Today marks the release of Reigns: Her Majesty, the fun sequel to the mobile, story-based, swipe-your-own-adventure strategy game that asked you to lead a dynasty of royalty to success.
Leigh Alexander's made a career of writing about quirky indie video games, especially those that represent a non-traditional point of view, and she's the lead writer for RHM. So perhaps it's not surprising that the second Reigns puts you in an unusual position: You're not the monarch this time around, but rather the Queen, unable to directly control the throne or its succession in the same way you did in the original game.
Developer Nerial and publisher Devolver Digital released the $3 game today for PC and iOS. I caught up with Alexander for a quick interview on the new game and the writing challenges it posed.
QUESTION: What led you to center Reigns 2 around a feminine lead role?
ALEXANDER: Well, lots of people who loved the first game had been asking about playing as a Queen, so François [Alliot, lead developer for the game] approached me to do the writing and the narrative design because of my background, as you mention. We wanted to go a bit further than just "same protagonist except as a woman"; we wanted to shift or complicate how power works in the Reigns world.
Where Reigns 1 was somewhat straightforward in terms of its kingdom management, this time we wanted to explore less direct and more intimate ways of having an effect on the kingdom. Like, one of the most interesting things about Game of Thrones is how the people who aren't on a throne affect the story. So we thought it would be really cool if you played as the King's wife, having to balance others' expectations of you, getting involved in palace intrigues, trying to gain some power for yourself in this environment.
Q: What are some of the big themes you work with in the game's story?
ALEXANDER: A great thing about the Reigns system is that really interesting themes can emerge just from what it feels like to play -- you're balancing these different values, where none may get either empty or full, and you can only do so through binary choices, often "Yes" or "No." It opens up an interesting space to think about how you can set personal goals while still trying to please lots of other people. So the game naturally ends up being about power and what people do with it.
But it's really lighthearted and dark simultaneously, and you will die a lot in bizarre ways, so it's not so much that there are big themes but lots of little caricatures. And magic! The theme of magic as political resistance is very lightly in there.
Q: Are you hoping that folks will draw any parallels with some current political realities?
ALEXANDER: Reigns: Her Majesty's setting is loosely based on late 1600s France, so not a lot is ripped from the headlines. But I'm sure some subtext couldn't help but leech in.
Q: What makes someone a good video game character?
ALEXANDER: Bold strokes, I think. We are always asking for better, more plausible characters in games, human beings with the subtlety and nuance of real life. As a writer and a big interactive fiction fan I often find myself wishing for this too!
But actually, when you think about the characters who are memorable and beloved in games, they are rarely the realistic ones. The ones we really love have some bizarre and surprising trait, something impossible. That sort of tells me something.
Q: How was writing for this game different from the types of writing you've done before?
ALEXANDER: It was hugely different -- my background is in journalism and I've done some fiction, but that's rather straightforward and exists to be read. In this case I wrote not only words, but the experience of the words, what happens as a result of different decisions, etc.
Writing in a game like this is an interesting challenge because each card has only a few lines' text, but those few lines really need to give the player a lot of information in order to make their choice feel interesting and risky, as well as to help them (try to) predict the possible outcomes. They also need to give character to the person speaking! I had to pay constant attention to how the words would be experienced.
Q: What did you find to be the most difficult part of your work with this game?
ALEXANDER: I had to learn how to use the tools, how to actually code in the behavior of the cards, how they should be weighted and so forth so that the player will encounter them in the intended way. It was really hard to write anything specific before understanding how to work within the system, but I had a lot of help from my team, and I learned through feedback. It was tough to be unable to really express my ideas through the system right away, but eventually I got up to speed.
Q: How do you handle the challenge of a story where players' actions can totally change the tale?
ALEXANDER: The Reigns system is particularly great for this, because there's very little about it that's linear; it's not even so much "a story" as it is a modular collection of moments that, strung together, create the tale of a queen's reign and untimely death. We have lots more cards in Reigns: Her Majesty than in the original, so hopefully each reign feels distinct, with its own series of events.
Q: What were your priorities when writing the game's story?
ALEXANDER: It had to be related to the mechanics. The story of having a lot of contradictory expectations upon you, for example, comes out of how you play -- managing the different values.
Q: How do you hope this game will make players feel?
ALEXANDER: I guess I hope it will make them laugh, and I have tried to make moments that I hope people will find touching as well. I really love games that offer the player a single, high stakes choice-- that pause of wondering what to do can be so exciting.
And that's what Reigns: Her Majesty really is in essence: one single choice after another. I hope I've created some of that exciting decision space for people.
