitarianism.

A lot of these arise from the sheer limitations and necessity of game design. If you design a game that completely ignores the player, it will be useless and no fun. However, the downside of these points above is that they create a gameplay experience that from the get go is entirely self-centered. The only person who matters - who really matters, is the player. In many games, he is the only character who is truly real, everyone else just being there to serve him in his quest.

It should not be surprising then, that most games take the form of an intense ego-trip. Or rather, an id-trip, where we run amok wallowing in our most basic instincts, because, after all, it's only a game. It's like having a lucid dream and you know nothing you do is real, so you just indulge your fantasies.

Id Software: makers of Doom and Quake. Most honestly named company ever. I salute them for it!

I'm not here to get rid of the old school of game design or to rail against player-centric game design. I just want to make this observation, and use this knowledge to inform a more nuanced approach to dealing with how we represent moral choices in games.

Ironically, if you attack a chicken, an entire flock will come for revenge. Remember kids: vandalism and theft is okay so long as you don't hurt any animals!

Oh, and by the way: I believe in the right of free speech. But I also believe in the moral responsibility to stand by what we say. So whenever Rockstar defends Grand Theft Auto by saying Grand Theft Auto is "just a game" they are telling the mainstream that games are not art. You can't have it both ways. Art influences people. If you claim your work does not influence people, you are calling your work - and everyone else's in the medium - trash. When you make something, stand by it or shut up.

Content

So all that being said, I'm making a game. It's called The Little Monster. It's a story about a human child that gets lost in the land of the mysterious Castle VanSkapning the home of all monsters. He (or she) wakes up after a long sleep, remembering only that he used to be a human being and must have fallen under some sort of curse. As he puts together the splintered pieces of his past, he is thrust into the middle of the latest battle in an endlessly recurring war between Monsters and Men. Like any video game, if you play it through to the end you will get to be a hero and save the world. But when all is said and done, will you have saved yourself? Will you have broken the curse, or will you still be a Little Monster?

The Little Monster : The game's title screen

Method

The Little Monster's basic gameplay mechanics borrow heavily from Cave Story by Pixel and Within a Deep Forest by Nifflas. However, I wanted to bring something new to the table rather than simply try to copy Pixel and Nifflas, whose shoes I could never hope to fill. My morality system is based off of some rather nuanced concepts from Eastern Orthodox theology, attempting to demonstrate what we in the church call "The Noetic Soul" of Man.

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