Miss Duckworthy's School for Magic-Infested Young People

It’s a commonplace, I think, for those of us in the mainline IF tradition to look over at the (far bigger and far more successful by any metric you care to name) Choice of Games community and goggle comically at the Brobdingnagian word counts. 110,000 words! 470,000 words! 1,140,000 words! What on earth could they possibly need all that space for, we muse – well, I muse, let’s drop this not-fooling-anybody first-person-plural conceit – and possibly crack a joke about that game a year or two back where character creation involved deciding on the color of your favorite mug. Well, comes a time when I’ve got to eat some crow, because while I’m not sure Miss Duckworthy’s School for Magic-Infested Young People needs to be twice as long as War and Peace, it sure would work better at three or four times its current length.

There is a lot going on here, but I’ll do my best to hit the high points. So this is a ChoiceScript magic-school game except in place of Hogwarts you’ve got a flying castle hovering far above the Indian Ocean, and there are additional dystopic-YA-novel tropes layered in because magical beings in this world are hated and feared by the general population and the world’s governments fund jack-booted thugs to drag magical teenagers off to the grimly authoritarian Miss Duckworthy’s once their powers begin to pop off. The game includes all the stuff you’d expect to play out given this premise – you wind up part of a plucky group of friends trying to get to the bottom of the school’s mysteries and fight the man, with optional romances on the side and a time-management minigame where you can balance building your various magical skills against exploration, investigation, and relationship-building – and a bunch of extras besides, most notably the four bespoke “origins” for the main character, which involve substantial vignettes that allow you to meet some characters early or otherwise have a reasonably significant impact on the main storyline.

I opted for playing a respectable Dutchman, admittedly as much through a process of elimination as anything else – “artsy Canadian car thief” is not an archetype I feel at all confident at being able to embody, and the Australian and Indonesian origins require you to be athletic and industrious, respectably, so no thanks to those too – but I wound up fairly excited the more I thought about it, since typically I struggle with how to approach ChoiceScript games as anything other than a self-insert of my boring, middle-aged self, and this prompt gave me the idea that this time I could play as @VictorGijsbers instead!

Alas, it was not to be, because Miss Duckworthy’s doesn’t provide much scope for roleplaying, largely due to the rocket-boosted pacing. The opening vignette feels like it lasts an appropriate amount of time, long enough to establish your mundane life and bring a bit of oddness and dread into things as your magical nature manifests and the baddies show up. But after that, all the stuff I mentioned above – meeting your three or four new besties, learning to control your abilities, engaging with student politics, learning secrets about the school, the tentative stirrings of teenaged romance – plays out over maybe half an hour in real time, and seventy-two hours or so in the fiction.

To say that this is break-neck speed is overestimating the resilience of the spine; indeed, the game feels like it’s in so much hurry that it routinely gets way way ahead of itself. My first hint of this was when, on the plane to the school, a troll named Jack introduced himself – he came on a bit strong, maybe, but he seemed like an interesting character, whose backstory had him helping run a magical Underground Railroad for a year before being caught. Seems like a potentially interesting character, I thought to myself, only for my cat familiar to immediately tell me “this guy is consumed with rage and is going to try to dominate everybody,” which in addition to playing out what feel like not-great stereotypes (trolls are people too!) also flattened out any sense of ambiguity about him, bottom-lining what could have been an extended subplot of learning about the ways Jack uses idealistic rhetoric to cloak naked ambition into literally one line of dialogue.

Similarly, the game just sort of assumes that you’ll be down with the fascists. The main plot of the game turns on the fact that Jack decides within two hours of the school to mount a coup and knock off the student who’s sort of the queen trusty of the place (and takes two and a half more days to actually attempt it), and rather than deciding to join him because this whole system sucks and said student appears to have one of the newcomers killed because he sassed her your only options are to ignore the plot, tattle on it, or try to get close to Jack to learn enough to betray him to the authorities.

