Gamers Going Home
I heard an interesting complaint recently about World of Warcraft. The complainant feels WoW is immeasurably more professional and polished than its predecessors, notably Everquest, and generally more fun moment to moment. But no cloud is without its silver lining, and every ray of sunshine casts a shadow, so even the vast improvements in the MMO that WoW represents mark some kind of loss. In particular, the endless grind of EQ and the sharp penalties for death, among other obstacles, contributed to a greater sense of community; people would chat more extensively in EQ because they spent more time bored between fights, and would cheer major accomplishments because they actually were major, and rare, as opposed to a conveyor belt of guildies turning in Onyxia’s head. Players who got to high levels could feel they’d accomplished something, if only enduring the grind that long. And this guy missed that community of adversity.
Now, I never played EQ, or ever got much of anywhere with an MMO other than WoW, so I have to take such claims on trust, but they seem entirely plausible to me. I’m not much impressed by their appeal—if I want to enjoy community and human interaction, I don’t log onto a computer and /cheer some guy named Lord DrAgOnZkIlLa, about whom I know nothing but that he reached level 50 today, for reaching level 50 today. Maybe I’m just a product of a pre-internet generation, but online interaction always seems far more shallow than the same amount of contact and effort produce in real-life interaction. Nor do I agree with the attitude among hardcore players (including the EQ lead developers) who feel that tedium is a positive virtue in games, separating the heroes from the dabblers. Someone who endures tedium to save a life, or inspire a student, or protect the innocent is a hero; someone who endures tedium to reach level 50 is just indulging himself in wasting more time than his neighbors. Nonetheless, I can sympathize with a more general desire to recapture some of the fun bits of old games eclipsed by their glossier, more sophisticated progeny, even the fun bits that could only exist as a byproduct of broken game elements.
I’m not talking here about game elements that only seem fun through the haze of nostalgia. I’m not talking about, say, Germany 1985, one of those attempts to bring clunky old wargames with hex maps and a million little cardboard chits and painstaking rules directly to the computer, preserving all the workarounds forced upon such games by the limitations of hex maps and a million cardboard chits, instead of designing a game to take best advantage of what a computer can do. I had a lot of fun with Germany 1985, picking through a sea of statistics to grind my opponent down, but I would never point to it as something that’s missing from computer games today. Nor am I talking about the nostalgia itself. I have fond memories of Sargon, that ancient, ancient struggle against inevitable collapse where you spent grain and plowed fields trying to keep your population fed and productive without spiraling out of control, which it inevitably did, because random catastrophes trashed any attempt at stability. The fickle finger of fate made Sargon a bad game, but I enjoyed it, and I miss that willingness in my youth to engage enthusiasm—a willingness which no game could ever recreate.
No, I’m talking more about games—or rather, game elements—which were fun for being bad, or which could only exist in the frame of a larger collection of fun-killing bad ideas. Civ4 is better than Civ1, hands down. None of Civilization’s sequels have fixed its fundamental problems of micromanagement or the sheer complexity guaranteeing that computer opponents will suffer exploitable blind spots, but the sharpest edges have been hammered down, and new game elements like strategic resources and customizable maps keep making the game richer. But I will never recreate a game of Civ1 wherein I got a couple lucky draws of cavalry (2-1-2) out of my first few goodie huts, and those horsemen zipped across the Asian steppes grabbing more goodie huts and wiping out my Paleolithic rivals before they could get a leg up. I reached “future technology” (worth extra points because Sid Meier ran out of material benefits) and settled the entire eastern hemisphere by 480AD, and shortly thereafter stormed the western hemisphere with tanks and battleships to the Babylonians’ chariots. I had to give up Civ1 forever at that point, because it was clear beyond all doubt that I had beaten the game in the broadest sense: cracked the design flaws so badly that it could never, ever present a challenge again. It was terrific fun, despite being possible only because those mutually-reinforcing exploits existed, and finding those exploits over the course of multiple games and learning how to use them to best effect was stimulating.
Some of those grand old games are gone for good, unless you’re the kind of OCD victim who keeps his Tandy and his Apple IIe “just in case.” Certainly we’ll never see their like made again, but then, I don’t see why we should. Oh, someone could make a true “retro” 8-bit reproduction, but the old coots already have their nostalgia to keep them warm, and the young whippersnappers couldn’t share it anyway, even if they wanted to, even if they tried their hardest. I don’t often get the urge to go retro, but when I do, many of my favorites simply won’t work any more, even on so-called emulators. The programs simply break down over arcane graphics incompatibilities. Fortunately, text is easy to reproduce. It will survive forever. So, whenever the pressure of the graphics arms race gets to be too much, or the dumbing down of games to fit onto consoles, or the ultimate victory of the FPS over the strategy game, there is still now, and will always be, a way to go home again, if not at this link, then in another that will take its place.
West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
>_