Tacoma, a first-person mystery game, uses an open world concept in order to carry the player through a compelling narrative. The game begins, by placing you into a space craft that has been absent of people due to an unknown reason. As the main protagonist, you enter the space craft to simply carry out a job and retrieve information. However, besides that main premise, you are placed into this scenario with little information but an open world, and your curiosity. Tacoma leads the player into an immersive story by using spatial exploration, in order to decipher the clarity of a narrative. In doing so, Tacoma takes a seemingly slow-paced experience, into an intense, mind juggling experience of morality and truth.
Tacoma makes clear, that it isn’t an intense game that pressures you to face time and death. Instead, it creates an open geography to explore a space, and with that, a narrative. Jenkins stated that “The organization of plot becomes a matter of designing the geography of the worlds” (Jenkins, 8). Tacoma does this, but then takes it one step further by intertwining the idea of spatial exploration and plot development together, in a way that isn’t mutually exclusive. One way that this is done, is by controlling the extent in which the player can explore a given space. Instead of opening the whole map to endless exploration, Tacoma restricts access to certain areas of the spaceship in order to ensure the player is grappling with the narrative in a logical manner, while also feeling the freedom of interactivity. For example, the first section of the environment that the player is led to is to the “personnel” section of the game. By doing this, the player is then enclosed in a limited space, and then allowed to explore that space. This forces the player to stay within a logical line of narrative, while exploring a world at their own pace. By setting this type of restraint, the player doesn’t jump too far ahead in their assumptions of what had happened to the spaceship. For this reason, in the beginning of the game it isn’t too suspicious to see Venturis’ propaganda, Venturis’ restricted information, or Venturis’ commands. However, as you progress through the game, the pace picks up, and it causes you to tread further into the narrative eventually disentangling the truth and morality behind Venturis.
As you progress through the narrative of the game, another device is used to control the extent into which you can explore the game’s spatiality. This is done by the inclination to follow the hologram’s through the given spaces. As the game open’s up more of its geography, the player’s ability to explore is narrowed. It is as if the game is trying to zero the player’s focus to the suspicions, morality, and truth of Venturis. For example, when exploring the space of the biomedical facility, you explore the dialogue of the medic. However, the medic’s hologram does not stay in one spot. Instead it walks to different parts of the geography, thus leading you to certain places and through the narrative. This compels you to lower your desire to explore random spaces of the geography that stray from the current narrative the game is trying to show you. Jenkin states that “Spatiality stories are not badly constructed stories; rather, they are stories…privileging spatial exploration over plot development” (Jenkins, 7). Although correct in part, Tacoma takes this statement a little further by constricting spatiality at differing times in order to equally further plot development. This shows that video games can both prioritize spatiality and plot development by putting them hand in hand when designing video games. Tacoma creates a compelling story that makes you grapple the truth and morality of Venturis by constricting and guiding spatial exploration at different times. This neither restricts the freedom to explore, nor restricts the plot’s development. Instead, it seems to satisfy both.
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