How Do You Scoop?

One of my main personality traits is how unconditionally devoted I am to eating ice cream several times a week (even in the winter). This obsession is what drove me to create the game How Do You Scoop?, where the player is placed into an intense job interview scenario, with judges scoring them based on the ice cream concoctions they present. By placing the player into the absurd position of an Ice Cream Developer, I also aim to poke fun at the job application and interview process that we all dread as university students. Depending on the decisions made, details about the character’s life are revealed, allowing the player to sympathize with them and “struggle towards” the established end goal of getting the job (Costikyan 22). Through personable descriptions, the player becomes more engaged with the high stakes of the interview, hopefully inviting them to reflect on their own experience with job application stress. 

I chose to assign my game a linear narrative, with only slight variations that would lead to one of two possible endings. This is most similar to the “key nodes” approach that Nat Mesnard discusses, as the player is confronted with (more or less) the same important plot points, no matter which small choices they make. Without knowing which choices are integral to the ending, the player will assume that even the smallest of choices will affect the game’s outcome. This is originally why I decided to create several passages asking the player to customize their ice cream dishes with minor choices, to challenge the viewer with their decision-making. However towards the end, I actually made these seemingly minor choices a deciding factor in the game’s ending; the toppings and sauces chosen actually determine which path the character finishes with. While creating the path to victory in a very nonsensical way, I found myself thinking often about Bandersnatch, and how the seemingly minor choices of cereal and music apparently play a leading role in the character’s fate. 

As Mesnard emphasized in their lecture, it is important to playtest your game with players who are not necessarily game experts. I decided to test it with my roommates and my friend back home in Toronto, none of whom are game experts. Therefore, I was able to address the most important question of “does it work” with everyday players. Luckily, my friend was able to catch an issue in one of the passages that I hadn’t noticed before. I also asked very general questions like “did you enjoy it?”, “did you like the options?”, and “what didn’t you like about it?”, before moving on to more specifically directed questions about the length of text passages, uniqueness of the options, and interactivity concerns.

Works cited

Costikyan, Greg. “I Have No Words & I Must Design: Toward a Critical Vocabulary for Games.” CGDC Conf, 2002.

Mesnard, Nat. “Branching Infinity: Exploring the Many Structures of Interactive Fiction.” Catapult, 26 July 2021.