How "Fishing Girl" Restored My Inspiration

You might have noticed I haven't written anything in here for a while. While part of that has been down to changes in my personal life, my general malaise towards the games industry has played a part as well. It seems no amount of academic study or criticism will stand a chance of changing the tune of developers. Neither the brunt of the developers nor the core consumers see the need for any change to the current slew of brain-dead titles, nor do they have any desire to push back the boundaries of our understanding of interactivity. In short, there just didn't seem to be any point any more.

It was to my great surprise, then, that I saw a game appear on Xbox Live's Indie Games that, for once, was not a zombie-infested murder marathon. “Fishing Girl” was a cute little game with a simple one-button gameplay mechanic and low-key lo-fi graphics that managed to appear distinct from mainstream titles without falling into the trap of looking “obviously Indie”.

What struck me – and inspired me - was not just the simplicity of the gameplay and the graphics, but the wonderful use of story. Fishing Girl's premise is simple – two creatures are in love. One is suddenly separated from another by a stretch of water. You take control of this creature, and can earn coins by catching fish. By upgrading your fishing rod and line, you can eventually catch the other piece of land with your lure, and reel it in, pulling the two creatures back together – but the game does not tell you this. As a player, I felt that I had come to the conclusion of pulling the other piece of land towards me of my own accord. This is the holy grail of interactive writing – a fixed ending that feels emergent. It also perfectly displays a natural ludo-narrative resonance. Many larger, more complex games – including those worked on by established authors – use story as a trope or machina. In a similar fashion to the way in which a TV character might suddenly reveal an otherwise unrelated (and often unlikely) hobby or past experience that just so happens to be useful in the show, all too often our games rely on a complex plot to explain the minutia of the gaming mechanic. Fishing Girl demonstrates how a simple, natural and easily understood story can flow simply into a supporting gameplay mechanic, and how this can lead the player to a conclusion without having to directly tell them what to do.

For all the discussion that goes on today of branching vs fixed narrative, and of the possibilities and technical limitations of a truly emergent story experience, a game like Fishing Girl comes as a shock to the system, and leaves me wondering if perhaps crafting an emergent, story-based interactive experience is like learning to fly before we can even crawl. Perhaps the better solution to creating a deeper interactive experience lies not in the player carving their own solution, but in creating a single, unchanging solution that flows so cleanly from the gameplay that the player doesn't feel cheated or slighted by their inability to change it.