“Man has climbed Mount Everest, gone to the bottom of the ocean. He’s fired rockets at the Moon, split the atom, achieved miracles in every field of human endeavor… except crime!” – Gert Frobe as Auric Goldfinger
Many fields of endeavor have their defining moments. Even if you aren’t old enough, most people know about the first time Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. Recently U.S. politics had a defining moment when the first African American president took office. Film has defining moments as well – In Casablanca when Rick delivers those famous lines to Ingrid Bergman, “If you don’t get on the plane you’ll be sorry; maybe not today, or tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.”
The September issue of PC Gamer* has a regular feature entitled “Dev Man Talking”. This month features Andy Schatz discussing his concept of the “first great game”. His main points are that the first great game will be “short and dense”, “will be on the PC”, and “won’t ask us to pretend to be someone else.”
“…The First Great Game will be about a theme, an idea or a world in which the player does not exist.”
He goes on to say the following:
“SimCity and The Sims may be the best examples we’ve seen so far of games that make us care about a world in which we, as the player, do not ostensibly exist.”
When we used this as a jumping off point in a recent discussion on the No Prisoners, No Mercy (NPNM) show my co-hosts first reaction was “bullshit”. Still, let’s take a look at how Kotaku.com described the paragon of all that is right with at least one game mechanic:
One Woman Show
“Players act as an omnipotent being that can micromanage every aspect of a sim life, or just leave them to rot and die in a puddle of their own urine. The structure of the game is an open world with no narrative and no ending. So – like a dollhouse, only your dolls can die.”- Kotaku.com
One of our regular reads on our news feed comes from Escapistmagazine.com, which recently featured an article by Troy Goodfellow Entitled Multiple Roleplaying Disorder.
“In many ways, The Sims is true roleplaying even if you don’t consider it a roleplaying game. The Sims was originally pitched as a dollhouse game and the comparison is obvious…But moving dolls is the simplest thing you do. You also weigh their desires and their needs. You postpone the present joys for future glory. Or indulge in immediate opportunity and say “To hell with tomorrow. All the while, other personalities may intrude, compete for attention, and clamor for your care. It’s bigger than a dollhouse; the player is like an only child in the backyard who must play every part of the action movie in his head, the Sims player has to create or embrace motivations of a myriad of characters.” – Troy Goodfellow, Escapist Magazine
The Sims is a lot like a one woman show where each character is portrayed by one person. But the player is one removed in this particular case – And there, as the great bard once said, lays the rub. In most mmos the player character, the avatar controlled by the person behind the pixels, is unable to move autonomously. Take your hands off the keyboard and your gnome, dwarf or troll just stands there; with the rare exception of some programmed idle movements in mmos like World of Wacraft (WoW). While WoW characters have no capability of autonomous behavior, what they do have in common with Sims are abilities with which they have been endowed – the same subject that Desslock discusses in the September issue of PC Gamer:
“If you consider using honed mouse fu and manual dexterity to thwart the pursuit of a gaggle of orcs nipping at your heels to be a roleplaying zenith, you are a genre boor. Real-time RPGs inherently compromise roleplaying depth because success in them is at least partly dependent upon player skill.” – Desslock
The point that author Desslock is making is that turn based RPG brings more depth to the table because the outcome is determined by the abilities of the character, not the manual dexterity of the player. This is also something that is a prevalent game mechanic in The Sims. By way of example, if you chose a criminal career path for a Sims 3 character, but do not include or develop athletic ability, the character will spend more time in the slammer than out – and it doesn’t matter how fast you can click a mouse.
The eye of the gamer
Through a labyrinthine stretch of logic that would make Spock weep we can perhaps extrapolate a concept of what makes great roleplaying, if not a great game. After all, that is where the entire premise made by Mr.Schatz falls apart. A great game is like great art (unless you are Roger Ebert).
In the lobby of a building in Chicago’s Loop stands a sculpture entitled “Town Ho” (see picture at right). The name plate on the sculpture was quickly removed, for obvious reasons. Now, if you hang around the sculpture long enough, you will eventually hear someone exclaim “I may not know art but I know what I like.” Any attempt to define a “great game” will fail for the same reason as an attempt to define great art – what makes anything great is subjective. In the end, greatness will always be in the eye of the gamer.
See you online,
Julie Whitefeather
[Posted for Julie Whitefeather by The Webmaster]
*Wow the September issue in July right? Next month’s magazine ironically featuring last month’s news about Lotro going free to play.