Up From the Mud
Eileene has taken up “A Tale in the Desert” (ATitD), a MMORPG set in ancient Egypt. ATitD diverges from the normal line of MMORPGs in many ways, but primarily in that it revolves around crafting, instead of killing. You act as a one-man technological revolution, working your way up from Paleolithic hunter/gatherer to classical era master craftsman. You can do other things besides, like becoming a traveling merchant earning his keep by carting stuff around and saving craftsman the chore, or becoming a political leader if you can get enough support from your fellow players, but the heart of the game is crafting. As best I can tell, looking over the skill trees, combat doesn’t enter the game at all.
I haven’t seen much of the game, so take that (and everything else I have to say) with a grain of salt. What I know I learned by looking over Eileene’s shoulder as she tended a small plot of flax, but it’s clear that the crafting system is insanely robust. Barely out of the tutorial, she already collects mud, sand, slate, grass, flax, wood, and possibly other things I haven’t seen. To leave the tutorial, she had to make a boat. For this, she needed planks. For planks, she needed a plane to shave boards from timber. For the plane, she needed a number of easily broken slate blades, which she had to flake herself from slate stones scavenged from scattered locations on the river bank. Likewise sail, linen, loom, rope, machines to make the linen and rope, materials for the machines, flax for the linen, machines to process the flax into tow, the town into linen, bricks for a small building to house the machines, wooden frames to make the bricks, mud for the bricks, straw for the bricks, a machine to process the straw from flax…you get the idea.
The game appeals only to a niche of players, but to these, there is no substitute. I’ve already mentioned that the game de-emphasizes, and possibly eschews, combat. There’s something rewarding about earning a name for yourself by making the finest outfits available, potentially as satisfying as murdering a dozen people in the next town over for the crime of hanging the wrong banner over their houses. This can be an enormous draw for players bored with an eternity of glorified muggings, or for players who find the idea of advancement through brutality distasteful. This latter can include parents who frown on exposing their children to casual game violence.
Speaking of the kiddies, the game has obvious educational purposes, too, despite conflating widely disparate historical periods. The sheer detail of the crafting mechanics can’t help but be educational: how things were made before the industrial revolution. Such subjects are sadly neglected in history classes, in favor of the more glamorous game of thrones, when they have as much impact as anything on human life. It’s too late to see the bootstrapping of a trade economy, but I’m sure it was instructive to those involved.
Both of these attractions are strong for me. I like historicity, which the stale “histories” of fantasy realms can never duplicate, favoring as they do endless clashes of arms between nations with endless reserves of soldiers and treacherous rulers. I’m interested in watching a simplified, yet realistic economy at work, and especially in watching its genesis from unrelated resources. The bronze age, where the twining branches of trade, technology, and politics began, is a subject of particular personal interest; seeing it in practice would be nifty.
But at what cost? Watching over Eileene’s shoulder, I realized that recreating all of this as a first-person experience was an exercise in tedium, despite being orders of magnitude faster and easier than the actual building of Egypt. Plant some flax. Weed it. Weed it again. Don’t harvest it for linen; you need to let it go to seed and build your reserve. Repeat. Repeat. Now you can grow some flax for linen. Do this hundreds of times, and you’ll have enough to make thread for a loom. Then you can start growing more linen to weave. Egad. I’ve read complaints about many games, notably including the Sims, that they are too much like real life: “We already work a daily grind, why would we want a game about getting up, eating breakfast, going to work, coming home, eating dinner, watching TV, and going to bed?” ATitD measures up to this complaint in spades. As educational as it might be, ATitD looks less like a game than like a virtual life, and that in a period when “not going hungry” was a mark of wealth.
Some things are better learned through books. This looks like a recipe for killing interest, not creating it.