Ever wanted to play a game that didn’t follow the norm? that pushed the boundaries of gaming and gave you something completely different? If the answer to that is yes then maybe it’s time you played Cloud Chamber.
Not only did we manage to get a copy of the game and have a play through but we also managed to catch up with Christian Fonnesbech, the Creative Director, at Investigate North Aps and ask him a few questions about their brand new game. Firstly, take a look at my first crazy half an hour with the game to fully understand the world of Cloud Chamber.
Mike: First things first, for those of us who don’t know, explain what your game “Cloud Chamber” is about.
Christian: Cloud Chamber is a Multiplayer story game: You have to figure out what happened, along with the other players – and the gameplay is discussion. It has hollywood quality foound footage, 3D navigation, real astrophysics and online collaboration.
Could a signal from another world have been kept secret for 40 years? Players enter a strange database and work together to figure out what happened when a young astrophysicist betrayed her father and risked insanity to explore the unknown. Who or what killed Ingrid Petersen? What is the Petersen Institute hiding?
The gameplay is 3D exploration of the database, mixed with social discussion – you get points when other players think you write something cool. It also has found footage shot by the team behind The Killing, real space documentary footage from the European Space Agency – as well as stars from James Bond and Game of Thrones.
So it’s quite a journey – while you’re travelling into the story and the characters, you’re also travelling out, into the universe – and while you do it, you get to know the other players, because it’s only by reading their posts and discussing with them what is going on, that you will really get to the bottom of it all.
Mike: Cloud Chamber is definitely a new direction for gaming, how did you come up with the idea?
Christian: It fell out of the sky. Or, well, actually it didn’t. My team and I have been obsessed with the idea of a new kind of story game for many years. We really don’t think that stories or games have kept up with the world.
Movies are so last century, books are even older – and story games seem to be stuck in the “play a little, then get some story, then play a little” rut. We think the story should BE the game … and it should feel like our own lives (not like somebody living in the last century’s life!).
Life, today, is indivisible from smartphones and the Internet and flipping between media types and social networking – these things have changed the way we live, work, love and fight. Why don’t stories work like that? Cloud Chamber is our humble attempt at an answer to that.
Mike: At any point during the creation of your game did you think “This is such a new idea, we’re worried it may not catch on”?
Christian:Well, we had the privilege of making something that WE, ourselves, really wanted to experience – and that is really the best you can do, I think, whatever you’re making.
We’d made a number of previous mysteries that flirted with the same idea – so we knew the centre would hold. But we’d never attempted anything of this scope. It took 4 years to make Cloud Chamber, so I would be lying if I said we felt dead certain all the way.
It has been very much a process of exploration, trying things out, changing them, trying them out again. You have to embrace your uncertainty to do that: from game design to script writing to licensing contracts, we had to pretty much re-invent everything, while still making it recognisable. It WAS daunting at times, but that was mainly because I knew it had to be big in order to be convincing. I still believe that, but it sure would have been a LOT easier, if we could just have made this little thing and tied a bow around everything. I think it paid off, though. The sheer size of the experience (25-50 hours, if you get deeply involved) makes it possible to immerse yourself in the idea that it really could be true – without feeling like an idiot. People who play games are very intelligent – you need a big and convincing canvas if you hope to get them to allow themselves to believe.
Mike: Playing the game myself it instantly makes me think of Reddit. Are you big Reddit users?
Christian: We’re not, actually. My first Reddit experience was the AMA I did a few weeks ago (see http://redd.it/26skvx), which was a lovely experience. The central thing, in Cloud Chamber, is that the discussion IS the gameplay. You have to figure out what happened – because figuring out the story IS the game.
So what we did was look at the mechanics of social networks – and start imagining them as Game Mechanics. In our Beta test, the social gameplay worked more like Facebook, but it turns out that Facebook isn’t very well suited to investigating things. The mechanic we ended with is MUCH more focused and flexible – it allows subjects to be pursued and it lets good stuff rise. Facebook is more like TV – it’s a constant flow and you can’t really get much depth into it.
