Doctor Dekker Live – What To Get Excited For

Listeners of the show know how much I love FMV games. During the 90’s they were the height of games wanting to be movies. Today, many developers (most out of the UK oddly enough) have taken up the mantle of FMV games and seemingly learned from the past to deal with some of the issues.

One team that I love is D’Avekki Studios, and their debut game “The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker”. The game was an FMV mystery/therapy adventure. You are tasked with helping a core set of patients with a handful of cameos throughout, all while trying to find out who killed your predecessor, the eponymous Doctor Dekker. All of this was done in a single room, using a text parser to ask questions of your patients. I personally loved this combination of FMV games with the even older text parser option. Later editions and updates of the game added the option to select questions from a drop-down menu, but the creators see the text parser as the ideal method of discovery.

On March 9th, at 6 pm GMT, they are taking this idea to a new level. At that time, on Twitch, the will be doing a live version of this game with a whole new patient, Eve, and everyone gets to ask questions. This is very exciting for me. The thought of combining a mystery game, FMV design, and interactive theater gets my mind spinning with possibilities.

Deeper Understanding

One of the biggest elements of this that I’m most looking forward to is the fact that being performed live, there will be almost no issues over the questions asked. In any text parser game, if you don’t choose the right words, be they verbs, keywords, triggers, then the game will give you a generic “I don’t understand” answer. AI and natural language processing have come a long way to deciphering what we mean when we type, but it can only understand so much. Dekker was good at blending these into the world with the characters giving genuinely confused reactions, but, even with updates post-release, the limits and walls were still there.

Since this will be live and both the actor and behind the scenes team are living breathing humans, the only issue would be asking something so wordy and convoluted the question gets lost. That was always a frustrating wall to bonk up against when, as a player, you’re trying to get the information you want and the game refuses to understand. With all of that out the window, who knows what we get to learn?

Getting To Know You

With the fact that this isn’t just a series of pre-filmed sequences all tied together, we now have the potential to know more about the character than even the creators planned. Right now, we don’t know much about Eve, played by Bibi Lucille. From the teasers shown, she might get scared, she might get confused, being a Dekker patient, she at the very least believes she has a supernatural power. Besides all of that, she won’t be revealed to us until the event.

When I asked the D’Avekki team about Bibi they had the following to say:

Bibi has a very compelling improv style which will hopefully draw people in, and she’s very good at responding to any questions we throw at her

This makes me think they spent much of the prep time figuring out who Eve is. They are giving the power over to the audience to ask questions, be they important and related to her issue, or simply her stance on the pineapple on pizza debate. All of this makes for a deep character study that I will probably find myself watching multiple times to pick out the little things that come up.

I’m sure they have planned for most questions or line of questions, but anyone who has run a tabletop RPG can attest, the players will never stay on the track you plan for. In fact, most of the time they will go right off the rails, and this will be a big batch of players. That being said, there are tricks to handle the derailing that I’m sure the team has considered.

All Things Must End

The Dekker Live team has been open that there will be a few pre-recorded elements, including the epilogues, only one of which will be seen. This is to keep the feeling of the game intactwhere at the end each character gave you an update of how they are doing after your help. This was also combined with how crazy you went by asking questions better left unanswered.

In the case of the live event, they have only hinted the ending will be determined by how “good” you are to Eve. How they are measuring this, what the trigger questions might be, I can only guess at. I’m not going to share my guesses here since not everyone likes to know how a magic trick is done, but this is probably the most fascinating part for me to look forward to and keep in mind during a rewatch after the fact.

After the show is done and the video of the steam is available I will update this post with a link so anyone who missed it can watch. If you’re free though, make sure to check out this one time experience.

Update:

The event didn’t go off as planned on the weekend (thanks to the trains being held up), but on Thursday the 14th it did happen. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it myself due to other obligations, but replays are a thing. While updating this post I’m in the middle of watching, but wanted to make an update to add in the streams. Check them out on Twitch itself as the chat is a key feature:

Part 1
Part 2