FreeGameDev

I stumbled on this thread on itch.io. The idea of a personal game which includes autobiographical content or is never intended to be released is interesting. The premise being that people keep journals or diaries. Poets might write without any thought of financial gain. Sometimes these works produce something more meaningful than a mass market product.

I haven't gone through the mess of links to see what people are suggesting yet. I fine it an interesting idea. Have anyone written an autobiographical game or something just for you?

Deleted.

Lyberta {l Wrote}:I can certainly see the viability personal games that contain illegal stuff such as child porn.

Not what the idea is going for. Personal journals or poetry is about things hard to talk about or very emotional. Something that helps you understand a person. It's not something you don't share because it is illegal.

Maybe there are some people working on really awesome private story-telling games like Franz Kafka was doing with his great (but very strange) novels. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka
The interesting thing is that those were never meant to be released. Only because a friend who inherited his works after his death felt he could go against Kafka's explicit wish for them to be never released, is humanity aware of these critically acclaimed works of art.

Julius {l Wrote}:Maybe there are some people working on really awesome private story-telling games like Franz Kafka was doing with his great (but very strange) novels. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka
The interesting thing is that those were never meant to be released. Only because a friend who inherited his works after his death felt he could go against Kafka's explicit wish for them to be never released, is humanity aware of these critically acclaimed works of art.

When I read the post the first thing that came to my mind was literature. Not Kafka specifically, but personal stories often become books. Im myself a writer and even when my books are epic fantasy adventures, have put some of my personal experiences in a character or two. Not what I expected to see in a game, but perfectly possible, as games are a form of art too.

Well, I guess we all put some part of ourselves in our stories (thou I'm not a writer, I sometimes doodle too ). Thou I don't keep a diary or a personal blog, I can understand people who do, but that's the trick - writing day's events in text would take half-an-hour, writing a game about someone's real-life summer adventures in the mountains would take at least half-a-year, and writing a release-quality game (especially in one's spare time) - much, much more. I guess that can only be a simple text game "based on real events"...

(UPD) On the second thought...
Personal (autobiographical) records represent real life events or feelings of the person. On the other hand, game suggests "choice" at least to some extent. I.e. changing the course of events, thus making such game not biographical in strict sense, presenting possible solutions or different behavior in some specific situation.

I keep some journals that are personal in nature, and I do not really plan to release them unless for some reason my heirs decide to do so after my death. Naturally these are pen and paper things and not some computer item. Occasionally I reread parts of them. I may decide to publish parts of them at some future date.
I write a lot and have a blog for my game, http://wogralddev.blogspot.com/
but I don't really write in it that much. It just seems like alot because of so many years of accumulated content.

I do keep a journal on my computer.

But if the key feature of games is interactivity, I'm not sure what that would add to a journal.

The journal records facts, things that happened and things that I thought.

I don't know if I could make a journal as a game for the same reason I don't make visual novels or
story-heavy games: Why would I make a game that has no replay value for me, where I have to
know the whole story before even playing it? It's the biggest possible spoiler.

It sounds like such a neat idea but I can't think how I would do it.

It was done fictionally, in Beginner's Guide (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBK5Jheu0To), but in that fiction the game designer was very art-oriented. I'm not an artist, I'm a programmer, so it doesn't make sense to me to code a journal.

You could make it a meta-game in the sense that there would be certain (moral?) choices in the game and this gets submitted to a central server for people to see how other players reacted. As the author of a biographic game you could then see if your life choices were in line with what most people chose, or in how far you are part of a minority that chose a specific subset etc.
Of course the caveat is that actually doing something in your life and having a choice in a video game are two quite different things

I ended up making a very short one.

There are two speedometers, one belongs to the player and one to the computer. The computer tells you to press the spacebar to make your speedometer go up.

You do it, but it doesn't go very high.

The computer says "No, do it like this" and its speedometer goes all the way up.

The computer tells you to "press the spacebar harder".

I feel indie now. Where is my kickstarter?

I typed up a suggestion for a funny addition and then realized it wouldn't be auto-biographical anymore then... that would be a disadvantage of such a personal game, i.e that outside contributions to the story are not really possible.

I could certainly release the .love file so that your fork is your own story. Maybe I should make another very small game like this for GGJ.