Detective Beebo and Other Games That Live

This essay contains spoilers for Detective Beebo: Night at the Mansion.

The cover image of Detective Beebo

I am not afraid to say that Detective Beebo: Night at the Mansion is one of my favorite games I've played this year (and this is a year when I've played Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Mouthwashing, and Blue Prince). As a recent entry into the point-and-click genre, a genre known for being relatively stagnant, Detective Beebo stands out with its clever use of minigames, genuinely entertaining dialogue, and emotional undercurrents. But despite this, the main purpose of this post is not to be a pure review of the game. Why? Because the real game of Detective Beebo: Night at the Mansion was played 2 and a half years ago, and its game engine of choice was Tumblr.

The Tumblr poll that gave Beebo his name

After Tumblr's rollout of the polls feature in January of 2023, users began experimenting with their newfound interactivity. Alongside the infamous Vanilla Extract poll, a Tumblr user named "bwobgames" (referred to in this post as "Bwobbers", their game development alias), was beginning a choose your own adventure webcomic. At the time it was relatively small, by game standards. The first ever post, made February 21, 2023, ended with 179 votes. It was unassuming by any means, and Bwobbers likely didn't expect the game to evolve to its final state at this point, but it didn't matter; Detective Beebo was now a living game.

"Living Games" are games that develop over time in response to the actions of groups of players, usually not individually but as a collective. In the game design space we talk a lot about "player agency", the idea that player actions should have some real impact on the game's narrative or experience, and to me, living games represent this in its most primal form.

The experience of living games grows out of a back-and-forth between the players and a different human force, which from now on I'll be calling "The Game Master" (or, GM), and some kind of engine: a set of rules, procedures, and social boundaries accepted by both parties. If this sounds familiar, it's because almost all TTRPGs fall under this definition. That is not by accident.

The conversation of Detective Beebo is further complicated by it's engine of choice, as is the case with almost every game. Tumblr is a site known for its multi-layered in-jokes and overwhelmingly queer, online community. While it's clear from the poll options that Bwobbers presented that she had a Tumblr-appropriate tone in mind for the game, it is, in the end, the players who make the choice. Each individual choice is small, but the ripple effects they create over the course of the game's life are what make it unique. Take this example, from when players decided what Oliver Beebo's most recent case was, and hold on to it — we'll come back to it later.

The poll that determined what Detective Beebo's most recent case was.

But before we talk about the relevance of that poll, let's go back in time. It's three years before Detective Beebo began: Quarantine is in full swing, everyone is online, and a small indie team called The Game band has just launched Blaseball.

It's hard to discuss living games without Blaseball coming up. The absurdist baseball simulation site developed a cult following over it's lifespan from 2020 to 2023, and it functioned in many ways very similarly to Detective Beebo. It was often nonsensical, it had a penchant for funny names, and it was very clearly a product of the conversation between its players, its game masters, and its engine.

Over the course of a week, the website would automatically simulate a season of horror-filled baseball — complete with player incineration, gravity sharks, capitalism, and more — with players betting on games to earn coins. At the end of each week, players would vote on a series of decrees, which, like Beebo's polls, would determine the future of the game. The most infamous of these decrees was the very first, where 566 votes (out of a total of just under 1000) went towards opening the forbidden book. By the end of Blaseball's life, its elections had tens of thousands of votes each.

Blaseball was as close to any living game could get to being a true live service game. Joel Clark, one of the game's GMs and developers, even noted the similarities to Helldivers 2 in an article from Aftermath. Narrative elements often formed not just out of the choices players made at the end of the week, but actions that the simulation chose (or bugged into) throughout. The system required constant tuning, the players were constantly inventing new goals (that often the developers needed to program into the system within a week to ensure they were even possible), and the developers were constantly iterating on the overall narrative of the game, figuring out interesting places it could go next. In short, it was wildly unsustainable.

The problem with living games is that by necessity, they have to die. The question then becomes: "What do we do with the remains?"

The current home screen of blaseball.com

But first, let's take it back to the story of Detective Beebo. As Beebo explores the mansion and the strange happenings within, he comes to the conclusion that this house is actually haunted. Fortunately, he has experience with haunted houses. In fact, his most recent case, the one that nearly scared him out of being a detective, took place in one. I'll leave you to play the game yourself if you want more of the specifics, but here's the key: living games require a skill I like to call "weaving".

Weaving is a sort of retroactive story-building, recognizing where choices made in the distant past can be pulled back into narrative relevance to tie everything up in a nice little bow. Sometimes, in the case of Beebo (and often in TTRPGs), this can be the GM pulling the string, connecting Beebo's previous case to the current one. Other times, as was often the case in Blaseball, it can be the players pulling an old narrative thread back to the surface, choosing to resurrect Jaylen Hotdogfingers nearly 5 seasons after she became the first player ever incinerated. Living games have a magical ability to grow stories naturally, letting various threads develop at their own pace and then pulling them into the core narrative when it suits the story best.

But as I've mentioned, this requires immense amounts of effort, and as opposed to many other forms of game writing, this effort is active and constant. You can't really take a break from telling the story without risking losing your audience or momentum. The story has to end so the GMs don't burn themselves to ash, and the longer the story goes without being woven together, the harder it is to do this weaving in a way that's narratively satisfying.

Nobody knows this better than the participants of the most mainstream of all living games: D&D actual plays.

The GM and players of Critical Role

As many people have noted, "actual play" often does not emulate the experience of actually playing a TTRPG. Instead they function as a mediated version of the game, using it to tell a streamlined narrative fit for public consumption. As noted by Dimension 20 GM Brennan Lee Mulligan, the narrative of actual plays usually also includes the stories of the players around the table and the choices they make, in addition to the characters in the game.

TTRPG APs do still function like living games. They follow the same principles of player agency, followed by an eventual weaving from either side, and they react in response to their engine: both the TTRPG rules, and the whims of their audience. But they do something differently too: As opposed to most living games, actual plays are actively creating their own legacy.

By virtue of the editing process, AP games can be streamlined to tell a narrative that is built for the purpose of showing to others, and ensuring the stories of the living game can live on. Sometimes they go further than that: shows like Critical Role's The Legend of Vox Machina and graphic novels like the ones made of The Adventure Zone: Balance provide an opportunity of even further refinement, using the power of hindsight to retroactively highlight the most important beats from earlier in the game's life, knowing which ones will inevitably become relevant.

A hero shot from Legend of Vox Machina (left), and a panel from The Adventure Zone's graphic novels (right)

But many other living games, especially the ones created by independent artists who never developed an audience large enough to fund their tombstones, don't have the luxury of a professional or form-provided legacy. So what do they do? How do they survive?

For some, they don't really. Blaseball, as of now, exists only in the preservation work done by its players. The stories of Blaseball are saved in the fan wiki, a fossilized discord, and countless role-play accounts across various social media posts. That's OK. Part of the ephemeral beauty of living games is that they don't last, and not everyone will get to be a player.

But some living games find other ways. Some living games are Detective Beebo.

In a living game, player choice is directly influential on the future of a game where the possibility space is essentially limitless. The GMs are actively responding, creating new possibilities that flow narratively from the choices that have been made.

This isn't possible to replicate yet in single-release video games, where all outcomes have to be pre-programmed in some way, but choosing to cement the legacy of a living game in a video game format provides two benefits: First, by remaking the narrative from the beginning, you earn the same narrative streamlining I mentioned with the actual play adaptations. Knowing where Beebo will end up, you can add foreshadowing, edit dialogue, clean up character arcs, and polish to a shine. Second, the interactive nature of video games does do a good job of replicating the feeling of engagement in a living game.

What's lost in the adaptations of actual plays (or even just consuming their standard content) and in the archived history of Blaseball is the experience of the game's player agency. You'll never again be able to feel what it was like to vote in one of Blaseball's elections. You will likely never be able to feel what it's like to roll a die at Matthew Mercer's table. But you can experience the possibilities and narrative branching of Beebo's choose your own adventure style, long after the original choices were made and set in stone.

In this form, Detective Beebo's living game can live forever.

One of the final polls from the Detective Beebo webcomic. 88.4% of the responses say "One more chance"

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Since this post is technically part of my Point-and-Click collection, I will still hand out a rating.

Detective Beebo: Night at the Mansion earns a 95/100. All ratings over 50 indicate that I enjoyed the game.

As a bonus, here's my favorite track from the OST by musician Cuttlephone: "Song That Plays When You Ask A Guy If He's Into Men"

Also, if you're interested in engaging with one of these living games, the sequel to Detective Beebo: Night at the Mansion is running as we speak! Check out Detective Beebo: Overnight Train here!