The Grind

Two unusual games are on my current playlist, games that I have simply been curious about. If my tastes and preferences for games have never been revealed, then let me say this: I love doing the impossible. Those games that thrill and excite me, that strike that amazing balance of unreal existence and epic environments, I could play those games for hours on end. I play games like Pyschonauts, Fallout 3, or Mirror's Edge for the thrill of unreal worlds. To be in places that are beyond the realm of my hometown. There are enough beautiful moments in reality, enough vistas to make life wonderful. A game hits me when I know that within my lifetime there is no chance I will experience such wonder.

Likewise, games like Max Payne, Mirror's Edge (again), or Shadow of the Collosus are games to be experienced. To play with, to enjoy the fact that, as a player, I am capable of things that would never ever be possible in real-life. Situations that are not feasible. Climbing astride a beast hundreds of feat tall, clinging to its fur, and then climbing further up, that is worth my money. Or how about a gun-duel with multiple enemies? I will never in my life be in a gun duel. And I'm okay with that, because Max Payne gives me all of the joy with none of the reality of me getting shot and dying.

Many games these days are not what I really envision as games because they seem to no longer embrace the fun or the challenge. So out of curiosity I am currently playing Lord of the Rings Online and Farmville. I have wanted to know why people would play Farmville, so I joined the ranks in an effort to determine whether or not Farmville is even a game. After probably an hour of actual playtime I can announce that it is not a game. The premise is to farm a plot of land and to raise money to farm more land and add more types of crops, add random visual flair to your farm, to add neighbors, and to add, add, add! As far as I have been able to discern, there is no negative element to the game. You cannot lose, there is no series of interesting choices, it is merely the progressive collection of elements that may or may not exist on real farms anymore. I have come to the conclusion that Farmville is not a game, it is a tedious chore.

So yesterday, after harvesting my soy crop and planting a new round of seeds, I tried Lord of the Rings Online for the first time, and was slightly disturbed how similar it felt to Farmville. "Oh please, Tinuriael! We need to kill 6 of those Blighted Insects!" "Oh thank you! Here is some experience and silver!" "Oh but this man wants to see you about killing 3 Rustling Mugwumps!""Oh grand happy day! Have an old leather shoe! Now there are 8 Goblin shoes to be collected down the road which we'll trade you 6 more silver for! And if you find any vegetables to pick... Off you go, please!"

I have never really been into MMOs, but I thought I would give LOTRO a try, because I was told that it was a beautiful game with lots of exploration elements. Frankly, it is a beautiful game, and I was pleasantly surprised by the well designed environments, but was this slow grinding going to kill me? It destroyed WOW for me very quickly. LOTRO does have grinding, but at least it's not Farmville. Why not? Because you can die! You can fail, lose, get hurt, have to run away from too many enemies. It contains the very real possibility of failure, and I like that. My accomplishments in Farmville are not many, but they feel like even less, because every step I took put me closer to the accomplishments, whereas LOTRO contains steps that carry me backward, further from one destination in my efforts to seek something new. I visited Bree quickly after the world opened up to me, because I wanted to see Bree. I was quickly out of my level-safe area, but it was fun because I felt like I was giving up one quest for my own personal quest of exploration. What has Turbine done with Middle-Earth? I am finding the answers to that.

I enjoy games that give me thrills, and LOTRO has a beautiful thrilling world, but unless I can soon escape the tedium of its action, I might have to give up on another MMO. Perhaps I just don't appreciate the subtlety of MMO action, but games are my hobby, I play what I want, and I want a game that not only gives me an unbelievable world, but one where my actions are also impossibly awesome. However I can say for sure that Farmville (like too many Facebook apps) is not a game and is definitely not something I want to deal with anymore.

Unnamed project

That's a lie. My project does have a name, but I'm trying to keep it off the web, as it's still very much in the design stage. I mentioned this, but I am trying to work on game design daily, because persistence is the key to success. Right? I love simple ideas like that and all the exceptions they allow.

But onto the project. Tonight, since I must get up early, I am combining my blog with my game design thoughts and musings for the night. The questions I have to ask as I'm constructing this series of game vignettes is: what do I want the player to experience? What is my goal for making this game? Do I want the purpose to be on an individual level? What should the player feel after playing? Do I even want to use the term that the person "plays" the vignettes?

The potential I see within games and the particular area that fascinates me the most is the idea of simulation, specifically an organic simulation, such as Will Wright's godly game Spore set to arrive in a few months. I have not really gotten into playing an MMO for the simple fact that I want my environment to be authentic. I'll admit that I'm looking into Lord Of The Rings Online, as I heard it was a great game for entering the environments, but in general, the environment within an MMO is set by the players, and thus just another social world. The possibilities that I see revolve around creating entirely new simulated systems and placing the player within. How does a player react to the world around them depending on how that world lives? MMOs are safe social environments, they're about the interaction with other humans.

But my vignettes, I've realized, along with the games that I'm either most interested in or most interested in making, create simulated worlds. Set the starting conditions, and let artificial life have its go. Indeed, one of my games will be a derivative of pac-man and part of the reason for that is that pac-man is one of the earliest game biology simulators. It puts the player into an environment with 3 hostile creatures that will navigate terrain to eat the player, meanwhile the player has to consume all the food (white bread tablets?) to survive until the next environment. And maybe I'm putting Pac-Man on too high a pedestal, but that simple game still is one of the most renowned "video games" of all time and I would argue it is because it created a simple simulation system with varying environments to change the challenge. And so, in addition to attempting to create a variation on that, I'm working on multiple other knock-offs of other games, all the while trying to make it worth my while. Hopefully my imitation will pay eventually.