Pretentious Actor Simulator
Pretentious Actor Simulator
Anya Reynolds-Swannie and Laura Dumitrache, 2025
This Game was developed as part of the final assignment for the course ENG 328 Writing for Games and Narrative Design (Fall 2025), University of Toronto Mississauga. The work was supervised by Professor Bruno R. Véras, Assistant Professor, LTA, Game Studies Program, Department of English and Drama, UTM.
Abstract
Pretentious Actor Simulator is a text-based satire wherein you - yes, YOU - must survive your first day on a professional theatre contract! Be just pretentious enough to stand out, and you may find yourself in the director’s favour. But be careful- overdoing it may have dire consequences for your career… and your dreams.
Authored Design Statement
For our Twine game, we have chosen to take players on the journey of the opening rehearsal day of their first professional theatre contract: Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The game provides players with various choices for how to approach their first rehearsal, each choice increasing either their friendliness or their pretentiousness. The goal of the game is to balance one’s pretentious and friendly sides to make a positive impression on other theatre professionals, satirizing the theatre industry and the experience of interacting with artistic professionals from any creative field. We have drawn inspiration from the game we played in class, entitled “First Day in the Office,” wherein the player is required to make a series of choices that inevitably call for the character to either go against their own personal preferences to appease others or follow their heart at the risk of making a bad impression. Our game is similar in the game mechanic of choice-making in order to gain impressions from NPCs, but the difference lies in the social themes explored; where the other game illustrates feminist ideals and the impossibility of succeeding as a woman in the workplace, our game attempts to simulate an exaggerated feeling of trying to fit in within the arts industries.
Mechanically, our game focuses on many of the elements included in the “Elements of Game Design” from session 3.2. The main actions, given the nature of twine games, are making choices, but we have tried to include as many other mechanics as possible using the available code. For example, we have included direct progression mechanics, where variables of either pretentiousness or friendliness increase as the game goes on, with your final score in each of these categories determining your ending. There is also a mechanic in which, if the player gets too pretentious, the Director NPC snaps at them as a hint that they should better balance the two variables. We have also included a variety of choices to balance gameplay with narrative exposition, including which character they want to play as in Hamlet and how they want to interact with NPCs. For this narrative element, we went back to a reading from 7.2, “Game Design as Narrative Architecture”. In the Enacting Stories section, there are many references to choices that we made as game designers, such as using obstacles to guide players when they are going the wrong direction, as we do with the aforementioned Director dialogue. We have tried to allow for enough gameplay that the player still feels a sense of authority over the path they are taking, as their own experience in the game and the overall themes explored are more important than the linearity of the plot.
This project was a great way to exercise our knowledge of the different types of storytelling listed in the 7.2 reading. We were able to explore the creation of spaces within games, and, more specifically, the ways of creating the atmosphere of a game space through actions (i.e., choices) rather than through pure exposition. We learned that, while the story is an important element, it is still crucial to include gameplay, lest the game become boring and stagnant.
Works Cited:
First Day in the Office. by gkirilloff, itch.io.
Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” Publications, web.mit.edu/~21fms/People/henry3/games%26narrative.html. Accessed 24 Nov. 2025.
Zubek, Robert. Elements of Game Design, MIT Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central,
