IGM Interviews — Aaron Reed and Jacob Garde (Ice-Bound)

Ice-Bound is a new game from Down to the Wire, the two man writing/dev team of Aaron Reed and Jacob Garde, who you might already know from previous games.

is a new game from Down to the Wire, the two man writing/dev team of Aaron Reed and Jacob Garde, who you might already know from previous games. I had a chance to talk with both of them about their upcoming game, its Kickstarter(which is already live), the decision to use a physical Augmented Reality book as a part of their game, and game-making in general. So then, let’s get to it!

Okay, so first things first: Can you tell us what Ice-Bound is about?

Jacob : Okay, so I’m going to try not to go into script mode here… so essentially Ice-Bound is an interactive fiction project that is composed of two parts: One part is using a thing that we call combinatorial narrative that lets people kind of sculpt the stories that they want out of a series of possibilities by activating or deactivating little elements of story. And the second part of it is a printed book that interacts with that system, using Augmented Reality. It’s concerned with this author who dies under suspicious circumstances, who had an unfinished work, Ice-Bound.

A publishing house commissioned the creation of an AI from a brain scan to finish the book. But they ran into some problems, and without giving away anything, essentially the AI is not able to finish the story. So Tethys House, being frustrated is like “Listen man, we’ve gotta get this thing finished, we’ve got deadlines,” and is saying that we’re going to let you work with humans, and maybe, if you work with a reader, you can maybe get this finished up. And so this is how you interact with Ice-Bound, by interacting with Kris and building these stories, but he has his own agenda. He knows the printed book, which is called the Ice-Bound Compendium is out there in the world, and it has very strange sort of transmissions from memories that he doesn’t have anymore, and he doesn’t understand why he doesn’t have these memories. He starts getting really obsessed and interested with trying to find out what’s in this book.

And so in the future we sort of used this idea that if you want information to be really secure, the first thing you do to keep AIs from getting hold of it is to make it physical, not digital. And so the Compendium is actually like, “Oh we’ll just have this as a printed thing, so at least it’s harder for AIs to get ahold of.” There are a couple of warnings in there that it’s actually technically illegal to show KRIS this book, since there are UN injunctions against constructed sentiences, and everything else. So the reader is definitely entering nebulously legal territory by interacting with KRIS like this.

But what we’re going for is, in addition to making choices about what is made, what the story is, and in addition to making choices about how you end the story, using the Compendium for material, we wanted to also introduce the idea of making people choose between “Hey, I could show this to KRIS and prove to him that this is how the story should end,” and this is cool, because that’s how you want the story to end, but you might show him something on that page and it shows him that his daughter sold him out, and all of a sudden he’s incredibly depressed and outraged. And you’re suddenly like whoa, wait, maybe now I need to start thinking: “Man, I really want the story to be like this, but I really don’t want to upset KRIS,” and so that’s one of the kinds of tensions that we’re doing.

It was sort of an odd decision to go with a printed, Augmented Reality book. Was this done purely for story reasons, or was this done because of some other consideration?

Aaron : I think it was some of each. I think we’re at a really weird time right now, where so many things are shifting to digital. And so the rise of e-readers in the last ten years has just been this astronomically fast changeover compared to, you know, how we’ve changed modes of engaging with stories in the past. And so I think there’s a lot of uncertainty in the consciousness about like, what is the future of books going to be, what is the future of games going to be, how are those things going to be intertwined, if at all.

So, definitely a lot of the ideas for the project came out of our thinking as writers about those concepts. From a perspective of Ice-Bound as a game that we’re releasing, I think it’s kind of nice because it makes it unique compared to most other games, because it does have this kind of mandatory physical component, so I’m hoping that will help more people find out about it and get interested in it. But I think it definitely came from the kind of kernel of the question of “What is the future of books?”

You talk about the future of books and of games, was there anything specific that inspired Ice-Bound? I know you talked about Borges and Nabokov, and House of Leaves, but was there anything else?

Aaron : Yeah, definitely Borges, Nabokov and House of Leaves — we were both a huge fan of that book, and just books in general that tried to make you feel like you’re necessary somehow for the story to be told. And there’s a tradition of that that stretches back even hundreds of years. There’s a book from the 1700’s, Tristram Shandy, that is actively engaging in a conversation with you as the reader, and encouraging you to like, rip pages out of the book, and, you know, do all of these things that [cross the boundary] between the reader and the author. So I think we’ve both always been big fans of books like that.

