There are always two conflicting goals in any roleplaying game: The Game Master or Designer has a story they want to tell and a series of wickets they hope the player will hit in a particular order. These checkpoints might consist of talking a series of NPCs who will deliver story through dialogue as players complete a quest, dealing a particular amount of damage to a given set of enemies, or following a set of waypoints on a map. Even the most sandboxy of open world games will almost always feature some sort of gatekeeping mechanic to ensure that the core of the story is delivered in a particular order.
Players… generally have the goal of ruining that plan.
It doesn’t matter if you’re playing on a computer or around the table, tactical grid combat or pure theater of the mind roleplay, players inherently have their own ideas of what a character will do and that element of player choice plus the randomness of dice rolls will twist even the most prepared DM’s plans. And that’s before we bring rocket launchers and complex 3D terrain boxes into the conversation.
Even the most linear non-combat walking simulator has to account for the player who adores boundry breaking or puts their controller down to get a fresh bag of chips, if the designers want to ensure a story is delivered in a particular way. It’s in this sense that the ferry sequence which plays out as Alan and Alice Wake arrive in Bright Falls reminds me of the tension between the idea of “playing a role” and “playing a role playing game.” This scene is only four minutes long and contains no interactions which could not have been replaced with a cutscene, but giving players the opportunity to perform as Alan helps set the tone of the game and develops the relationship between this couple in some ways that tickle my brain.
Let’s take a look at these four interactions which occur on the ferry as Alan, freshly awakened from his nightmarish tutorial sequence, interacts with Alice Wake, Pat Maine, Barry Wheeler, and a mysterious man who will later be revealed to be Ben Mott. Each interaction is different in tone, presentation, and gameplay, highlighting the power of inviting players to inhabit a character in a game.
We’ve all had those moments of being unsure whether we are awake or dreaming, of trying to pull our spirits back into our bodies as the waking world closes in around us. Some mornings I just don’t feel human until I’ve wrapped myself in a blanket and sipped a couple cups of coffee while quietly forcing my mind onto the correct track. That’s exactly where Alan Wake is at the opening of the Ferry scene. Stirred from his dream, Alan wakes to the pun of Alice saying, “Alan, wake up”. His lingering frustration from the nightmare manifests in snarky responses and contrasts immediately with Alice’s cheerful tone and efforts to bring some levity to their vacation.
This portrayal of the artists as a curmudgeon is something which resonates with me. I can even think of a several times when I was on vacation or had a day off but struggled to pull myself out of the dark places where my mind strays if a project is overwhelming me, money is tight, or plans are changing too rapidly for me to keep up. As players, we don’t have any choice of Alan’s mood when he awakes, but we’re as likely to feel some empathy for him as we are to be bothered by how sharply he speaks to Alice. More importantly, we aren’t in control yet. Alan is who the writers made him here and we can’t change it any more than we can change a film or a book.
The cinematic cuts to a wide view of the ferry, then swoops forward across the deck, under a train trestle marked with the name of Bright Falls, and across the shoreline of this quaint Northwest American town. We gain control of Alan standing beside the rental car on the ferry, just as Alice asks him to go overt near the old man at the front of the ferry so she can take a photo of him on vacation.
It’s this interaction with Alice which is the most fascinating element of the scene to me. The old man is Pat Maine, who will be important to the plot of later episodes, but it does no harm to the game’s story to ignore him now. If we do as Alice tell us, if we actively engage with her request and play the roll of a husband conceeding to this wife’s advice, the developers reward us with a conversation that explains more about both Pat and Allan as individuals. Pat is a kindly local radio personality. Allan is a celebrity from out of town, who is going to be recognized with strange frequency by the residents of Bright Falls.
This isn’t roleplay in the traditional sense of rolling dice or assigning skillpoints, but it’s an interaction between the player and the intended storyline in a way which feels like a natural choice, requires active engagement from the player, and develops the characters. In a way, its a glimmer of moments I loved from the novel Ready Player One, when in order to advance to the next stage of the competition, Gunters had to speak the lines and perform the actions taken by the character David Lightman in the film War Games.
Alternatively, we can choose to ignore Alice’s request and the scene will continue right along. We can even walk around the ferry and blithly ignore Alice as she repeatedly tries to convince Alan to play along. And it’s Alan who she is trying to reach. There are no canned repetitive lines, even if each bit of dialoge does suggest to players that they should return to the preferred path. There is no mechnical punishment for ignoring her, and Alice never turns cruel or whines, but if we never conceded to her requests she and Alan do joke about him being a miserable bastard.
If we play along with the script and pose for Alice’s photo, we enter into a more traditional interactive cutscene. Pat Maine introduces himself and, recognizing the famous writer, invites Alan to join him for an interview on his local radio show. We aren’t given any option of accepting the invitation, but instead witness as Alan politely declines to go on Pat’s radio show and and politely asks to be left alone while he is on vacation. The predetermined narrative has taken over. The only choice we have is whether to ignore the dialoge and wander off or place Alan and the camera in a location which frames this scene in a cinematic way, in which case the 2010-era character puppets attempt to make eye contact and gesture mildly to emphasize their words.
Though the scene is performed in the marionette style of most video games, the brief sketches of characterization tell us something about the contrast between these characters. Alan is a young man from the city dressed in layers of tweed jacket and hoodie and sardonic disinterest. Pat Maine plays the roll of a convivial local elder, dressed in comfortable sweaters and equally happy to discuss Alan’s work or the upcoming Deerfest. The contrast between an abrasive outsider and a kindly local is a well worn trope, as is their obvious disparity in age, but these two men have a stronger connection than their brief, optional interaction in this scene might convey. They are both people who work in media, but while Alan is a man of letters who has been unable to produce a story for years, Pat is a man of live radio and music whose kindly voice vanishes into airwaves every night, appreciated by all who hear, but unedited and unpreserved as he speaks with callers and shares the music he loves.
Whether we engage with the narrative and speak with Pat or choose to reject the best efforts of Alice and the game designers to pull us into a deeper understanding of the events which are about to unfold, the third interaction in this ferry scene is inevitable, but presented in a manner which encourages us to explore, possibly triggering the final interaction.
Alan’s cellphone rings and we get our first introduction to Barry Wheeler, his literary agent and best friend. Even over the phone, Barry is as cheerful and outgoing as Alan is introverted and moody. It’s understandable how Barry, with his New York accent and his chatty, mildly pushy manner, could be the man respomnsible for promoting Alan’s novels. They are friends, but there’s also a strong business aspect to their relationship as Barry is the first person to push Alan to try writing while he’s on vacation. We are beginning to see that Alan, a man of dark thoughts and violent stories, is at the center of a web of characters who depend on him as much as he depends on them.
So far we have had three kinds of interaction: Alice has prompted us to roleplay Alan’s journey from meloncholy to kindly activity. Pat Maine has shown us Alan stepping into his public persona and pushed us into a moment of predefined narrative. During the phone call from Barry, the player is free to wander the whole ferry listening as Barry monologues at him. In fact, the use of a phone call is likely to encourage the player to move away from Pat and Alice, as many people do instinctually walk away from others while on the phone both to gain some measure of privacy and so they don’t disturb others. This subtle prompting of the player to move towards the back of the ferry triggers the final interaction.
If we walk to the rear of the ferry and get close enough to a man in hunter’s clothes who leans there smoking a cigarette, he will call Alan and Alice “damn yuppies” while continueing to gaze out across the water. Linger long enough and he’ll make a vaguely threatening comment, but otherwie refuse to engage. His presence can be completely missed if the player doesn’t wander far enough while listneing to Barry talk.
It is easy to dismiss Ben Mott as unimportant in this brief scene. With his limited lines, this hunter feels the most like an average NPC in a video game. Game developers will often drop non-interactive characters into a map merely to suggest to players that they are participating in an living world rather than piloting a hollow collection of polygons from one point in space to another.
Including Ben on the ferry is slightly more important than that, but only because his presence serves as foreshadowing and contrast. Not only will this character turn out to be more important than he first appears when we reach episode two and three of the game, but his refusal to engage with Alan contrasts with Alice giving us interactive stage directions, Pat and Alan having a plesant but mostly non-interactive conversation, and Barry talking our ear off no matter where we walk on the ferry. He is an intentional enigma, perhaps to the point that players may not even notice him.
The scene aboard the ferry to Bright Falls is brief, but does a lot to pull players into the mindset of playing out Alan’s role in the story. We won’t always be able to make choices that differ from the narrative which has been laid out for us. When we do have options, they will be limited and generally framed to nudge us back onto the preplanned path. Choice matters and storybeats can be skipped at the cost of learning more about the characters, but the outline of our story has already been written.
Unless we can find a way to change it. To write our own ending. To escape this narrative and write our own.
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