#gdc18 About to start: Narrative Design of Reigns Her Majesty
Planning a co-op Reigns mode on Switch. Something about needing consensus between players.
The original Reigns was successful; players wanted a queen mode. (Author starts by apologizing for the gender-binaryness of the game tropes.)
Kept the basic Reigns model: fast decisions, frequent violent death, repetition to find progression.
“nobody sucks at Reigns, dying is expected”. Some players didn’t get that model, death feels like failure.
But they couldn’t just change the gender without changing the lens on power. It’s a shallow tropey game about cartoony death, but it can still respect real experience.
“I love Cersei Lannister. I would make a game entirely about her if I thought people would play a character that hateable.”
Wanted the Reigns queen to have the same range of experiences — greedy, loving, traitorous, triumphant — as the Reigns king. But from a slightly different angle. Controlling the kingdom is more of a political, intrigue-ous scenario.
This is one reason for being a king’s wife rather than a queen regnant. Another reason is wanting to hit familiar story tropes.
Wanted to go a little farther into IF storytelling and storytelling systems.
Making cards link together into mini-arcs was as much a matter of balance as the writing. The design is in the system (the statistical properties of the cards).
The system is good for overwhelming you with options, so it conveys the theme of women struggling with choice. However, empathy by itself is not a message. The game is really about how women can respond.
The responses try to more nuanced then just accept/reject. You can refuse something in an impactful way. You can open paths by being vain or greedy. You relate to people as an outsider, among other relations.
The game has many relations with feminism too. It makes fun of some forms of feminism. It can’t be simply advocacy because it is also an app on sale, for money, in an industry.
Tries to be self-aware in those ways.
“If I had a daughter, I would have bigger dreams for her than to become a capitalist shitlord.”
