What am I missing, Alice?

Alice is Missing delivers a powerful experience. For me, it wasn't a good one.

Appendix of feelings:

Let’s start with a couple of emotional disclaimers about my experience of the game Alice is Missing:

1. All of this conjecture is based on near-distant memory. At this point, it might have been 2 years ago that I ran this game. My experience is likely colored by the fact that I was also the facilitator, and so I had a felt a responsibility to make sure others were having fun. Some did, some didn’t.

2. Some of the emotions that came up for me during the game were very strong. Both the mechanics and the fiction of the game made me feel anxious and powerless. I responded, in my roleplay, with defensiveness and downplaying. It gave a lot of life to the character — my fellow players found it a compelling portrayal — and maybe taught me something about myself, but it wasn’t something I enjoyed.

3. We played Alice is Missing in person. Many people who love this game experienced it over the internet, or at least remotely from the other players. I wonder if this might have been both a better container for my emotional experience, and also a better simulation of a disembodied medium. Sitting in silence texting the people who are in the room with you for 90 minutes is an implicitly odd way to roleplay not-being-in-the-same-room.

4. There is a part of me, perhaps one touched by experiences with certain forms of religious community, that sees a well-timed multi-media experience, designed to reliably produce a certain emotional response, and recoils from what feels instinctively not like an authentic invitation, but rather as a form of scheduled manipulation. I make no such charge against Alice is Missing, but this bias still has its hooks in me.

And now, what am I missing?

Alice is Missing is a ubiquitously-loved award winning game. Game? Storytelling experience. Immersive roleplaying experience. I want to start by saying that I didn’t enjoy it, but that the designers still achieved something amazing. I’m glad they won a ton of accolades, players, sales, and recognition.

It has a novel central mechanic that is instantly loveable and appealing: You play as a bunch of teens who are related somehow to a missing girl, and the game plays out as a series of text-message that you all exchange silently while you “investigate” the mystery of Alice’s disappearance. The game uses a built-in soundtrack, and asks you to generate voicemails as diegetic game objects. These are very cool mechanics. It’s really an awesome product.

It is also game in which player decision doesn’t affect anything related to the mystery or what happens in the main plot. I wish I’d known this in advance, cause man oh man, when I sat down to play it, I had a not-great time. Most of the hype promised a “novel” or “unique” experience. I had an intense experience with it, but not one that I enjoyed.

When the game begins, a timer starts and cards are revealed on a timer, laying out the mysteries various revelations (if she was killed, by who, where, etc) with some attendant roleplay prompts.

None of that roleplaying will have any consequences on those prompts. This will sound extreme, but: You could actually stop playing the game, sit there silently, and the cards will play out the same results they would have had you also been engaging and roleplaying the whole time.

It’s a pedantic observation, but I feel like making it nonetheless, because it seems so seldomly said in reviews, marketing materials, what have you. It’s not a “game” with many choices at all! I love constraints in gaming, but not only do you not affect key events, you don’t make characters, you don’t set the tempo, you don’t even set the soundtrack.

Mo Holkar puts it perfectly here:

So, AiM is framed as a game of investigation, but it isn’t really, I don’t think.

It’s not possible for the players to do any meaningful investigation of the mystery of Alice’s disappearance, because the solution to that mystery isn’t established until right at the end. Rather than investigating, players are marking time by pretending to investigate, chasing down clues whose value they can’t convincingly narrate. Because any given clue might be a red herring or genuine, but there’s no way of knowing which it is even after looking into it, until Schrödinger’s box is opened at the end of the game.

You might read this and say, “My god, man, the whole point is the scene-work, the magic of roleplaying, the things that play out along the margins of the in-game events!”
And I would be really down for that, except that it’s not entirely clear that’s what you’re getting into until you’re reading the rules and playing it. The game could say on the box “a game about helplessness, where we as players don’t decide what will happen, but we can decide how to feel about it.” I wish it had! Instead, the publishers say that the mystery “unfolds organically through the text messages they send to one another.” It doesn’t. The mystery unfolds on a timeline, and locked into a randomized outcome.

Side note: The prompts are randomized in order to generate a novel combination of clues and occurrences. But why? If the game is meant to be played once, why bother randomizing certain prompts? It reminds me of the silliness of some of the latest D&D modules, such as Curse of Strahd, which randomizes the location of the key McGuffins for the sake of “replay-ability,” as though I’m tempted to embark on the same 30-session campaign twice simply because you moved a sunblade from the belltower to the basement.

Presumably, pre-prescribed characters are fun, because you get to determine what they do. But as your character, you don’t really do anything except respond emotionally to what the game tells you happens. You could say something like “I’m going to investigate the school to find a clue!” but the only reason to do this is the generate more roleplaying prompts. It won’t contribute to the solving of any mystery. It felt as though the players and I were improv actors responding to prompts thrown at us from offstage. “Now you’re sad! And… now you’re scared!”

This isn’t to say that Alice is Missing is a bad game — I believe that if so many people report meaningful experiences, it’s doing something quite right!

As Justin Alexander wrote this week:

It’s a game that effortlessly immerses you in your character: The experience of play — focused through your text messaging app — is seamlessly identical to the character’s own experience.

You know how the world can sometimes sort of drop away when you get focused on your phone? Starke leverages that fugue state — everything else drops away, and the only thing you’re truly experiencing is the world of the text messages. A world where you’re not talking to your friends; you’re talking to Charlie and Dakota and Julia.

This is absolutely true. It is a very immersive roleplaying experience. I wouldn’t necessarily then say it’s a very fun game. I think it could have done both.

The Alexandrian calls it “stunningly beautiful,” and many people agree. But given the soundtrack, the pre-written clues, the technological medium of play, it’s one of the few roleplaying games where it feels like its beauty wasn’t an emergent phenomenon from the group as much as something the game’s production value provided. Stunningly beautiful things can happen in my D&D game, but not because of anything WotC brought to the table.

Hell, for all that made me uneasy about it in practice, I still remember and recall the experience quite well. There were some things that surprised me about my own roleplaying, and there were some nifty scenes made along the way. I also learned what kind of games I don’t like, and in a way that was not unsafe? One of the other players loved it.

Another of the players disliked the game so much, she literally stopped playing about halfway in and did other stuff on her phone until it was over. As she tuned the game out, the game continued to play itself, unnoticing.