24 replies to this topic

[denzquix]

Alter Ego for MS-DOS, C64 & Apple computers of the time was an ambitious attempt to simulate a human life from birth to grave

 

there were two separate editions released, one with a male protagonist and the other with a female protagonist. there is an online version available: http://www.playalterego.com/ which also has iPhone and Android app versions. something about the HTML interface bugs me though... i still play it on dosbox...

life in Alter Ego is split into seven phases (Infancy, Childhood, Adolescence, Young Adulthood, Adulthood, Middle Age & Old Age). in each phase you are presented with dozens of situations (total of about 400 in the game) and asked to choose how to handle them in a choose-your-own-adventure type way

 

 

you pick which vignette to do next with an interface that resembles picking up cards laid out on a table. how things play about affects a bunch of stats (Intelligence, Confidence, Physical Health, Money, etc.) and states (Employed/Unemployed, Single/In a Relationship, etc.) and these will sometimes affect how things play out later on...

 

 

the game fascinates me, so, like my alter ego's dad's cherished electronic calculator, I cannot help but ruthlessly take it apart & have a look at what's going on in there...

nerd shit

ok so, in the MS-DOS version at least, the game's events are written in a simple scripting language stored as individual files in the game folder (*.VIG, *.SIE, *.SIC, QUOTE* and INTER*)

i don't know everything about this little language yet but here's what i have worked out:

Spoiler

alter ego scripting language
each line in the file is normally displayed as a block of text
the maximum length for a line is 240 characters. if you need a longer block of text, split it in two and put the caret character ^ on the end of the first line:

 

This text is ^
split over two lines.

there are various symbols that have special meaning when they are the first/only character on a line...

clear the screen of text:

,

show warning about sexy content (with option to wuss out):

*

check the age (in years) of the Alter Ego is within a range, and if not show a message that you are too young/old and exit:

)14,15

(in this case, the Ego must be no younger than 14 years old & no older than 15)

 

end of vignette:

/

you are dead, game over:

.

set a temporary screen title:

>TEMPORARY TITLE

clear temporary screen title:

>>

modify variables:

;IN+5,SC-3,MN=0

...in this case: increase INtelligence by 5 points, decrease SoCial skills by 3 points, and set MoNey to zero dollars

create a position label here with the given name:

:LABEL

jump to a position label:

&LABEL

conditional jump:

=COND,IN<50
:COND.T
Your intelligence is less than fifty points.
/
:COND.F
Your intelligence is at least fifty points.
/

...in this case, if INtelligence is less than fifty points, jump to position label "COND.T", otherwise jump to "COND.F"

you can also include the first part of a piece of text before the condition, like this:

Your intelligence is =COND,IN<50
:COND.T
less than fifty points.
/
:COND.F
at least fifty points.
/

jump to a random position label:

?A3
:A1
You flip a coin and get heads.
/
:A2
You flip a coin and get tails.
/
:A3
You flip a coin but the dog swallows it.
/

menus
there are several kinds of menus. in each case the options that the player can choose from are terminated with an empty line

choose how to feel:

#X
vague sense of dread
curious optimism

:X1
You stare with intense melancholy into the middle distance.
/
:X2
Yes! Everything's going to be great.
/

...choosing feeling #1 jumps to position label "X1", feeling #2 to "X2", etc.

choose how to act:

!Y
make a sandwich
eat nothing

:Y1
The sandwich is delicious.
/
:Y2
Your stomach rumbles.
/

.... choosing action #1 jumps to position label "Y1", action #2 to "Y2", etc.

choose both how to feel & act:

%Z
happy
sad

frown
smile

:Z12
You smile happily.
/
:Z21
You frown sadly.
/

...choosing feeling #1 & action #1 jumps to position label "Z11", feeling #1 & action #2 "Z12" etc. if a particular combination does not have a corresponding position label, tell the player this combination is inappropriate and ask again.

these files are also compressed using a simple dictionary compression:

Spoiler

alter ego script compression
the file dcomp.txt is a list of word and phrase fragments, one on each line, which correspond to ASCII character codes, starting at 128 (hex 0x80). when you go past ASCII code 255 (0xFF), it should wrap around to code 0. an empty line means that this character should not be substituted and should be left as it is.

