Kill Ten Rats

Our games are great for providing a false sense of accomplishment. I leveled! I got a badge! We defeated the dragon! It is an accomplishment in some sense, but it does not clean the kitty litter, pay off your mortgage, or provide clean drinking water in Africa. That is fine. It does not need to. We all have our recreation and entertainment, and you just as easily might have been watching a sporting event or cog dancing. I am ecumenical about that.

Part of that sense of accomplishment comes from attachment and achievement. You leveled up. Maybe you said you leveled your warrior, but it is still your warrior. You are connected, you have built something. Even if you are grinding your way along a treadmill, the little number says 56 instead of 54. Advancement! Progress!

Building sand castles is not progress. You get memories, maybe a photograph, and the tide comes in. You have sand again. It might be fun making sand castles, but that fun is more like baking a cake than raising a barn. We know the barn will be gone someday too, but it is less ephemeral.

Is this game The One? Will it last for years rather than months? We build up our characters. We spend hours getting that purple set. We have massive guild drama over loot allocation. And then we move on to the next game. The next The One might be several years away, or maybe you know this next game is just a bagatelle. The flames are barely on the horizon, and already it tastes like ashes.

: Zubon

Paraphrasing a discussion of Second Life and other online fun:
A> So virtual sex is twisted and strange, but virtual killing is good clean fun? This country is messed up.
B> Virtual killing is great because no one really dies. Virtual sex is stupid because no one really gets laid. See the difference?

: Zubon

I am one of 35 people in the world who liked the original ending of Evangelion. I think it takes the internal perspective on the external events shown in the (first hour of the) re-done version. One notable bit in those episodes is that Shinji is given infinite potential, a blank slate. And he rejects it. He needs a line, ground to walk upon, something to give him bearings. Alone in the void, he has nothing meaningful to do.

Many people reject Second Life because there is nothing to do. Wait, that can’t be right, you can do whatever you want, from swordfighting to interior design. There is just no reason to unless you already want to. Second Life does not have quests or monsters or levels to push you in some direction. You make of your universe what you will, in interaction with others doing the same. That is a lot of responsibility to bear, especially if you are looking for simple fun. (Also, the interface kind of sucks.)

A recent book I read was on the problem of evil. A partial answer I recall from a college text was the need for an “Irenaean environment”: without danger, we would not grow. One similar atheistic perspective holds that a being with no threats to itself has no reason to do anything. If there is no goal to potentially fail in your sandbox game, how long until people get bored and wander off?

So we start with a line. You are level one, and you have an experience point bar. Fill that bar and you reach two. You have a direction, and a goal at the end. We even have some new lines for you to follow at the end of that one. Small risks of failure along the way hide the fact that you cannot lose at World of Warcraft. There are things that want to eat you, and people with exclamation points asking if you would kindly do things. Far from a blank slate of imagination, you now have a clear, channeled path.

But I guess you can win now.

: Zubon

From the Wikipedia:

Ernest Gary Gygax (July 27, 1938 – March 4, 2008) was an American writer and game designer, best known for co-creating the pioneering role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) with Dave Arneson, and co-founding the company Tactical Studies Rules with Don Kaye in 1974. Gygax is generally acknowledged as the father of the role-playing game.

On March 4th, the Associated Press confirmed reports of Gygax’s passing that originally were made by Troll Lord Games, a small role playing game company Gygax had been working with. He had been in poor health, suffering multiple strokes and a near-heart attack.

– Ethic

Reaching into new parts of the Orange Box, I had my first taste of Half Life (2) ever this weekend. Yeah, I’m a bit behind the times, but is the gameplay supposed to be this dull? The game world is beautifully done, but I feel like I’m playing House of the Dead or something, except that I have more freedom to look around as I follow the one possible path. It looks like a big city, but it really is just a decorated alley that twists around a lot. It is twisty, but it is still a tube. Oh, and there are things shooting at me.

I found that silly in Portal’s escape section. It made sense for the levels to have one forced path: it is a puzzle game, and the Aperture enrichment course is a course. Go from A to B, you win! And then you get behind the scenes … and still have one forced path, still with convenient signs along the way. This only makes sense if that is still a part of the course, one that is designed to look like everything has gone wrong.

We hate MMOs with invisible walls, unclimbable hills, and impenetrable forests. They are the wallpaper that poorly hides the theme park nature of a world that pretends to be larger. And some of them have parts with the same problem: not only is there a single possible path, but the decoration is clutter that makes it really annoying to find the one possible path.

Maybe the series gets better. I hear that it has a great story, while others enjoy shooting masses of aliens. The gravity gun sounds fun. But if we are still at the point of making games that run from A to B with no meaningful choices, we might as well keep making them 2D games where we run left to right. The prettier they get, the clearer it is that we have all this great technology and nothing to do with it.

: Zubon