S4: Player-Driven Memories
Season: A Letter to the Future prioritizes Player-Driven Memories as a key part of its road-trip experience.
"Old bicycle" by Cahroi is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
Season: A Letter to the Future, released 2023, developed by Scavengers Studio, available on PC and PlayStation. This is a narrative experience in which you explore mostly abandoned rural environments on foot and via bicycle in a third-person perspective. Recording the things you see (photography, audio), building a scrapbook, and communicating with others are the primary mechanisms.
What is your first memory? Who was there? What were you doing? Why do you think this is the one you remember?
Why do your favorite television shows reside with you long-after the TV has cooled? Why do you remember your favorite books beyond the last page?
Memory is a tricky thing in our lives and with the media we consume. The burden of memory is largely one we place on ourselves, excepting the tests we must take and the work we must complete and the birthdays we must celebrate. The formation of memory is often a passive experience, a thing we just do, but that isn’t exactly the approach taken by Season: A Letter to the Future.
Many people, like myself, actively take notes at work and other times in life. This is a helpful tool for retaining information because it is a way to actively engage with the topic. Taking notes drives cognitive engagement as you must actively summarize, paraphrase, and prioritize what you heard in order to be retained and consumed later.
That’s life. We abstract and change things for a video game. A typical adventure game manages your Quest Log, a document in which destinations are underlined, key actions and decisions are marked boldly, and the full history is objectively and preserved.
But, history is never that clean, is it? Every single piece of history in existence is an explicit choice made by the chronicler to present, prioritize, and discuss certain facts at the expense of others. When studying the ancient Spartans, you can examine their purported military might, but in doing so, how much do you examine their slave state? Or methods of governance? Or the treatment of women? It’s a choice.
Such is the awesome power given to you in Season, which uses Player-Driven Memories as a key driving force. The game takes place in a world similar to our own. The geography is reminiscent of a Mediterranean coast, a California coastal highway, and Vietnamese farmland. The clothing and level of technology is a little older than ours, but not significantly so. But, the game flirts with a sense of magic and religion, and there is a notion that at the end of a season, there is a massive structural change to the world and society.
The game begins at the end of a season. It is a period of immense change and migration. Of structures falling apart. Your character chooses to leave home to see what they can see and document the current world for future generations.
As you explore the landscape on your bicycle, you stop to take photographs, some of which trigger a narration or insight. You communicate with a few people you meet. You examine artifacts from the previous season that featured a devastating war. You also use an audio recorder to capture birdsong, narrations from the main character, or noises from the environment.
You then open your book and choose what goes inside of it. The choice is entirely up to you. The game merely requires a relatively small number of items be added, but otherwise there are no limitations or mandates. You are building this history. Consider three possible focuses supported by the game:
You can exclusively record birds, insects, and natural phenomena (like waterfalls).
You can photograph signs of decay and the war of the previous season.
You can focus on the people you find and their stories.
You can focus on the letters and notes of the lost society.
The game forces you into the awesome and potentially uncomfortable role of historian. It bluntly forces you to reckon with what is worth remembering.
As an exercise, take a week and at the end of each day, write a single sentence outlining the most important thing that happened to you. I would be forced to choose between sharing stories about my toddler, my wife, my job, my dog, the food I cooked, the cocktail I consumed, the weather, the idiot on the freeway, the video game I played, or the book I finished. My life is pretty boring and that one sentence is crippling. Season makes this a video game, makes it front and center, and doesn’t break eye contact.
What do the future generations deserve to know?
The One Cool Thing
Season: A Letter to the Future uses Player-Driven Memories to connect its themes, mechanisms, and world to the player in a deep and meaningful way. Instead of a passive Quest Log, or Achievements that ding, the game trusts the player to elevate their experience with their own intrinsically driven efforts.
Why does this matter?
Firstly, the game makes you timeless. You are not solving an immediate problem, but making a permanent impact. You are creating your world’s legacy.
Furthermore, the stakes presented require contemplation. There is no right or wrong. For many games, the core interaction (ex: a sword swing) becomes rote. Hack, slash, jump. But, for Seasons, you are always asking yourself “what do I value?” which adds a rich, but gentle tension to the experience.
Player-Driven Memories are fundamentally interactive, which means video games have a premium on this special experience. Books and film cannot replicate this.
Finally, every experience is unique. Goals are intrinsic, not explicitly defined (and therefore limited) by the game. Intrinsic goals come from within and stem from your passions and your core values. This makes them valuable. As a game developer it is difficult for me to know who you are. But, I can provide the tools by which you explore that question yourself.
I hypothesize those who play Season and play it as intended will create a memory. Perhaps they won’t remember what exactly they did in the game, but I suspect they’ll learn something about themselves, and create an even more valuable memory.
Preview for Next Time
The next post for Season 4 digs into one of my favorite games and one I’ve wanted to discuss for quite some time: Hollow Knight. The sequel, Silksong, is still under tight wraps, so there’s no reason to not take a look at this beautiful and haunting bug kingdom in time to follow along!
Edited by Joshua Buergel
I'm a big fan of games that pose interesting questions (like here, "What matters to you?") and also games that move forward regardless of your successes/failures. Seems like this one is a winner on both counts!
I also am grateful to you for highlighting a Cool Thing that I wish more games would adopt. I love when a game gives me the curiosity and ambition to find my own place and purpose in it, and I get increasingly bored when a game instead acts as a AAA to-do list with no mystery in its questlog or markers.