Howling Dogs

Last updated
Howling Dogs
Designer(s) Porpentine
Engine Twine
Platform(s) Browser
Release2012

Howling Dogs is a Twine game and piece of interactive fiction created by Porpentine in 2012. [1] [2] The game is text-based [2] and includes occasional abstract pixel art. In 2017, the game was included in the Whitney Biennial. [3]

Contents

Gameplay

Howling Dogs opens with a quote from The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away by Kenzaburo Oe [4] and starts off in a metal room. [1] The game makes the user repeat basic actions, such as eating, drinking, sleeping and bathing, in a repetitive cycle. As the setting deteriorates over the course of the game, the tasks become harder to perform. [2] The user can escape their surroundings momentarily by putting on a virtual reality visor, which becomes accessible after they perform some of their basic tasks. The virtual reality allows users to escape their cell-like surroundings, and displays a bizarre alternative world and imagery, before ending and bringing the user back to the same room. [5] [6] The game closes with a quote from theologian John Wesley.

The game's visuals consist of a black background with white text and blue hyperlinks, with occasional pixelated images shown [4] when accessing the virtual reality visor.

Development and reception

The game was written within a week, after Porpentine began hormone therapy treatment. [3] She wrote the game while living in her friend's barn. [1] She has stated the game evokes a feeling of someone not being able to take care of themself when they are broke and in a bad living situation. [2] While speaking about the game to The New York Times , she has compared dealing with trauma as similar to being in a dark room. [1]

Writing for Gamasutra, Leigh Alexander called the game an "abstract, often surreal experience centralized on the concept of confinement". [2] According to Mallika Rao of The Village Voice , Howling Dogs "is a commentary on trauma" and "isn’t so much a video game as a genre-mash, redolent of choose-your-own-adventure books, an unwritten Black Mirror plot, a poem, a depressive spiral, a manic flight." [3]

In 2012, Howling Dogs won two XYZZY Awards for Best Writing and Best Story. [7] That year, it was also nominated for the categories of Best Game, Best Setting, and Best Use of Innovation. [8]

At the Independent Games Festival in 2013, game designer Richard Hofmeier used his booth for the game Cart Life , which won that year's Grand Prize, to instead display Porptentine's Howling Dogs. He said he wanted to give greater exposure to Porpentine's game, at one point stating "It's really dear to me, this game... it's fucked with my guts in a way that nothing else has". [2] [9]

Related Research Articles

Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the form of Interactive narratives or Interactive narrations. These works can also be understood as a form of video game, either in the form of an adventure game or role-playing game. In common usage, the term refers to text adventures, a type of adventure game where the entire interface can be "text-only", however, graphical text adventure games, where the text is accompanied by graphics still fall under the text adventure category if the main way to interact with the game is by typing text. Some users of the term distinguish between interactive fiction, known as "Puzzle-free", that focuses on narrative, and "text adventures" that focus on puzzles.

The Interactive Fiction Competition is one of several annual competitions for works of interactive fiction. It has been held since 1995. It is intended for fairly short games, as judges are only allowed to spend two hours playing a game before deciding how many points to award it. The competition has been described as the "Super Bowl" of interactive fiction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sega VR</span> Video console peripheral

The Sega VR is an unreleased virtual reality headset developed by Sega in the early 1990s. Planned as an add-on peripheral for the Sega Genesis and only publicly showcased at a number of trade shows and expositions, its release was postponed and later cancelled outright after Sega ran into development issues. At least four in-progress games for the hardware were in development before its cancellation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Virtual reality</span> Computer-simulated experience

Virtual reality (VR) is a simulated experience that employs pose tracking and 3D near-eye displays to give the user an immersive feel of a virtual world. Applications of virtual reality include entertainment, education and business. Other distinct types of VR-style technology include augmented reality and mixed reality, sometimes referred to as extended reality or XR, although definitions are currently changing due to the nascence of the industry.