While there have definitely been a lot of literary games, they tend to be engaging with the more descriptiive kinds of aspects of literature, but not the sort of playful stuff that you can do with language that you can’t do as well when you have to visualily represent everything, or audio that represents everything. When you can just use language, there are a  lot of really fascinating things you can do that’s unique to language. For me at least, that’s one of the things that I’m really interested in exploring. Jacob?

Jacob : Yeah, I think too, I mean I would echo what Aaron said for inspirations, but I think maybe building off of that a little bit, it’s been a natural extension of the previous work we’ve done, because we’ve both done Augmented Reality pieces that are attempting to work with Augmented Reality in a way that is trying to push at the boundaries of it. And then we had both done extensive interactive text works, and so I feel like with Ice-Bound , we came to all of these different inspirations from everywhere else, but… it’d sort of come together, you know, [and] with this project we get to do both: the Augmented Reality, we get to try to push that in a new direction, and we also get to push this interactive narrative system in the new direction as well.

I’ve always loved this kind of thing — I’m a sucker for narrative heavy games. And I’ve always dreamt of having this kind of flexibility in a story, but there were always barriers: For one, you need an absolutely enormous amount of content, and you also need some kind of way to make it feel like the players are making a difference in the story, rather than just running along rails. Obviously you’ve been working on overcoming these boundaries for Ice-Bound , but do you think there might be a way to put this kind of narrative into a more mainstream kind of game? Or do you think it’s more relegated to projects like Ice-Bound ?

Aaron : Yeah, it’s a good question. I think it really requires new fundamental design ideas, which I think is really scary for any team that has a bigger budget, a lot of people, on the line. But if you are going to make the narrative the core mechanic of the game, there are only a couple of models for interactive narrative that are seen as well as understood, and branching paths is one of those, [along with] conversation trees [that are mainly] understood in the RPG domains, right?

But moving beyond those things, there are a lot fewer games that have done that successfully, so there aren’t as many existing models for people to base things on. So I think you do have to be in an environment where you’re able to take risks and try something new — an indie game will do that — [and] we’re all academics at UC Santa Cruz, and that’s another environment where you’re encouraged to take risks and try things that may or may not work out. But, yeah, it just takes people trying stuff until enough things work that a new model becomes apparent.

Gotcha. And I know you guys mentioned that the book draws people in, but are you also worried that it might be a barrier to entry? Because it’s fairly easy to get the app, but getting the book is going to be a little bit more difficult, even with the Kickstarter.

Aaron : Yeah, for sure.

Jacob : Yeah, I think the way we’re looking at approaching it is: You can play, and as you may have found by now, you can play the first part of the app, you can kind of get introduced to the first part of the system, and we’re hoping that offering it as an introductory experience in that way can draw people in. But it’s an interesting thing… we’re hoping to be increasing audiences from people who just play games but aren’t familiar with these really cool kinds of books, like Dictionary of the Khazars, stuff like that, and so we’re hoping to broaden those kinds of people’s minds, but we’re also hoping that people who are like: “Oh yeah, I’ll buy a book,” but are like “Oh, an app? Well I don’t know about this.” We’re hoping to hit both of these audiences, to make something that can kind of bridge the two. ‘Cause it’s a space that Aaron and I are both really interested in.

Yeah, that sounds really cool. I know one of the hard things is always trying to convince people to come to games if they haven’t before, and it’s always hard to get people to read if they don’t normally, of course.

Aaron : Yeah. From some of the places we’ve shown it so far, I would say almost every time, the person who ends up getting the most into it and spending the most time with is someone who doesn’t necessarily consider themselves a gamer. So you know, we see sometimes older people, or sometimes people who don’t think of themselves as primarily game players just get totally fascinated with it, and just spend 45 minutes with them, and eventually we just have to politely ask, you know, for someone else to have a chance. [laughs] So I think we do have that potential of it being something that feels accessible enough that you don’t have to have a lot of that pre-existing knowledge about operating a game. We’re hoping we can pull some of those people who would really enjoy it.

That’s it for part one — don’t want to overload anyone — but Part 2 will be around next Friday, and those of you who just can’t wait can look at our preview of the game’s first two chapters, as well as consider supporting the team’s Kickstarterto bring Ice-Bound’s physical book to everyone.