here is a zip of all the files uncompressed, also sorted into folders:

https://www.dropbox....ncompressed.zip

discoveries!!

there are a few exploitable bugs (both editions)... for example:

• on a beach trip during Infancy, selecting "creative"/"talk to dad" gets you an Intelligence Sphere boost, but since you are returned to the same options you can just make the same choice & keep getting that boost...
• every time you open the "College" screen in Young Adulthood you get a boost in your Calmness Sphere... even if all it does is say you don't have enough money to go to college...

seems the female edition was a mod of the male edition (hereafter "F.E." & "M.E.") after the fact (often along p. sexist lines... rock-throwing competitions become dress-up competitions, slashing a hated teacher's tires is transformed into getting a risky new hairdo, etc.) rather than the two being developed in parallel from the beginning

• F.E. is a noticeable improvement in terms of fixed bugs & additional proofreading throughout
• scenario filenames remain unchanged. e.g. the scenarios about getting your first erection & getting your first period both called ERECT.VIG

with some things it's not really clear whether it's an intentional male/female contrast or just a general gameplay change due to feedback or w/e

• penalties to Physical Sphere are generally less severe in the F.E. and also there is a lower Physical Sphere score threshold to being called "healthy" in the life-phase wrap-up summary
• there are significantly fewer ways to die in the F.E... for example, in the child abduction scenario, very deadly in the M.E., but in the F.E. you are invariably saved from the worst outcome by a last-minute deus ex machina... later in another scenario, the F.E. is changed so you lose the one opportunity to die heroically trying to save a life
• as a guy, if you ask a girlfriend to move in with you, it's a random 1 in 3 chance she will. as a woman, asking your boyfriend to move in works if and only if your "Trustworthiness" is high enough

other miscellaneous things...

• as a man, you have a 50-50 chance of either going bald or winning $250 in a fishing tournament
• if you have a kid and he/she ends up getting married, you only find out what happens in the months after the wedding if you are a mother/daughter, no other combination

[Vellfire]

Daaaaang this technical breakdown is incredibly fascinating, especially in the differences between the male and female versions.  I had never poked into the code for it before.  The split between the male and female versions poses a really specific problem that the site addresses which is that it would be incredibly hard to alter the game to allow for homosexuality.  It would either mean merging the two versions somehow or creating entirely separate versions for homosexual characters).  A huge pain all around.

 

I am a huge fan of Alter Ego though.  I've played through it several times since I've heard about it.  I bring Alter Ego up a lot in conversations about decision-based games in particular.  What I like about Alter Ego that a lot of conversation/decision-based games don't do is that it obscures the results based on your options.  To paraphrase Keith Malley, the options in most games are "a) fuck you i don't need you b) i'll do whatever you want you can walk all over me c) i'm going to do the right thing and compromise can be good".  You can tell what the results of your choices is going to be and instead of choosing the choice you think most represents how you would respond you choose the choice that you think will get you the response you want.  Alter Ego however doesn't make things as obvious.  If you try to the play the game and make choices with the results in mind you will repeatedly be disappointed or frustrated.  The choices you make don't always have the outcomes you expect, especially in scenarios where other people are involved.  After all, you can only account for your own actions, not the actions and thoughts of others.  Also, there are some choices that will work one way in one playthrough but work differently in another.  You end up having to just go with your gut feelings instead of trying to manipulate the entire game world and I really like this.  I wish more decision-based games would do this.  

 

Your decisions in Alter Ego also affect you in ways that aren't always transparent.  I mean iirc you can check your stats at any time but when you go through each event it doesn't always say "SELF ESTEEM -4 POINTS  TRUSTWORTHINESS +2  YOU NEED A TRUSTWORTHINESS OF 10 POINTS TO GET YOUR MOM TO LET YOU GO TO THE CONCERT" or whatever.  It allows these factors to be a bit more abstract and as a result a bit more realistic.  After all, seeing "I have a trustworthiness of 10 so I'll be able to do x but need two more points in y" is making you think too hard about meaningless numerical stats and less about what this means in terms of a character.  Unless you're constantly checking up on them then you aren't seeing these stats or really thinking about them, you're just playing the game and experiencing different events and their outcomes.  That's just really refreshing to me.  I mean, right now I'm playing Persona 4 and I really enjoy it but it totally lacks that layer of abstraction.  The game will flat out tell you if your Courage Numbers™ are too low to do something and won't let you even attempt it and fail at it.  It just tells you "nope your numbers are too low pick something else!!!" and the choices you make primarily have no effect on anything.  I think that the whole point of decision-based gameplay should be making choices and having those choices mean something.  The choices should have meaningful effects.  At the same time, those choices shouldn't be made in a manipulative way in an attempt to get the outcomes you want.  The choices should be made based on your own judgement of the situation.  So if Alter Ego is nothing else, I think it's an excellent example of doing decision-based gameplay in a way that is not easily manipulated with enough abstraction to make it feel very organic.

