EPTA parable is a succinct, didactic story, in prose or verse, which illustrates one or more instructive lessons or principles. It differs from a fable in that fables employ animals, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature as characters, whereas parables have human characters. A parable is a type of analogy.
David B. Gowler (2000). "What are they saying about the parables". What are they saying about the parables.
SPOILER WARNING : If you haven't played the game. Do so and them read what follows.
I take a quote from another forum, just because it shows how someone else can interpret the game.
+ Show Spoiler +
Freedom ending: God created a story for man to enact
Countdown ending: God is toying with man / God is wrathful
Button ending: Man is rewarded for his work with Heaven
Museum ending: God is just a creation of a greater God (the museum represents all the work that the developer/greater-god put into creating the narrator/lesser-God)
Insanity ending: God was an illusion of the mind and theists are deluded/insane; the woman represents atheists/agnostics and her job represents secular life
Coward ending (staying in his office): Man waits for someone else to tell him whether or not God exists (AKA blindly following an organized religion)
Broken-world ending: Man manages to defy God inexplicably, God's plans for Man are ruined, God is dismayed
Apartment ending: God is disappointed in Man being Man
Portal ending: Man is disappointed with God's world, God tries to work with Man to improve it, God eventually allows Man to make his own world
Confusion ending: God confronts paradoxes created by himself (example: can God make food that is too hot for himself eat)
Staircase Suicide ending: Man is disappointed with God's world, Man leaves the world the only way in which he knows how, God is dismayed (AKA real-life suicide)
Each parable are about a certain type of belief but the poster ends this with this sentence.
"Those are the main endings. I can't explain the other, weirder endings like the Escape Pod ending and the Warehouse Suicide ending. "
It's interesting how differently someone might end up living the game. But the last sentence just shows the limitation of the religion analogy because, it is not about god, but about another creator, the game creator. It is about all the little things the player might try, might want to skip, about the player being human and the game creator wanting to control, understand, influence the way the player act
Of course, as gamers we see it. It is about gaming! Right? Well we'd come close but it is actually more precise. Very very precise.
It is about game design/production.
You can see the hints on white boards. The museum itself is a hint.
To quote Sid Meier's definition:
"A game is a collection of interesting choices"
Before starting to write this blog, I was planning to write about each ending and how they relate to game design. That started to sound pompous and had little added value to what you could figure out yourself.
So instead I will highlight few things that I loved.
The mind control facility: This is very close to what game development is about. We watch how our players are behaving all the time. Are they following the rules, which choice they make and so on.
The boss' office, you enter the first time, you are following the instruction like a tutorial. The second time, you know the code, and the game make you wait if you input before the narration progress. This is the classical forced waiting in games and they are especially annoying in tutorials. The third time, the game dev just gave up, as game dev is iterative and the player didn't like the first two, they decide to remove the mandatory tutorial and open the pass forward. The is even a return to the bosses office where you are asked to speak a code, how familiar that is to be in a situation you know exactly what you should do but can't figure out which button to press. This is even more frequent feeling as a game designer, you do something that seems obvious and no one gets it, no one understand that they should press your big flashing button...
If you have taken the stairs down and became crazy, you would have reach another set of game design rules about immersion. How do you create large areas with repeating content without the player noticing it. And the second thing is the reference to what happens when you find a way out of the level. Does the player fly, or fall, is that fall infinite?
References to game breaking bugs and the player doing something the designer didn't think about, like unplugging the phone end then missing a scripted call. Emergence and the hard consequences it means to the developer, do you temper with the choices or do you just remove the scripted action and give more freedom to the player but you can't count that the precious content you created will be enjoyed by players.
The only true choice that wasn't put there by the game designer is to not to play.
Somehow, every player will play the game differently and the interpretation can vary according to your personal experiences and even the order in which you go through.
Strangely, this game is a bit outdated and there is full set of new solution that game designers are applying to control the player even further. The only reference to that is written somewhere in small "Monetize free to play". There is a whole new world of bad design to the player to explore.
So just like in Journey, we want to challenge the path, we want to know what is keeping us from going a different way... How many choices did you make before disobeying the narrator? I ended up going downstairs instead of the bosses office. My girlfriend's first play followed the narrator's instruction until the last choice where she pressed no. That was a relatively poor path to start with as the you end up punished by the game without yet knowing what the game might be about and then end up quitting.
What was your first play?
