In the game “Save the Date”, there is no means of winning — regardless of how many combinations of choices you make, Felicia will still die, whether it be by ninjas, sea monsters, a stray bullet or a peanut allergy.
At first, this left me thinking that the game was somehow worse than other gamers I’ve played. I spent at least an hour trying to find the specific combination of choices that would lead to me and Felicia having a nice date and she could come out of it alive. But as we know, there is no “happily ever after” for Felicia and the player. She is destined to die. Which led to me to ask a simple question — what does a game need to be a game? I wouldn’t call the game “fun” in any way that I would call any other game that has a win state fun, since it is this state of winning that makes all the hours you’ve put into the game worthwhile, but I wouldnt call it boring either. Save the Date leaves the player wanting more. As opposed to most games, where the player feels like the controls they use are actually useful, and feel like an active participant in the game, Save the Date made me feel like an outside observer. Anything I do as a player only aims to delay the inevitability of her demise, almost suggesting that my “playing” the game is almost useless. And perhaps that’s the point of the meat game — to make me think about the nature of games and what a game “needs” in order to be a valid game.
This also led me to think about the nature of story games. Most deterministic story games are also examples of games where the actions of the player does not particularly matter, since the developers have already decided how the game is going to go. So, what can we learn to appreciate from metagames? What can we learn from games like these and the nature of player freedom in video games. I think Save the Date aims to show us that games do not need a win state in order to be a game, and properly challenged the relationship between player and developer, as I spent a lot of time thinking about the design behind the game, and how I could win, and what the develop may have been thinking when they created the game. Most of my times spent games are not spent thinking about the intentions of the developer, so it was quite a refreshing change of pace.
