Ever, Jane

I had, in class weeks ago, stated that I was planning a video all about Ever, Jane. Well, the best laid plans of mice and men often go astray. What follows is a rough draft of the script that would have become that video.

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Why Absolutely EVERYONE should be excited for Ever, Jane -

Why The Industry should BEND OVER BACKWARDS to make sure it succeeds -

How elements of game design and immersion form a better storytelling method -

I LOVE THIS GAME ALREADY

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So I’m going to get the English class stuff out of the way real quick, just so that we’re all on a level playing field.

Most of you probably recognize Jane Austen as a name from English class or from overhearing something said by that really smart girl with the glasses, who you completely ignored in high school because she got hit by the hormones part of puberty more than the physical parts and you’re super shallow.

Born 1775, died 1817, Jane Austen wrote Romantic fiction that focused primarily on the landed gentry in England.

It’s important to note that when we say she wrote “Romantic fiction”, most of us are thinking things like Dark Desires After Dusk and For the Love of Scotty McMullet, and to look at all the various adaptations of her work, and how they get marketed, it would be fair to be surprised that that sort of thing is not the focus of Austen’s work. Even Laurence Olivier could not escape from the cold, unfeeling grasp of the marketing department.

In her second novel, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen tells the tale of the Bennet family, and really, it’s bigger than I can describe here. We don’t have time, and if you’re watching this, I’m trusting that you’re smart enough to read. You should really just read it. It’s good for you.

In some ways part of the reason I’m even talking about this is the fact that in a bizarre twist of fate, Jane Austen’s work may have inspired the first modern version of what we call a “fandom”, with so-called “Janeites” being fanatical long before the first Trekkie was even conceived. Some of the first Trekkies may have even been conceived by Janeites, which is a terrifying thought.

What’s not surprising about an author who was only marginally successful in life, exploding in popularity following their death and maintaining a cult-like following for a great number of decades is that Austen’s works have of course inspired a number of adaptations, which all seem to overlook the actual life stuff that happens in her works in favor of marketing a fantasy about things like Dating Mr. Darcy, a brooding gentleman who was probably the reason that smart girl with the glasses was reading Jane Austen in high school.

What IS surprising is that on December 2, 2013, almost two hundred years after Austen’s death, we find ourselves faced with a reality in which a Jane Austen video game may very well become a reality, and I will remind you video game based story-telling has not progressed much beyond its early days of “vaguely representational image of white dude stomps his way through enemies that may as well be turtles.”

    I can hear you all in the comments already talking about games like Final Fantasy 7 making you cry when Aeris died, the big reveal at the end of the second generation of Pokemon games where the strongest trainer you could face was supposed to be your guy from the first generation, and the Bioshock series blowing your mind with things like the mind control assisted suicide scene where they actually take away player control  (“A man chooses. A slave obeys.”) and force you to just WATCH as this guy gets beaten to death with a minigolf club. I get that. I respect that. In fact, I devote much of my academic interests to exactly this sort of thing.

    But the fact of the matter remains that within gameplay itself, the formula has not changed much. Because video games are trying to also be a form of higher media, then I think it’s only fair to look at everything about them in order to judge their worth in a higher context. In a movie like The Lion King, the consumer of the entertainment culture takes a passive role in the experience, and has no input over what happens. By the end of The Lion King, the rather unsettling lesson of “Sometimes, people just need to die for a problem to be solved” can be gained vicariously. Simba is clearly not happy about what he has to do, and through Disney magic he’s absolved of actually needing to be the one to do it, but it still gets done because of him. And we just sit there and watch it happen.

    In a video game, contrary to the passive nature of other forms of entertainment culture, the consumer MUST take an active role, and for the sake of gameplay design, the methods by which a game is played are often the same from the beginning of the game all the way to the end of it, with the only major change being the difficulty of that process. This pretty much means that the predominant lesson of every video game, through its gameplay, is that your road to greatness is absolutely paved violence - and a whooooooole lot of it.

    While I don’t necessarily think that this sort of experience needs to be automatically counted as a mark against the medium (it would be like marking down paintings because they use paint to get their points across) I do think that it’s especially important to take note of the games that go against this idea.

    Ever, Jane bills itself primarily as a Roleplaying game, and while that description of a genre usually implies a Dungeons and Dragons type of game, where warriors and wizards do battle, in this instance, it’s meant more from the sense of immersion and pretend, the playing of a role.

The entire point of Ever, Jane then is to have a world that represents the things that Jane Austen is remembered for in her works, and to support a game-like structure to further facilitate “living” for a little while in that world.

The “stats” that form the building blocks of your character in a roleplaying game are typically things like Strength and Intelligence, but that’s not the case in Ever, Jane, which forgoes the usual formula in favor of things more representative of the themes of Austen’s work, such as Status, Reputation, Happiness, Duty and Kindness.

I can’t even to tell you how mindshatteringly amazing it is that Kindness is even a consideration here. Your capability to do something and the rewards that you can receive from it may very well be determined by how Kind you are.

Even the monetization plan for the game fits into the themes tackled by Austen. Although Ever, Jane is to be a free-to-play game, subscribing (and thus paying per month) is how you go from being a peasant to a part of the landed gentry.

That’s right, gamers. You can literally be a free-to-play peasant.

Sometimes, it really is about money. Sometimes, it’s about who you know, what you know, and what you know about who you know. When push comes to shove, there will be times when you’ll be forced to choose between your personal happiness and your duty.

Put that in any way where it’s stated outright, and it feels like an anvil’s been dropped on your head. Yeah, we get it, after-school-special. There are lessons to learn and you’re here to give them to us. Thanks. Really. I mean that. Sincerely. I really do.

Except those lessons can be some of the hardest to really care about, because they seem so forced. Teach someone a lesson in a way that feels like a game, and maybe they’ll be interested in it.

More importantly, they’ll already have an advantage when it comes time to use that lesson, because they’ll have done the thing already. They’ll already have been faced with the big dilemma, and chosen between self and other.

Anna Quindlen, writer for the New York Times said about Pride and Prejudice-

    “Pride and Prejudice is also about that thing that all great novels consider, the search for self. And it is the first great novel that teaches us this search is as surely undertaken in the drawing room making small talk as in the pursuit of a great white whale or the public punishment of adultery.” -

Please, Ever, Jane. Don’t disappear into the ether. You have such a glorious amount of potential that I’ll be disappointed if I’m not still talking about you ten years from now. I desperately want you to become an example of what game design could be, not an example of the flaws with the Kickstarter formula.

So many other games have us pursuing dragons and adultery. I will totally play a game where the objective is to totally throw the most kickass dinner party.