Incredibly Strange Games

Path of the Monk: Global Game Jam 2010

Created by: Gabe Smedresman, Brian Cronin, Brendan Mauro w/ special thanks to Jessica Bower, Chris Cornell,  & Steven Sulgit
Platform: Flash

Sunday at 5pm marked the end of the 48 hour coding marathon that is the  2010 Global Game Jam. I meant to participate, but instead got involved with the 48 hour drinking marathon that was the 2010 Las Vegas Avel’s Birthday Jam, which was also a blast to be honest… Anyway the Global Game Jam is a pretty awesome event. Show up at a strange location, likely with strangers (pre-made teams are an official no-no), and pitch, design, and code a game in 48 hours. Sleep is optional (but encouraged for liability reasons).

Lots of locations participated this year, like about a million, and amidst all the normal games, the cool games, and the totally unfinished games, were some incredibly strange gems.

Path of the Monk deserves special mention. It’s a three-player (no more, no less) Internet multiplayer game that’s sort of a Turing Test for good and evil. One player takes the role of a monk, working his way through a series of rooms towards a ladder (leading presumably to enlightenment). Some rooms contain enemies who attack the monk. Other potions or poison. The monk can’t see anything beyond the room he’s in, so he has no way of knowing where the room with the ladder is, or what the next rooms hold. That’s where the other two players, as Guiding Spirits, come in. One can see what’s in the room around the Monk, the other where the ladder is. Everyone can chat via text.

Oh, we forgot to mention. One Spirit’s goal is to help the Monk reach the exit safely, and the other’s goal is to get him killed. The Monk has no intrinsic way of knowing which is which.

It’s a simple set up that leads almost immediately to mistrust and chaos, especially since the good Spirit doesn’t have perfect vision, so it will occasionally lead the Monk to harm (giving the Evil Spirit plenty of ammo for claiming that *it* is actually the good Spirit). Much of the game (especially once the Monk gets low on Health) involves chat room arguing about who the bad guy is, not unlike a Turing test where two chatters are trying to convince a third observer they are the human and the other chatter is a bot.

It’s worth noting that the while Monk has the starring role in the title, and is the default Player 1, he actually doesn’t even have a win condition in the rules of the game – it’s really a battle between the Spirits. As befits a 48 hour game, PotM is light on UI and matchmaking (you need to type in a custom URL for every playthrough). Graphically, it looks like a game that was done in two days, but the addition of some creepy, repetitive throat chanting adds some fun.

Games only take about five minutes (assuming you’re not griefing the Monk into wandering around in a circle, never quite reaching the ladder, while the two spirits yuk it up over IM). Because the 3 players have to know each other (to share the custom URL for that game), I’ve also never seen a game descend so quickly into profanity and immoral (and frequently anatomically explicit, but impossible) suggestions, and I play Halo 3 MP on a regular basis…

There’s really a surprising amount of depth here, and the game is super successful for such a short dev time. The requirement for exactly three players, the extremely distinct role each player takes, and the surprisingly different reward each gets from the game are also really neat features that you don’t see every day.

You and exactly two friends can try out Path of the Monk here: http://monk5.shrdwhtbrd.com/