I Released a Game!

So… what is this game?

Telegrams from the Choir Train is an experimental narrative game running via a Discord Bot players invite into their own server. It is played entirely inside Discord, using only an external manual on a website for guidance. Everything else happens through discord prompts and commands. And it is importantly in YOUR discord server. You are not joining a new server with a bunch of new people, you invite the bot into exactly the server you wish to play it in, with the people you wish. You can play it alone, or you can play it with others! Entirely up to you.

But… what is it?

Telegrams from the Choir Train is a game about managing freight on a fictional train, traveling through a post-post apocalypse. You do this through a telegraph (the discord bot), which you use to send commands on which orders to accept, which wares to buy, making sure you offload the right wares at the right places.

As you do this, you will receive messages, some sensible, from employers asking you do fulfill requests, or the weekly newspaper, yet others… are a bit more strange. It is a game with a strong narrative focus, yet it will not give its answers easily, and you will have to piece together the story yourselves.

There’s more to it than that, but I will let the game explain itself if you want to give it a whirl, and there is also more information on the website, so please check it out!

But what is it?? Bjarke TELL ME!!

Fine, you got me.
Telegrams from the Choir Train is a cooperative idle game. It takes real-time weeks to play through this game, and that is intentional. You play maybe 5-15 minutes each day (or however often you wish) and then you wait for the train to arrive at the next stop. The train is globally synced and traverses a fixed path over and over again, and the game is played while this train is travelling from destination to destination. You can compare this to slow forms of play like a Tamagotchi, play-by-email, or a journaling game. Only, instead of by yourself, you can take on this journey with your friends. A “communal tamagotchi” was indeed one of my early design touchstones. It is meant to be a slow, communal experience you and a group of friends learn together over time.

But why on earth did you make something like this?

Good question! That one’s going to take a little longer to explain.

I have for several years been puzzling with the idea of making a game in a Discord bot, as I have been doing my PhD on “perennial games”. You should read that article if you want to know more about what that means, but the shortest explanation is a perennial game is a live-service game that is telling a narrative. Think Destiny or Final Fantasy XIV or Blaseball. Because I am also a game developer, I wanted to get first-hand experience making the thing I was studying, to understand the practical reality of making a game like this myself.
I knew I could not make a game on the scale of Destiny, or even Blaseball, by myself. So, I took some shortcuts. The first of these was making the game entirely in text. The second was getting some help! I did not make this game by myself, and you can see the full credits on the website. Again, many thanks to all the people who helped make this game a reality.
The third shortcut was using Discord.

Why Discord?

A perennial game needs a community, a way to communicate with other players, and collaborate (or compete). It needs an online infrastructure and a way to store information. It needs a way for the community to receive narrative information and disseminate it. Discord has all these things built in.

The second major advantage was the idea of this being a bot you invite to your server. This solves a major problem of community building for me, because players (ideally) invite into their pre-existing communities, letting them play with their friends where they are already talking with them. That’s great!
(It did lead to other challenges, but that is for another time.)

The other reason I wanted to do this was because… I have never really seen it done? There are some Discord bot games, but most of them are simple collection games, gacha games, or gardening games, none of which have a strong narrative focus or were trying to take active advantage of communal storytelling. This is a very unique game, meant to insert itself into the place a community would already be chatting, and sit, as a small idle experience, chugging along in the background. Every once in a while, it will chime in and someone can grab it and move on, hopefully spurring conversation, yet most of the time it will sit idly without interfering. It is a Tamagotchi you play with your friends. Only the Tamagotchi is a… strange, sacred train.

So, why a train?

Trains are cool, okay? I love trains. I also miss trains, living in this Californian car-scape, the idea of just being able to take a convenient train anywhere is… idyllic.
Trains also served as a nice setup for the repetitive ritual structure I needed. Trains have a built-in expectation that they take time to arrive. I knew early on I needed a reason for time to move forward irrespective of player input, and a train leaving and arriving at stations makes natural sense as something players are not in full control of. As the game says to players early on, The Train Must Leave.

I should also here shoutout several Computational Media UCSC narrative folks (Max, Jacob, Cat, Tammy, Nic, etc. you know who you are), who were instrumental at arriving at this idea in an early ideation session. I believe the train idea was Max’s, but you all contributed. Thank you all so much.

Why “Choir” Train?

Aha, well to explain that fully, I would spoil the fun! I can say the same thing I share on the splash website for the game, which is the definition of what a Choir Train is:

The Choir Trains are sacred, all-important trains that connects our Known World. They are the only known vessel that can travel through The Scan, the digital corruption left all across the world after the Logic Bomb. They were granted to us by the Gods. The common name "Choir Train" is based on how people say they hear choral singing when the trains arrive.
People say this, because recordings do not pick up anything resembling a choir.

Safe to say, in the world of the game, Choir Trains are very important.

Why did it take you this long to write a blog about it? The game’s been out for 2 months!

Well… I only have bad excuses. I was terrified that it wasn’t going to work that when I launched the game, so once I got a handful of players in I did not broadcast the launch any further. I wanted to see how it would play out until I went any further, making sure I wouldn't break anything major. I considered it more of a… soft launch. Now that I am more confident that it does in fact not fall over if a stranger touches it AND that it actually is something people enjoy, I thought I should do a bit more of a general publishing push on it. So here we are.

So, should I play it?

If you want to! It’s free! There’s no harm in trying it and figuring out it is not for you. I am the first to know this game is not for everyone, and I will not be offended if you decide it is not for you. You can invite the bot, play around with it, and remove it again if it doesn't work. It is a game with a lot of repetitive tasks, which can either be soothing or annoying, depending who you are as a person. It is a game with a lot of reading, and it requires some commitment to stick with it. If you like games like Papers, Please, Her Story, Blaseball, Contraband Police, or Neurocracy, then this may be for you.

Telegrams from the Choir Train is playable right here, right now.

I might share more detailed developer thoughts in a later blog but for now I just wanted to get a complete description of it out there! Thanks for reading.

See you around! And, of course

The Train Must Leave.