Now, there’s a reason for this – in my playthrough, I learned that the student capo wasn’t actually that bad, and just pretended to kill that dude so that she’d seem hardcore and no one would mess with her (this is pretty stupid IMO, but we are dealing with teenagers…) But I think that’s missable, and pretty much all the plot-lines are like this, overly-accelerated and assuming you’ll have certain knowledge you might not actually get. There’s also some sloppiness to the game knowledge that means continuity errors were rampant. Within one second of meeting one of the other students, Hannah, she told me that she was a reporter just pretending to be a troll, which seemed like a ridiculously risky thing to disclose to someone you don’t know – and I guess the game agreed because a day and a half later, after gaining her trust, there’s an emotional scene where she told me the exact same information again, with no indication that she was repeating herself. Meanwhile one member of the friend group just sort of showed up in our shared bedroom with no indication of how he’d gotten there; there’s a fun subplot where we successfully conspired to help him escape back to his home in Indonesia, but this didn’t prevent him from still being around during the climax. The game never directly told me that I’d turned into an elf in the opening, either, which seems like a heck of a thing to have to intuit from context.

I have many, many more examples of this stuff, I think a combination of trying to cram too many characters and plot twists into too small a word-count, and a lack of adequate testing for all the many possible permutations (I got rescued by a troll named Rock and had a bunch of banter with him afterwards, the game not seeming to acknowledge that I had never even heard of this guy before in my life). It’s pervasive, and it winds up having a substantial impact on the gameplay mechanics, because I never felt like my choices really mattered; the game is on the clock to get through the story that it’s telling, and I was just along for the ride (as is typical for ChoiceScript, there are like a billion stats, but I feel like maybe only one of them ever made a difference). And the impact on tone and theme is even worse: seriously, are the fascists fascist or are they cool? That’s kind of a big deal!

This is a real shame because I think there’d be a lot to enjoy in a less-hyper version of Miss Duckworthy’s. The characters and situations are broad, sure, but they’re fun, engaging archetypes, and the writing’s quite good at moving quickly while providing enough detail to anchor you and fire the imagination. I really love the disparate-origins approach to the game, which is a lovely mechanic that can make the player’s decisions feel really meaningful. With the action spread out over maybe a month or two rather than just three days, more granular choices allowing the player to actually make decisions, and better testing to make sure all the pieces fit, this game could be really very good – unfortunately that’s not the version of it that’s currently available to play.

Felicity Banks has entered IFComp many times before with clever Choicescript games that contain themes like magic, alchemy, cats, and Australia (many of which show up in this game as well). Those games often get a post-comp release that is expanded and then put on Hosted Games.

This game is about a world where magic can be awakened in anyone through unknown means. It's treated like an infection, and society is built around blocking any access to magic-causing things, like using plastic plants instead of natural ones.

When magic awakens in you, the government enforcers come to get you and throw you into a magical prison/school where rival gangs attempt to fight or kill each other and people are sorted into magical categories (like elves, trolls, etc.) based on their abilities (I recommend reading the notes in the stats section).

Speaking of stats, I didn't check them during the game. Some games have really hard stat checks that constantly get in your way, but this game I just roleplayed and I generally did pretty good and only messed up once or twice.

The story and characters were fun, although some things really stretched my suspension of disbelief: (Spoiler - click to show)Are literally all of our friends non-magical people pretending to be magic? To be thrown into a prison? Where it's said that people die?? But they don't really die. Except people are fighting with bladed weapons and pretty much do get close to dying. Also magic has no visible drawbacks whatsoever but is locked down. It's the kind of story where hand-waving makes sense, but sometimes there was so much handwaving I almost thought *I'd* start flying!

I only used magic a couple of times. Besides my awakening, I only had one chance to learn more magic. I thought there'd be more, so I just focused on fiery magic, my strength. But no other chances to learn came up, and I'm not sure I ever actually used my charm. So if this gets a post-comp release, adding more magic-learning and magic-using opportunities and more time spent with friends/relationships would be great. What we have here fits well into the time constraints for the comp well.

I waited to play this until I had more time because I generally enjoy Felicity Banks's games and find them substantia, and I'm glad I did.

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Long before Miss Duckworthy’s, I had concluded that ChoiceScript was probably not my IF thing. Its conventions: RPG-like stat, trait, relationship, knowledge and plot trackers, these are all gaming staples that support a specific infrastructure of turning player choice into math, and math into future choice opportunities. It’s not the mechanics of it that put me off per se, it’s all the initial state setting and tuning that goes with it. MDSMIYP immediately got my (positive) attention by bypassing tedious stat setting questions with four ‘pre-generated’ characters to choose among. While there may be some players that would miss full customization, I am not that guy. Even where there were customizations required, the inclusion of a ‘Surprise Me’ choice was audaciously and subversively winning.