[denzquix]

thanks v much for your insight vellfire!! i think much of what you're talking about that A.E. can teach us about decision-based gaming i would put under the umbrella of suspension of disbelief, which in games probably makes people mostly think of graphics/physics realism but it's only tangentially related & a much more complex/subtle thing... I'm particularly interested in the thing about having the world around you feel like it is carrying on independent of you with people who got their own shit going on making their own decisions rather than a world that only moves in reaction to you...

The split between the male and female versions poses a really specific problem that the site addresses which is that it would be incredibly hard to alter the game to allow for homosexuality. It would either mean merging the two versions somehow or creating entirely separate versions for homosexual characters). A huge pain all around.

mm, I think if i was gonna try to do something about this I would probably try to work out how to convert this "AlterEgoScript" to ren'py (or twine or inform 7 or something), and then work out how to merge the two versions, and release the code for that so people can work out how to adapt/extend it further...

here's an example of how the code for one early scene might look (ren'py):

Spoiler

label draw:
  if gender == male:
    $ f = Person('Billy', male)
  else:
    $ f = Person('Missy', female)
  "You are a guest at your friend [f.name]'s house. [f.His_Her] mom gives you both a box of crayons and two pieces of paper."
  menu:
    "<ARTISTIC> DRAW ON THE PAPER":
      $ intellect += 20
      $ thoughtful += 30
      "You are behaving yourself very nicely so far. You draw a pretty picture."
      menu:
        "GIVE TO [f.NAME]'S MOM":
          $ thoughtful += 20
          $ social += 30
          "A very strong sign of developing social etiquette. Emily Post would certainly approve."
        "GIVE IT TO YOUR MOM":
          $ familial += 20
          "A very nice gesture. You can have a good time at somebody else's house for a short while, but there's no place like home."
    "<IMPULSIVE> DRAW ON THE PAPER":
      $ thoughtful -= 30
      "You scribble back and forth wildly, creating bold slashes of color. When you are finished, you can:"
      menu:
        "CRUMPLE IT UP AND START AGAIN":
          $ goodnatured -= 20
          "Ah yes, the frustrated artist. Your impulsiveness combined with your desire for perfection keeps you in a state of \"artistic turmoil.\""
        "SAVE IT":
          "You appreciate the value of even this kind of emotional expression. When you are famous, this scribbling might be worth a fortune."
    "<ARTISTIC> DRAW (IN GENERAL)":
      $ intellect += 20
      "You draw large circles and swirls with black crayon on the paper. Oops!  You drew on the expensive tablecloth."
      menu:
        "TELL [f.NAME] ABOUT THE SPOT":
	  if f.female:
            $ host_hostess = 'hostess'
	  else
	    $ host_hostess = 'host'
          "[f.Name] is a gracious [host_hostess]. [f.He_She] excuses you, then adds a stroke or two to your design (on the tablecloth, that is)."
        "COVER UP THE SPOT":
          "You casually slide the paper over the offending spot, where it will remain covered and undetected until after you leave. This was the sneaky, cowardly way out. But it was smart!"
        "TELL [f.NAME]'S MOM ABOUT THE SPOT":
          $ trustworthy += 30
          "Your honesty is commendable. [f.Name]'s mom realizes she wasn't thinking clearly when she let you draw on top of the tablecloth. Will you be this honest when you get yourself into real trouble?"
          menu:
            "YES":
              "We'll see."
            "NO":
              "Probably not, but admitting this is a trustworthy sign in itself."
    "<IMPULSIVE> DRAW (IN GENERAL)":
      $ thoughtful -= 20
      if gender == male and f.gender == male:
        $ frenzy_comment = ' (as little boys often do)'
      else:
        $ frenzy_comment = ''
      "You and [f.name] work each other into a frenzy[frenzy_comment]. First you cover the paper, then [f.name] suggests you redecorate the kitchen."
      menu:
        "JOIN [f.HIM_HER]":
          "You and [f.name] create a fabulous mural on the kitchen wall, a real one-of-a-kind masterpiece. Unfortunately, [f.name]'s mom shares neither your enthusiasm nor your love for the arts. You are sent home pronto, and the last you saw of [f.name], [f.he_she] was being put into solitary confinement and holding a pillow on [f.his_her] rear end."
        "MIND YOUR MANNERS":
          $ social += 30
          "A valiant choice with an unfortunate outcome. When [f.name]'s mother discovers [f.his_her] masterpiece, she gives you joint credit. She does not know that you are definitely an impressionist while [f.name] is an obvious cubist. Adults!"
  return

