In case anyone was curious what digital narcotics were keeping me from becoming an overnight millionaire, or if anyone else was looking for a distraction, I thought I'd share some titles...
1. Terraria
The biggest devourer of time at the moment is a little game alled Terraria that I picked up for $2.50 on sale a couple of weeks ago. It's $10 now. Why is it always the really cheap games that end up eating the most time? It's hard to explain what this game is. You take one part Adventure of Link and one part Minecraft, shake them up, and something like this pours out. There isn't much in the way of linear narrative. The game itself is set on randomly generated worlds, and there are just a few bosses that you can hunt down and kill. The real way it sucks up time is through mindless spelunking, grinding, and collecting so that you can find or unlock special items that change the gameplay. You can also build houses for NPC's and to store all of your loot.There is a multiplayer feature that lets up to four players either cooperatively explore or play competitive vs. matches against each other. I haven't actually tried the competitive match, but Isabel and I started a new world together. Curiously enough, we very quickly ended up recreating primitive human gender roles. Isabel decided that she preferred to stay at the base camp where she could design and decorate houses...while she sends me out on missions to go find the materials for the items she wants in the house.
She also sends me out to kill the zombies that show up every night while she locks herself in an underground panic room.
Just like real life!
In my opinion, this game's greatest success is that it generally leads the player to create their own goals...and therefore their own narrative. It's what the game theorist Henry Jenkins calls "emergent narrative." He uses the "Sims" as the prime example of this type of game in which the developers give the players tools and objects that will tend towards certain kinds of "stories" within the game, but that the player spontaneously creates that narrative on their own. For instance, I decided at one point that I wanted to build a road from one side of my world in Terraria to the other...and kind of transcontinental railroad. I didn't get any points for doing this, nor did I unlock any powers or minibosses. It was just something I decided to do because the developers gave me the ability to do it. In the process, I essentially made a little story for myself, incorporating the obstacles I faced, the treasures I inadvertantly stumbled upon...and that little narrative continues whenever I use that road. For instance, my little warrior is like a superhero whenever my homebase gets attacked by goblins. If I see the alert, my first move is to find my road, and then speed back home...something I couldn't do as quickly if I were still navigating the randomly generated terrain.
2. Spiral Knights
Spiral Knights is a fancy-looking "free to play" game that is one part A Link to the Past (notice a Zelda theme, yet?) and one part eBay. This is the online game that has sucked up most of Isabel's gaming time. At first, it's pretty addictive. It's fun watching your adorably cute little steampunk knight hack and slash at equally cute critters in an attempt to steal whatever treasure they have. (Both Spiral Knights and Terraria have a certain imperialistic streak to them...one engages with nature only to dominate it and plunder its riches.) However, the "free to play" aspect has a hitch. To do just about anything in the game requires spending "energy points"--either to play the next level of the game or to make better weapons. You get 100 free points a day, which is good for about an hour's worth of play (and those points do not accumulate). You can also buy accumulating energy for either in-game currency or real cash. There's even a little market where players bid on energy and items. We're cheap, so we refuse to pay real cash...but it has been a pretty interesting study in economics seeing how other players try to work the system. Unfortunately, the game mechanics are starting to get pretty monotonous, and Isabel and I have reached the point where upgrading our characters to the next level would take months. I keep describing this game like a "ship in a bottle." You can do a little bit every night, and in the end, have something kind of cool. But it has become tedious. Besides, Isabel finally bought her little knight the cowboy hat she wanted, so she no longer really has any goals set for herself.
The game is also a MMORPG, and, frankly, I'm getting sick of the little kids and likely predators asking me weird questions while I'm in the middle of bidding on weapon upgrades at the auction house.
You can't build houses or anything in this game, so it doesn't feel as immersive as Terraria. The most interesting "narrative" so far has been Isabel's making of a hat. The game does try to build in narrative, letting you find little notes left by NPCs that have gone through levels before you, what Henry Jenkins calls "embedded narrative," but, to be honest, I never bother reading the notes. I wasn't in it for their revolution. I just wanted the money for Isabel's hat.
3. Plants vs. Zombies
This Popcap game is pretty ubiquitous at this point, but I only just picked it up for $4. I've slowed down a bit after beating the adventure mode, which was also just about when Isabel got into Spiral Knights.
PvZ is part of the "tower defense genre," which is probably one of the most popular independent game genres out there. My suspicion is that tower defense games are easier to program than most action games. The programmer doesn't have to worry about constructing vast terrains, or even scrolling screens. Everything pretty much takes place on a static playing field. Heck, PvZ's playing field is even a locked-in rail-like grid, which probably makes the game even more simplistic. It's a bit like the old arcade game Tapper, if, instead of patrons wanting drinks, you had zombies wanting brains, and instead of giving the patrons what they want, you were trying to stop them.
What the game has going for it is infectious cuteness, catchy music, and just the right amount of difficulty--you have to keep pretty active to win, but I wouldn't say I felt "frustrated" at any point.
This might be closest to what Jenkins calls "enacted narratives." Here, Jenkins suggests that something as simple as learning how to overcome an obstacle in a game is, in a sense, a "micro-narrative." In this regard, PvZ is full of micro-narratives. Each zombie that appears on the screen poses a new problem, a new conflict that you have to overcome...especially when different types of zombies start appearing with different strengths and weaknesses. While the game technically has an overarching plot, the most memorable moments comes not from the random cutscenes, but from individual moments..."That zombie was soooo close to eating my brains before I dropped that exploding mushroom on him...haha, zombie!"
4. Super Mario Sunshine
I picked up this old Gamecube disk a few months ago, but only started playing it this summer. I dropped it when Isabel and I went on vacation, and have only been chipping away at it since. (I've actually kind of forgetten what the point of the game was...so I feel a little less urgency to beat the game.)
What I will say for this game, though, is that it does a tremendous job of what Scott McCloud calls "synaesthesia"--in his view, the ability to convey multiple senses through one sense, typically sight.
Ever since the dreaded and infamous incident at Exit 36, I have hated travelling. However, if I ever decided to take a Caribbean resort vacation, it would be because of this game. Like I said, I'm not entirely sure what Mario is doing on a tropical island anymore, but Nintendo's designers have done a phenomenal job making you feel like you are actually at a tropical...albeit, inhabited by large, vegetable-like goon creatures. Now, I'm sure actual tropical destinations are nothing like this game, but the fact is that Nintendo has captured the essence of what I expect an tropical island to feel like. Neal Stephenson describes Disney's ability to do a similar thing with its amusement parks in his essay In the Beginning Was the Commandline, and I suspect the success of Nintendo and Disney is due to a lot of overlaps in this department.
And, not to break my pattern, this experience is what Henry Jenkins describes as "evocative narrative;" the idea that the very way the environment is presented in a game evokes a mood, indicates the game's genre, and thereby plays upon a whole host of pre-packaged narrative elements that we bring with us every time we consume "genre" fiction.
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