Gaming: “Bonehead”

It is a well-established fact that the kids these days are somewhat entitled, what with their mp3s and their Kinects and their computer graphics.  Back in my day, we listened to mp2s and played migraine-inducing Virtual Boys and our video games sometimes didn’t even have graphics.  If you wanted to kill a troll, you typed the words “kill troll”, and the game narrated whether or not you were, in fact, successful in killing the troll.  Note: you were often not successful in killing the troll.

Among computer games, the interactive fiction genre began before people even owned computers.  Thirty-five years after people first typed “xyzzy”, the community is alive and well, or at least alive, dwelling in a strata of internet culture just beneath the basement from which the bloggers write about their sabermetrics.

Which leads us to our subject: three weeks ago saw the release of the first narrative baseball game.  Bonehead is written by Sean M. Shore, and tells the story of New York Giants first baseman and teenager Fred Merkle, whose baserunning gaffe in the final week of 1908 helped cost his team the pennant and dogged him the rest of his life.  Your goal is to re-enact that day, beginning with standing in line at the train station on the way to the stadium.

What’s interesting about Bonehead is the distinction it makes between you as the player and Merkle as the character, despite the fact that you are effectively acting as Merkle throughout the story.  The game makes it clear early on that Merkle is destined for misfortune, and that “winning” the game, i.e. playing it to its proper ending, brings about this misfortune.  Between passages of the game Shore weaves vignettes of Merkle’s later years.  Meanwhile, the game provides multiple opportunities to end the game another way, many of them averting ignominy.

Bonehead is free to play, and the game can be downloaded here.  The game file requires an interpreter to run, and they can be downloaded on the same page.