but it's just an idea at this point...

li'l bit more trivia: the personality quiz questions you answer at the beginning do push your starting stats around a bit, but the one about whether your parents were strict permanently switches your in-game parents to strict-mode

[Vellfire]

Yeah!  The idea of a game world's actors existing and acting independently of the player is something I'm incredibly interested in.  The vast majority of games are player-centric, which I suppose is because of many games functioning as escapist fantasies.  The player is the hero of the story (even if they have no heroic qualities) so everyone revolves around this hero.  That's something very boring to me.  I love the idea of games where other characters are doing things that don't involve you.  Seeing characters interact in the background, finding out about their interactions after the fact...later versions of The Sims added this with story progression, where essentially Sims in your neighborhood outside of the household you're currently controlling will have all the typical Sims interactions independently of you.  So, while you're controlling one house, NPC Sims will be talking, building/destroying relationships, marrying, having children, adopting pets, etc.  It makes the world feel a lot more alive than a game where, say, NPCs are just standing around waiting to be interacted with.  Even in Animal Crossing the animals will occasionally interact and make each other happy or put each other in bad moods.  Ultimately it breaks down into two very different kinds of gameplay.  You can have a world where actors interact independently of you which is more organic, or you can have a world where actors' behavior depends entirely on the decisions of the player, which is more controlled.  They offer entirely different gameplay experiences.  Story progression can be toggled on and off in The Sims and I think that is what most separates the ways people interact with the game.  With story progression on you get an experience where you're interacting with a world that you only have minor influence in (total influence over your household but only a household's worth of influence over the world as a whole).  But a lot of people turn this off because they want to construct a specific narrative within the world--having certain people be in certain types of relationships, that sort of thing.  I think having both types of play in the same game is fascinating.  But I also think that within the game industry as a whole there's a trend towards the latter.  If you look at games like Mass Effect or Fallout: NV you can more or less consistently make the same decisions in the game and get the same outcomes.  It's a very controlled environment in which you can construct a specific narrative.  So I guess the point in all of this rambling is that I really want to see more games where the player doesn't have control over the narrative.  I mean I guess that's also what the Real Lives games were all about.  Sure, you got to make some decisions, like what sort of job you wanted and whether or not you wanted to date someone--but ultimately there was very little about your life that you had control over.  To me it's really engaging to interact with a world in which you don't have full control over your own narrative.

 

As for the technical end of your post, I absolutely agree that if anyone was going to make any serious updates to Alter Ego it'd be best to totally recode it and combine the two games into one.  I'd actually really like to see a fully updated version of the game, like...a totally modern rewriting.  More gender neutral (or at least equal), less heteronormative and US-centric, updated technology, that sort of thing.  After all, the game has been out for almost 30 years now, I'd be interested to see how a 2013 version of Alter Ego would look and I'd be interested in it having input from a variety of modern psychologists and sociologists.

 

By the way, I'm really digging your deconstruction of the coding end of this!  I'm really interested in the technical aspects of games like these but I had never gotten around to looking at Alter Ego's code myself before.

[JMickle]

this is a super interesting thread

[mkkmypet]

yeah, super interesting stuff up in here! denzquix you are a cool person and i very much enjoy your posts :> the differences in the male and female versions of this game are intriguing :o i played this game a couple times (once female, once male) after seeing Vellfire's endorsements of it a while ago, and i basically agree with all her thoughts about it. it's a great execution of decision-based gameplay, but i would love to see an updated version with more freedom. i wish i was more able to maintain motivation to work on my own game development projects, because i've had several game ideas that play off of the concepts discussed here...

[denzquix]

another interesting thing to me is the way your actions & choices are emblematic, they define a pattern that fills in unseen gaps... each playable scene in your alter ego's life is weeks or months apart (the gaps widen as you get older)... in that "lost time" your alter ego is presumably living by the example you set. i mean it's just a flimsy illusion of course but conceptually, very interesting...

...which is why I feel like one thing the game does get kinda wrong is money, it keeps track pedantically of every dollar amount mentioned in the game, like the $17 you scammed out of people one Hallowe'en in your adolescence, or even the $1-5 you chipped in to get someone a going-away gift... seems like it would make more sense for money to be treated as a fuzzier concept, based on your ability to retain money over time or to scrape some together in an emergency, rather than a simple number... and maybe described in more relative terms, an amount of money being "three weeks' allowance" while you're a kid, or a potentail job that pays "twice what most of your friends are getting paid and three times what your Dad got at your age", and so on, would help the game feel less locked-in to a time or place where a dollar amount means a certain thing

denzquix you are a cool person and i very much enjoy your posts :>

ohh thank you!! you too jm...

 

i wish i was more able to maintain motivation to work on my own game development projects, because i've had several game ideas that play off of the concepts discussed here...

i know how motivation can be.. but i can tell you i'd really love to see them ideas come to life one day

 

[esiann]

The money/job system was always the weak point for me. (Relationships too, but I usually forget about those until I'm old, when I quick marry the first guy who comes up after two dates because the game says I should.) I assume some of the things you do when you're a kid affect your frugality later, but I'm always super frugal and then as an adult with zero assets spend barely within my income (or in old age beyond it, but within my means, I guess, since I usually invent a new bean dip or something to get a ton of money). The job system's requirements are also pretty fuzzy. Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing the code for those areas.

I would say that that other life-sim (Real Lives?) where you have less control over your characters than their circumstances at birth is probably better as far as money systems and context go, but it's not really as engrossing, just interesting. It's more of a spreadsheet where some cells have tuberculosis/military coups

It's also really neat to see the many branching paths that I never, ever take because I'm always trying to get the best stats instead of inhabiting a character much different from my own. I do like that other characters are temperamental and petty and get deeply hurt when I am too much of a stick-in-the-mud to skip school so my friend-group can go shopping, but as far as I know there aren't really developed characters beyond you and I guess your parents. It seems like every friend interaction is with a different person, and apart from one or two traits which may increase the likelihood of their being a jerk, any boy/girlfriend is pretty much the same.

[denzquix]

on a vectorin' kick i made some hi-def a.e. card icons based on the original ones..

makes me realise i got no idea what's going on on that family crest. i mean i'm pretty sure those are unicorn heads up in the top left & right, but

[denzquix]

so i do still want alter ego to be the main topic of this thread. buuuut I'd be happy to open it out to discuss other notable & weird decision/menu-based games from the past, if people are interested (??)

here are 3 I've encountered....

---

Floor 13 (1992) by Virgin Games for MS-DOS, Amiga, Atari ST

darkly satirical cloak & dagger sim: you are head of shadowy secret UK police force, stationed in the secret 13th floor of a London office block, your job is to keep the populace docile & the government more popular than its opposition. your tools to do this include surveillance, smear tactics, disinformation, burglary, kidnapping, assassination and torture

each game-day, you are first given reports to read from your office desk - newspaper clippings, internal memos, intercepted communications, etc. - these describe a developing situation & provide persons/groups/places of interest

you can then decide whether to deploy teams/agents to intervene, or hold back and let the situation(s) develop... for now

once you have made all your decisions for the day, you leave your office for a few days. when you return you have new reports to read. if government approval ratings drop too far or you are too reckless in your interventions you will be fired (or worse). the goal is to survive one year in this role

---

Drink & Drown (1986) by Bizarre Bulletin Systems for the Commodore 64
...please note this game was written by & for gross 80s dudes. if you do check it out, beware of casual misogyny & homophobia...

