#Alter ego game play update#
#Alter ego game play professional#

You can be a professional criminal, a rock star, a dragon, or use your superpowers to save the world.Īlter Ego is an important piece of electronic gaming history. Many of their games allow you to choose a gender (including a non-binary gender) and sexual orientation. If you write a game in ChoiceScript, they can publish it for you on their website and on other platforms, giving you a share of the revenue. Writing games in ChoiceScript is easy and fun, even for writers with no programming experience. They've developed a simple scripting language for writing text-based games, ChoiceScript. (I hope it would be something better.)Ĭhoice of Games LLC is a company dedicated to producing high-quality, text-based, multiple-choice games. If someone wrote a text-based life-simulation game about a black trans woman, that story wouldn't be Alter Ego. Indeed, it would require not just one rewrite, but dozens, hundreds, thousands.Īlter Ego isn't the story of a black trans woman. 'Updating' Alter Ego, including its implicit assumptions about race, sex, gender, and history, would mean rewriting the whole game yet again.

($35 in 1986 is worth more than twice that in today's dollars.) They shipped in two separately purchasable boxes, for $35 each. How could you become a politician in a world where there are no politics? How could you become a famous inventor when nothing can be invented? How can you serve in the military in a world without war? Why Don't You Rewrite Alter Ego?Īlter Ego originally shipped two substantially different versions of the game: a 'male' version and a 'female' version. Unsurprisingly, Alter Ego doesn't offer you the option to become a politician, an inventor, or soldier. No technology ever develops in this game, and you are never surprised or confused by new technology. There is no history and no political conflict in Alter Ego. Nothing of significance happens in America over the course of your lifetime. The entire game of Alter Ego is set in 1986, despite the fact that you live eighty years or more.

Some of those moments would be quite different when playing as a lesbian, and the life of bisexual characters would be different yet again. Telling the life story of a gay man in 1986 means telling the story of coming out of the closet, prejudiced employers, encounters with parents, and so on. Same-sex marriage was illegal in every state, and gay/lesbian couples experienced discrimination from many groups, sometimes even from their own families. Same-Sex Relationships in 1986Īdding support for same-sex dating and same-sex marriage could be easy: the game could just offer you a choice of genders when you use the dating icon.īut in 1986, that's not what same-sex dating was really like in America. The game never explicitly describes the color of your skin, but the life of an ordinary black woman in 1986 would have included a significant amount of discrimination, and some forms of that discrimination would be different from the discrimination a black man would have experienced.Īlter Ego doesn't let you live the life of just anyone you only have the option to live as someone who doesn't experience racial discrimination.īy only offering the player a chance to play as an 'ordinary' American, the game implicitly assumes that you're like the majority of Americans, that you are not yourself a minority in any way. On this basis, many readers have assumed (sometimes unconsciously) that the life you lead in Alter Ego is the life of a white American. It takes on significant assumptions about what the life of an ordinary American in 1986 would be like.įor example, in this game, no one discriminates against you on the basis of your ethnic background or the color of your skin. The Life of an 'Ordinary' American in 1986Īlter Ego tells the story of the life of an 'ordinary' American, as Dr. Instead, we're preserving it as an artifact of electronic gaming history.

#Alter ego game play update#

We've decided not to attempt to update the content of Alter Ego. The current edition includes an updated interface and fixes bugs in the original version of the game, but the content of the game (the writing) hasn't changed from the original 1986 version of the game. The current edition of the Alter Ego game is a production of Choose Multiple LLC. It was published in 1986 for the Commodore 64, MS-DOS, Apple II, and Macintosh. Alter Ego was originally written by Peter J.