So that’s why we started using that Reddit inspired mechanic: people can decide what to talk about, good stuff rises, bad stuff falls.
Mike: There are still people out there who never really use places like Reddit, do you think they could still enjoy your game?
Christian: What we’ve discovered is that all kinds of gamers get it very quickly. Non-gamers, on the other hand, never get it. Really. They just DON’T.
One thing that clearly defines gamers is that they enjoy “mastering a system”, or “figuring it out” – even if it just means “learning controls”. And Cloud Chamber is all about figuring it out.
People who only like books and TV, it seems to me that they just want the experience; they do not want there to be any challenge involved in getting that experience (they think of challenges as work, I think). We tried to get some people like that to play it – and it was like getting a cat into a bucket of water. They just didn’t get it, and they didn’t want to get it. Gamers, on the other hand, jumped right in.
What can I say? The future belongs to gamers. 😉
Mike: Places like Reddit can be thought of as breeding grounds for “Trolls”. How do you feel this could affect your game?
Christian: We’ve made 3 previous mysteries, where discussion was everything, and we have never had this problem. “Will the players behave well or not?” seems to be a big question for some…
In short: since discussion is gameplay, the game is designed for bad stuff to disappear. Downvotes will make bad stuff disappear, and you can always report abuse. We will of course be watching through our moderation tools, as well – but in the end, it will take care of itself – or else we will change the social mechanics until it does.
What happened on our other mysteries was that the community quickly became very tight and very self protecting. The whole experience is about hanging out with other people inside a story. And … honestly … if you hang out somewhere, getting to know a bunch of other people around a shared interest – and suddenly, somebody comes in and disrupts it all … how would you react? You would tell that somebody to chill the f*ck out or leave. In extreme cases, you would report them for abuse (that’s when the banhammer falls).
We will be watching what happens very carefully, but for me it’s very much a question of game design. We will be tweaking the algorithm that lets threads and comments rise and fall until they do the job for us – moderation should be a last resort, in my opinion.
Mike: Seeing as you’ve pretty much created a new genre, what would you call that genre?
Christian:We’ve been through a few names for it. The new things, here, are the combination of story and multiplayer. Story games are usually single player experiences. Multiplayer games have traditionally not handled story all that well. And then there is the whole “the story is the game” thing. Again, making the story BE the game is a big thing for us. So how about Massively Multiplayer Story Game?
Mike: The actors you have used for your game feel like a really good fit. How long did it take you to find the right people for the roles?
Christian: It took time. Jesper Christensen was easy. We wanted him from the start. The others were found through a casting process. Sara Hjorth has a father who is actually an astrophysicist, so she brought some reality to the starring role (she had to have that star thing, too, and she sure did). Gethin and Gwilym. (Sigh) what can you say? Once you go Welsh, you never go … back? Gethin did the best audition I have ever seen (we couldn’t even look at anybody else, after he showed us how Max should be). And Gwilym was a perfect thinking man with an edge. And when we put those two in the same room, they just seemed to have known each other for years. They’re both Welsh, so it’s probably that! 😉
Mike: What’s next for Investigate North?
Christian: A lot depends on how well the launch on Steam goes. If it goes well, we start making season 2 of Cloud Chamber as soon as possible. I’ve got the story lined up and we’ll hopefully have more resources next time, so we can make something even more spectacular, mysterious and emotional. It would really become a h u g e experience, if they let me have my way. We’d also like to do mini mysteries, between seasons. It’s a world, and if we’re successful, we can build and build.
Also, I do think we’ve stumbled onto something big with this whole “discussion as gameplay” mechanic. I think we can tell all kinds of stories with it. I have a completely new world and story, I’d like to get started on – and I know our producers are pretty keen on that as well. It all depends on that launch.
Mike: If you could say one think to people out there to convince them to buy your game, what would it be?
Christian: Cloud Chamber will blow your mind. It certainly blew mine.
7bitarcade - Archive 