I said in my PopMatters review of 80 Days that the titular 80 days of the bet that inspired this trip around the world in the first place is a macguffin. The real core of the game is the act and art of traveling through the foreign locales. The sights, the people, and the adventures are what matters. They matter far more than making the trip in an arbitrary number of days. Whereas Phileas Fogg is content enough with his cabin and his newspaper, we play as Passepartout, and he is out and about finding information about travel routes, making trades and getting into mischief.
That much I still believe about the game. 80 Days is the artful worldbuilding and allowing the player to explore it that matters. Given that the 80 days may seem like an extraneous challenge for those who have already explored the world, it is nonetheless an important component even to those who wish to experience the title as interactive fiction and not a challenge.
No fiction and no imaginary world, no matter how much meticulous effort and lore is created, will ever truly create a living breathing world beyond the bounds of its creators. Despite all its codex entries, Dragon Age will never have all those threads connected. Mass Effect has a lot of interesting trivia, but it is not a functioning galaxy. All fiction is finite. Whenever someone says something is a living breathing world, they are talking about the illusion created, because no fiction can live up to such lofty aspirations.
Take the real world, for contrast. If we use Wikipedia alone as the complete bastion of all human knowledge to represent its codex, the content within would last several thousand times longer than all the content in the entire trilogies of Bioware’s flagship franchises (e.g. Mass Effect). Even then, we know Wikipedia is not the full bastion of all knowable human experience; it is constantly updated and always at the current whims of its editors. There are plenty of subjects well under-served by the service. In addition to those topics that are knowable, one must consider those that haven’t been included for whatever reason. If we were to compile all the small details of everyday life of all ordinary people, we would have a complex web of collective human knowledge too vast to catalogue.
No fiction could ever compete with reality in the terms of a real living breathing world; eventually, there will be an end, and the truth of the fiction will be laid bare. The information about any given fictional location will end, and we will be left with the city screen and nothing to do. The purpose of worldbuilding details is to create the framework for imagination to function and allow for the story to function. The best worldbuilding will go a little further and act as part of the theme of the artwork, but ultimately it is still a facade.
In press materials, 80 Days boasted of over half a million words in the game. It sounds like a lot, and for what is essentially a text adventure it is certainly is, but it is still a finite end of material. We get to sightsee at a town square or the world’s fair or a store or a artificer’s lab, but ultimately we will exhaust what a city has to show us. That is where the pressure of the 80 days comes into the picture.
The game is segmented into two parts: the interactive fiction exploring the world and the resource management travel expenses. When we change focus, our brain changes gears right along with it. When we are exploring Paris, we are taking in the sights, talking to locals, and making dialogue choices. Our brains are in adventure game mode. Then, when its time to check our baggage for things to sell or buy, when we have to choose a route or figure out how to manipulate pricing with our outfits, our brains are in strategy game mode. There are elements that do cross over, like when you gain an item that can be sold for travel money or making a travel decision based on narrative threads, but they don’t cause quite the shift in focus. Generally, when we are exploring a city, we are looking at the game as interactive fiction, and when we are checking travel routes we are looking at the game as a challenge.
The challenge of the bet, of making it around the world in 80 days or less, pushes us forward. We might want to talk to the lovely artificer in Alexandria more and find out more about her crystalline light device, but temporal pressures push us forward. This is a good stategy to hide the fact that the sets are cardboard. We might want to find more about the brilliant artificer, but there are no more in Alexandria; all that there was, was in that scene. This is true for any stop. You can stay put, but there will be no more narrative threads to follow up on, no more city that can be explored. To maintain the illusion of a living breathing world, the player must be a fly-by-night tourist. This is no vacation, but ultimately a race against the clock.
Any one of the cities in 80 Days would make a great locale for a dozen different stories. The game creates many great settings, but the stories of the people within them cannot be fully developed. It’s in those moments of everyday life, unworthy of a Wikipedia citation, where the drama of these stories arises. We can never know these ordinary situations because there is not enough text to express all of it. We can only pass through and get mere impressions of the world through rightly placed details and threadbare connections between them. Our mind will fill in the pattern and right before we notice the poor quality of the textile, we are off on the next leg of our journey, the impression of the city settling in our mind.
I can think of a lot of people and aspects of the world I would love to follow up on in 80 Days: the strange living aircraft of the Himalayas, the revolution in Chittagong, the siege of Acapulco and many others. I would like to learn more about these things, but there are limits to all fiction, even that which allows you a choice of what to do. 80 Days deftly chooses to cover this up with the premise of the story itself.