“Why yes! I can see that you did!” your Grandmother explains. “I am so very, very proud of you. Good job!”

She takes some of the honey you gathered and spreads it lovingly on a freshly-made, warm, buttered roll.

Your taste buds water with delight as you bite into it, and your eyes water with joy as your grandma continues to burst with pride over your accomplishments.

For a second, she seems about to ask you a question, but then she stops. It as if she realizes that you have been overwhelmed by choices recently and knows that one more question just might put you right over the edge.

Instead, she says, “As a reward for your thoroughness, we can watch a movie together!” Grandma goes into her closet and pulls out an old-time film projector along with a canister of film. She threads the film through the projector, latching the loose end onto an empty reel. Then she dims the lights and starts the movie.

The light coming from the projector shimmers on the white, pristine walls of grandma's living room, and a title appears.

The Making of Through the Forest

Through the Forest began when I was trying to create a training exercise, and it grew out of control. The initial idea was to create a simple story in the style of the classic “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, but with only two choices per scene or none at all.

Since it was intended to be an introductory level project, I applied some constraints. For example, there would be no inventory tracking, except via the pathway that the user was forced to follow if they did or did not obtain an item. So, when the user picks up an item, it doesn't get recorded in any way except that they are sent to a different “scene” than they otherwise would be. This constraint produced a lot more paths than were necessary, but that was part of the exercise. Another constraint was that since the game would be written in JavaScript, it would have no save capability, so there couldn't be too many rooms. As a result, the number of separate scenes in the game stops at 100.

I wanted it to be a game in which the player couldn't die, because dying isn't really any fun. That was harder to implement, but ultimately, it made the game more exploratory. Since there weren't any “dead” ends, as it were, certain locations either had to lead back to themselves in a loop, or they had to provide one way connections back to other locations in the game.

I also wanted there to be many ways through the game, yet, at the same time, I wanted the user to feel compelled to explore most of it. Thus was born the idea of “exploration” points, which rewards the player for being thorough and provides a higher-level, meta puzzle, for the game.

The game does contain some inside jokes, some of which are known only to me, unless I explain them here. Like, for example, the scene in the dwarf's house where I deliberately make a point of the fact that a player can't enter certain rooms. This came from a conversation I had with a guy who was using the game walkthroughs I had written to some of the classic Infocom text adventures. My friend wanted to know how to access certain locations in the game that were described from adjacent locations, but that he could never get into. I was intrigued by the fact that you could create an imaginary room, deny someone access to it, and thereby create an impenetrable source of frustration for that person. So that's what I did.

Incidentally, there is a deleted scene from the game where the dwarf dances around with an umbrella in his bedroom. You will never see it.

And finally, I find this type of game to be interesting because it explores the nature of our choices. Sometimes we have no choice. Some choices, which seem like they might be impactful, have no consequences whatsoever. Meanwhile, seemingly meaningless choices may have great repercussions.

Games like these also allow us to do something that we never get to do in real life. In real life, we don't ever see the path we didn't take; we only see the path we chose. So we have no certain way of knowing if we made the most beneficial choice, and we often continue with bad habits that might be changed if we could see what they were doing to us. Life would be so much more instructional if we were able to see the result of behaving differently. Games allow us to do what life does not.

Play again?