_

so, this was a free game made to be distributed on BBS systems. you are sent on a pub crawl where you have to deal with a series of situations. you get a short paragraph describing what just happened & 3 options for how to react. every option has a good outcome and a bad outcome. it's random which one you get, but the penalty/reward tradeoff varies

_

the situations are always self-contained/single-choice, you don't get ones that develop & follow on from what happened before

between each situation you have the option to drink (until you run out of money) and/or swear

_

if you drink too much you will throw up or pass out, but you are penalized for not drinking

the game is split up into bars, each bar has its own set of situations. you can only visit half of them in one playthrough

_

---

The Archers (1985) by Level 9 Computing for C64, ZX Spectrum & others

licensed tie-in to supremely long-running BBC radio soap opera about the residents of a rural village in the UK midlands

the game is split into four sections. in each section you control the destiny of a different character. if things don't go well, at the end of the section you are forced to re-play it instead of continuing on to the next

scenes from each of the 4 sections

each section has a number of situations. these are fairly interchangeable, some need to come before others but generally they happen in any order. each situation can have several branching developments/choices before being resolved.

so, what makes this game particularly interesting to me is that it isn't actually set inside the world of the show

instead of playing the characters you are really playing the scriptwriter. so the choices you make are not always about what the character would choose to do, but sometimes God-like decisions about things beyond the character's control - someone is knocking on the door, you need to decide who it is, that sort of thing:

what determines whether you succeeded in one section is the show's ratings, not whether it's the best outcome for the character. you are penalized for upsetting important demographics, being too boring, and so on:

[Vellfire]

i will play all of these

[denzquix]

Drink & Drown got an Amiga version a few years later, with even less graphics, but it did get some funky music:

(that's all the music mashed together, in the game each situation plays a short loop from it)

[denzquix]

another one: Michael Gibson's ZapDramatic series of Flash games from 2000

-

each game has one NPC that you need to placate, to resolve a tense situation

these are intended to teach real negotiation skills (ZapDramatic's slogan is "Life Experience Through Simulations"), developed with the input of dispute resolution experts

Customer Service: http://web.archive.o...tomservice.swf#

Interview With A Vagabond: http://web.archive.o...iateIntro3.swf#

The Suspicious Cop: http://web.archive.o...icious_cop.swf#

The Lusty Barfly: http://web.archive.o...ustybarfly.swf#

[skulldrone]

I've watched several Retsus of that, I don't know what to say other than marvel at the 2001 era color choices and poorly symbol tweened characters moving around the screen. It's a strange cross between wanting to be some sort of simple "what would you do" situation test vs actually wanting to have a story with characters and a bizarre terriost bombing plot. I'm mostly talking about the Ambition series I think.

[denzquix]

It's a strange cross between wanting to be some sort of simple "what would you do" situation test vs actually wanting to have a story with characters and a bizarre terriost bombing plot. I'm mostly talking about the Ambition series I think.

i think there's definitely something to be said for a game with ambiguous/confused intentions about what it wants to be, whoit's aimed at and so on... an extra level of intrigue... Die Anstalt is another Flash game that gives me that feeling

---

in Law of the West (1985) for Commodore 64, Apple II & NES (but only in Japan) you play the sheriff of an Old West town

the whole gameplay is a series of encounters with characters walking out in front of you and starting up a conversation. you choose what to say with a conversation tree, at any time you also have the option to pull your gun and start shooting. your goal is to make it through one day to sundown alive & with the most points for handling situations well

[Vellfire]

Okay now I'm gonna have to find that Famicom version while I'm here in Japan.

[denzquix]

good luck!! here's what you wanna be looking out for...

[DDay]

Okay now I'm gonna have to find that Famicom version while I'm here in Japan.

 

 

Your in japan luck wish I had money.

[denzquix]

on a vectorin' kick i made some hi-def a.e. card icons based on the original ones..

made a lil test page for these: http://alterego.neocities.org/

[Faust]

Dude, this thread is amazing!

 

Alter-Ego rocked! I played that game so much, even though I've never actually had a "successful" character. It was one of the deepest games in terms of like world and making me care about it that I'd played for such a long time.

 

I also want to check out ZAPDRAMATIC. Maybe it will help me learn how to mediate angry youths, WHO KNOWS?