Text Adventure Development System (TADS) is a prototype-based domain-specific programming language and set of standard libraries for creating interactive fiction (IF) games.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Independent Games Festival</span> Annual video games festival

The Independent Games Festival (IGF) is an annual festival at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), the largest annual gathering of the independent video game industry. Originally founded in 1998 to promote independent video game developers, and innovation in video game development by CMP Media, later known as UBM Technology Group, IGF is now owned by Informa after UBM's acquisition.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Game Developers Conference</span> Annual video game developer conference

The Game Developers Conference (GDC) is an annual conference for video game developers. The event includes an expo, networking events, and awards shows like the Game Developers Choice Awards and Independent Games Festival, and a variety of tutorials, lectures, and roundtables by industry professionals on game-related topics covering programming, design, audio, production, business and management, and visual arts.

The XYZZY Awards are the annual awards given to works of interactive fiction, serving a similar role to the Academy Awards for film. The awards were inaugurated in 1997 by Eileen Mullin, the editor of XYZZYnews. Any game released during the year prior to the award ceremony is eligible for nomination to receive an award. The decision process takes place in two stages: members of the interactive fiction community nominate works within specific categories and sufficiently supported nominations become finalists within those categories. Community members then vote among the finalists, and the game receiving a plurality of votes is given the award in an online ceremony.

Game Developer is a website created in 1997 that focuses on aspects of video game development. It is owned and operated by Informa and acted as the online sister publication to the print magazine Game Developer prior to the latter's closure in 2013.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Twine (software)</span> Free and open-source tool for making interactive fiction in the form of web pages

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Porpentine (game designer)</span> American video game designer, new media artist, writer and curator

Porpentine Charity Heartscape is a video game designer, new media artist, writer and curator based in Oakland, California. She is primarily a developer of hypertext games and interactive fiction mainly built using Twine. She has been awarded a Creative Capital grant, a Rhizome.org commission, the Prix Net Art, and a Sundance Institute's New Frontier Story Lab Fellowship. Her work was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. She was an editor for freeindiegam.es, a curated collection of free, independently produced games. She was a columnist for online PC gaming magazine Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

<i>Cart Life</i> 2010 video game

Cart Life is a simulation video game developed by Richard Hofmeier using Adventure Game Studio for Microsoft Windows released in 2010. The game was added to Steam in March 2013 but later removed when Hofmeier released the full source code for free.

<i>Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes</i> 2015 video game

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is a puzzle video game developed and published by Canadian studio Steel Crate Games. The game tasks a player with disarming procedurally generated bombs with the assistance of other players who are reading a manual containing instructions. It was designed around virtual reality support, with availability first on Android-driven Samsung Gear VR, with later ports to supported devices on Microsoft Windows, OS X, PlayStation 4, and Linux; though could be played without virtual reality in some cases. An update for the game released in August 2018 removed the virtual reality requirement for these existing systems, as well as included releases for the Nintendo Switch and Xbox One. Non-VR ports for iOS and Android were released in August 2019.

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References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Hudson, Laura (19 November 2014). "Twine, the Video-Game Technology for All". The New York Times. Retrieved 15 August 2020.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Alexander, Leigh (29 March 2013). "IGF winner Hofmeier pays it forward for Porpentine's Howling Dogs". www.gamasutra.com. Retrieved 7 February 2021.
  3. 1 2 3 Rao, Mallika (15 March 2017). "What Makes Art "American" in 2017?". The Village Voice. Retrieved 7 February 2021.
  4. 1 2 Pederson, Claudia Costa (6 April 2021). Gaming Utopia: Ludic Worlds in Art, Design, and Media. Indiana University Press. ISBN   978-0-253-05452-4 . Retrieved 4 September 2021.
  5. ↑ "Howling Dogs". Rhizome Artbase. Retrieved 3 September 2021.
  6. ↑ Robertson, Adi (10 March 2021). "Text Adventures: how Twine remade gaming". The Verge. Retrieved 3 September 2021.
  7. ↑ "XYZZY Awards Historical Results - Winners". xyzzyawards.org. Retrieved 15 June 2021.
  8. ↑ "XYZZY Awards Historical Results - Finalists". xyzzyawards.org. Retrieved 15 June 2021.
  9. ↑ "IGF grand prize winner gives his booth away to 'Howling Dogs'". Engadget. March 28, 2013. Retrieved 3 September 2021.
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