The Dink Network

I'm called Tim. I've been playing Dink since it came out, when I was a young, dumb kid.

timthreethreethree@gmail.com
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--The Non-combat D-Mod Contest--

The sixth Dink Network D-Mod contest was announced on April 6th, 2010. Six entries were submitted by the original stated deadline of June 1st. Can you imagine? The criterion is the simplest since "Alternative Hero:" Just make a D-Mod without any combat. As always, I'll quote the original specifications:

The d-mod shall not include combat/fighting gameplay. Whilst it is acceptable to include fauna that the player can kill (ducks, for example), the gameplay itself must not have any combat sections. There may be fighting/combat in the d-mod (either by NPC's or in cut-scenes), but the player must never be in control at these times.

It is recommended that you create a traditional RPG/Adventure-style D-Mod for the contest. We are not looking for a "weird" d-mod here.

Can't get much clearer than that. There have of course been quite a few D-Mods without combat over the years, but they are in a distinct minority. It might be nice to have a little break from punching pillbugs.

315: Corporate Managerialism Author: Yeoldetoast Release Date: June 9, 2010
"I only have bad business choices to blame"

This is yeoldetoast's only released D-Mod, but he's an active member of the community who has released some useful tools on the forum. I like being able to refer to somebody simply as "Toast." That's a good nickname.

I had to look up whether managerialism is even a real word; it is, and not even a terribly obscure one. I guess I'm just dumb. Definitions seem to vary widely, but I'm going to say for simplicity's sake that it just refers to using professional managers in a company.

"Corporate Managerialism" tied for last in the contest, and I don't understand why at all. I don't agree with the rating it's got either. This D-Mod is original, creative, fun, and a good time. It's not a great D-Mod - the core gameplay, once you get around to it, is ridiculously simple - but it's so interesting. The higher-ranked entries are going to have to really bring it for me to turn around and agree with this ranking.

The intro tells a sordid story of colonialist greed and violence, where the natives of a resource-rich island were pointlessly wiped out in a brutal war by the colonizers despite having already established peaceful relations with some of them. The incident is considered so shameful that they attempt to bury the evidence at first, but it becomes known among settlers anyway, who term the island the "Island of Death." As a response, all violence of any kind is declared to be banned on the island, with violators sentenced to life imprisonment by magical teleporting cops. Obviously, this is just about as oppressive as actual violence.


That's, um, kinda dark.

It's a neatly told story, and seems quite serious. Yes, even the magic cops. Their abuse of magical power is clearly a metaphor - really, I'm not being sarcastic this time - for the abuses of power by the police in the real world. It's a bit of a surprise, then, when you get to the actual game and it's silly as Hell. The intro prepares us well for it, though; a cynicism underlies the silliness. It's important that we know our little adventure in gaining profit ("Corporate Managerialism" ends up being a sort of business sim) is made possible by the fact that the world has been f***ed up and everything has gone horribly wrong. There's a pretty strong implication that the same thing is true of the real world. This makes the D-Mod all the funnier by adding a bitter edge to the silly s*** that goes on in it.

You play as Richard S. Wood (see what he did there?), a young man near graduation from "Kelsey Grammer School." He lives with his mother in a house provided by the state because his father was killed in the campaign to wipe out the natives. He must finish his schooling and start a career. But before I did any of that, I went downstairs, saved the game, went back up and punched my mother to death (don't worry about it - it isn't combat if she doesn't fight back!). Hey, the intro made it very clear that there were consequences for violence, and I wanted to see them. I wonder what it says about me that I did this first.


Probably something like that.

By the way, see that "ducking?" As long as you're not reading this in a text file as part of a .torrent in the far future when this website is long gone and the screenshots have been lost with it, you probably do. "Duck" is substituted for everybody's favorite expletive in this D-Mod, just as the ducking swear filter on this forum does. At first I thought, "that's a clever way to self-censor and work in a community reference." Then I found out that this was not a simple substitution, but a swap.


Oh. OHHH.

Killing anybody gets the popo to come and take you away. There's a sentencing scene with an impressive range of different dialogue depending on what you've done. In addition to all the different NPCs you can murder (most of whom get their own unique sentencing scene), you also get collared for abusing public property or killing ducks. The dialogue in these scenes draws attention to the bizarre, perverse expectation Dink players have about assaulting anybody and everybody, just to see what happens. Richard is asked why he took a man away from his family and offers feeble defenses like "I thought he might say something funny." Yeah, that's not going to cut it. Any time you get arrested, your sentence is life imprisonment. You can choose to rot in your cell or "escape" by jumping down a well. In a sense, you do escape. Not in the sense Richard is probably hoping for, though.


Yeah, they planned this. So much for a policy of total non-violence.

Okay, so back to the plot. Richard must go to school, where he gets assignments - writing essays and speeches about Greek history and other subjects. To do your homework, you go back to your room in your mom's basement and examine the desk... whereupon you begin essay-writing minigames that actually take the form of tapping keys as directed or breaking barrels. The speed at which you perform these tasks determines your grade. I didn't do very well. There is then a quiz based on actual knowledge. I did a little better at that, getting 7 questions out of 10 right. If you take longer than two minutes, the game assumes you've tried to cheat by looking up the answers online and you get a 0. Before Toast comes here to yell at me, I only know this because I looked at the scripts after I was all done playing the D-Mod. The script also had a friendly greeting for anybody looking at it in the hopes of cheating thereby:

//If you look at the script to cheat I hope you ducking choke
//Seriously, this is worse than looking up the answer on Wikipedia or Wolfram Alpha

Not me, though. I took my 7/10. It doesn't matter anyway. There's no score so low that you won't graduate. The grades only give you a starting bonus of cash during the business sim portion.


Better get punching if you want that thesis to be cogent!

Richard finishes up school and strolls the very next day into the lobby of a huge insurance company and demands a job. Naturally this works, just like it does in the real world. What's maybe a teensy bit less realistic is that he is instantly made CEO. You've got just ten days to turn your meager starting fund (it was just over $300 in my case) to at least $5,000. You can increase your income by hiring more people for your marketing department, but that costs money, and you lose if you go into the red (comically, going bankrupt is accompanied by Richard's hastily-explained death).


This is it. This is the game, right here.

This segment is anticlimactic because it's so simple. Rather than having to manage multiple aspects of your business and balance them against each other and external factors like market fluctuations or disasters, you just hire as many marketeers as you can without running out of money for the most part. I managed to raise the necessary funds by hiring ten of them on the first day and two on every subsequent day until I saw that my rate of profit was enough to coast to the end.

Aside from the anticlimax, this D-Mod is also sloppy in places. There are several screens with no borders (a no-no because of the bug in Dink where you can skirt around a screen's hardness if you're at the edge of a screen with no screen adjacent on that side), and some depth dot errors, most notably on the exterior of the insurance building.


Don't do it Richard! Don't jump off of that cleverly-rendered skyscraper!

Still, I liked this D-Mod. It's funny and it makes you think a little bit. I also liked the music. Toast urges you to play this using FreeDink because it uses formats unsupported by regular 1.08 to play awesome chiptunes. The tracks are, as I just said, awesome, and in addition to making things generally groovy they add a touch of oppression and tension to the proceedings.

You could argue that I've overlooked this game's flaws. You could point out that the gameplay is shallow or that the part of the story that actually drives you to achieve your goal is dashed-off and meaningless compared to the setup. But you know what I say to that?


Whoops! Sorry folks, all out.