So off we go, on a camping trip with four friends! I really sat up and took notice with the excellently written natural camaraderie and dialogue. A representative sample:

Are you a troll now?"
“Yes,” you whisper. “I’m going to grind your bones to make my bread.”
“I bet I taste wonderful,” she says.

See, I like BOTH those characters now! Economical, smooth, appealing. I want to be spending time with them! After some early background/lore building and drama, our heroes find themselves bound for the titular institution, burdened with newfound magic powers which are unwelcome in the world. Look, you can call it a spoiler if you want, but if you name a story after a hospital, the story’s gonna have sick people. Do the math.

Here’s where I could feel Duckworthy’s slipping away from me. I chewed over details a lot here, because this is the risk with detailed world building. The more details you give the reader trying to build wonder and mystique, the more opportunity for those details to start to rub against each other in unwanted, contradictory, and defeating ways. In ways the reader sees but the narrative doesn’t and it undermines the whole thing. It happened in Potter. It happened in Tolkien. It happens here. It happens here a lot, but let’s start with the tone of the name “Miss Duckworthy’s” in the context of a gulag for teenagers and young adults. There is potential ironic mileage to wring there, but it seems more a wink to the reader than in-world justified. Not the least of which for all the tonal swings in atrocity and wonder that follow.

I really have no interest in poking at ‘holes in fantasy logic,’ but the alternative probably makes me look just as bad. From the early, amiable buddy camping romp, I mentally transitioned to a YA trope model. Just the fact of me putting that out there opens me to (probably fair) charges of dismissing YA stories as somehow lesser because they somehow ‘don’t hold up.’ I prefer to think of them as more worried about teenage relationship, fairness, and wish-fulfillment concerns, with the lore as enabling background but not worth a full sociological deep dive. This is fine. If realism were the only worthwhile metric we wouldn’t HAVE fantasy.

Consuming a work as a YA, lore-light entertainment works best I think when background details are not crucial to the plot, when it builds the crucible then gets out of the way. This lets the story focus on the interpersonal character dynamics maybe a little better. I wish I could say this rescued it for me, but the work continued to lean on lore for its plot engine in a way that ultimately didn’t deliver character moments, and still foregrounded elements that couldn’t bear the weight.

A pretty standard YA trope is of the heroes integrating into the lore, maybe being notably gifted, then rising to overthrow/escape/fix the system. Inherent in that trope is the idea that, somehow, in all the years of Opressive System existence, through all of the Evil Architects, our Heroes nevertheless uniquely challenge then defeat things that purportedly were working seamlessly until they showed up. Be it creative use of new powers, escaping systems engineered to prevent escape, or solving problems studied by countless people before them. When done well, YA will provide reasons WHY this is now true, justifying and earning these victories through uniquely compelling series of events. When done REALLY well, the story buys forgiveness from the reader to outright ignore dissonant things in the interest of forward momentum. I actually welcome opportunities to do this!

I feel the story let me down in two ways here. One, the interpersonal dynamics themselves were backgrounded to the lore. Two characters who were getting close suddenly had concerns that back burnered their emotions, with oddly dissonant episodes of ‘oh yeah, this relationship is still happening.’ Dissonant because the relationship seems absent in their more plotty interactions. Perhaps an authorial compromise to the choice-selecty-ness of it, using common text?

The second way it let me down was pushing a cold plot-hand on me, the player-protagonist. There are two factions in the school/prison. Early on we are exposed to motives in these factions that will evolve throughout the game. This is capably (and sometimes dramatically!) done via early plot events that we are left to digest. At some point, the prose shifts, and instead of open-ended event recitation for the PC to interpret, NPC and even PC motivations are steered in an author-mandated (or at least feels author-mandated) way. The net effect is after I pulled back from engaging the world building, the work shrank the appealing relationship dynamics away from me, then even the protagonist was pushed away. I couldn’t help but think the narrative flow fell victim to the ChoiceScript paradigm, where it couldn’t fully support the choices it let me make.

Ultimately, these forces couldn’t make for an engaging time for me. Even after all that though, I still acknowledge that this may be the smoothest ChoiceScript setup I’ve been treated to. And at least for a while, the character work really pulled me in, until it got overwhelmed by world building and plot. Honestly, that was really the heart of the work, and more interesting to me.

Played: 9/12/24
Playtime: 2hr, finished with 15min restart
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Mostly Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless