ScribeOS is a weird game. It's a game I designed for the sole purpose of proving that LARP and tabletop games can be deeply intertwined with video games (it was actually the follow-up to a class thesis I did on the subject). It's a game that pretends to be networked. It's a video game that asks you to stand up, walk around, turn off the lights, eat a sheet of paper.
ScribeOS is the game that solidified my understanding of the most core game design principle: A game needs to know what it wants players to feel, and then it needs to deliver. With Scribe, I realized that as long as you can fulfill that goal, the details of how you get there can be as wild as you can imagine.
Making a LARP Video Game
Making a game that doubles as a LARP comes with some extra challenges. First and foremost, how do you even make it? My decision was Twine, but with some deep customization (that twine really doesn't like you to do, but I did it anyway). Twine let me write branching dialogue easily, giving me all of the groundwork I needed for the core functionality of the game. At their core, LARPs are just a series of rules we agree to follow with our physical bodies in the space.
There's a concept of a "Magic Circle" we cross when we start LARPing, where we agree to play together by those rules. Making ScribeOS was about figuring out how the computer could define those rules for each player at any given time, and of course, how to get players across that magic circle.
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One cool thing that video games add to the LARP space is the ability to easily change the rules in a reactive way. In most larps, adjusting the rules of the game live requires pausing play to readjust and read the rules again. A computer that knows all the rules bypasses this problem, allowing players to seamlessly shift between states.
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ScribeOS is a game, but really it's more of an example. When we bring LARP and tabletop experience, or experience of any other kinds of games really, into the video game space, we all benefit.
Indiepocalypse: a Home for the Unhouseable
When I finished making ScribeOS, I had accepted the fact that it was an unpublishable game. There is nowhere you can sell a 2-player experimental game that requires the level of effort that Scribe does to play. I put it up on my itch page and there it sat...
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Until one day, I came across a Jam page for Indiepocalypse. I had met the creator a few years earlier at a convention, and remembered him talking about how he published games just like this: ones that seemed unpublishable anywhere else. I submitted ScribeOS and the rest is history.
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Places like Indiepocalypse make room for weird, experimental games that push the boundaries of the medium to exist. I even got paid for it! So if you want to play the game, or learn more about it (the Indiepocalypse version comes with an exclusive postmortem!), please purchase the game there!