This post is by guest blogger Amanda.
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Categories: Commentary
Tags: adventure, rpg, sim
When I first read Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game in the mid-nineties, I lusted after the open-ended fantasy game Ender plays. Ender plays a lot of games in that book (hence the title): epic space-battle games, real-life high-tech capture-the-flag games, even good old-fashioned locker-room showdowns. But the game I wanted to play was the one that served as a teaching tool-slash-pressure valve so Ender wouldn’t break down under the burden of saving the Earth from alien invasion.
When the game begins, Ender can walk wherever he pleases. This alone was enough to floor me. (At that point King’s Quest V was probably my favorite game.) At first he just walks around and looks at everything, playing with a mouse and watching some children go down the slide at the playground. Things quickly start to get ugly–the children turn into wolves that kill him–and soon he’s faced with challenges like The Giant’s Drink. He comes to a pass blocked by a giant, a table and two glasses of potions. The giant tells him one potion is poisonous and the other is not. Ender must choose one and drink it before the giant will let him pass by. No matter how many times Ender tries, he always picks the poisonous one and watches his character dissolve into a puddle or burn to a crisp while the giant laughs. Finally Ender gets fed up, jumps on the giant’s face, rips his eye out and kills him.
I think Ender’s Game cemented my interest in gaming. I had a feeling if I was patient enough, one day somebody would make a game like this that I could really play. So I kept plugging away at King’s Quest and The Seventh Guest and bided my time.
You can do anything, but lay off of my blue suede shoes.Fast-forward to 2006 and voila, we have Oblivion. I can dabble in the main quest. I can do stuff for the mage’s guild. I can levitate books and drop them on people’s heads. I can break into houses and steal every single pair of blue suede shoes in town. I can punch random people and ride away on my horse.
Oh, look! An alien nooboo!If I get tired of Oblivion I can go play The Sims 2 for awhile and create a cult of alien worshippers who spend all their time watching the skies, trying to get impregnated with an alien fetus. Or I can create a happy nuclear family in a fishbowl.
Open-ended gaming–or at least a sandbox/free play mode–is everywhere you look now: Animal Crossing, The Movies, City Life, the upcoming Spore. Even games that have an ultimate goal, like Katamari Damacy, often have such lax regulations (you have 45 minutes to make a katamari this big!) that you barely notice them.
Unfortunately, all this open-ended gaming has spoiled me. After I played Morrowind I picked up Neverwinter Nights based on lots of good reviews. I liked that it was a D&D game and thought the voice acting was decent. But the “clear this section of the grid, then move on” strategy drove me crazy. They tried to create the semblance of a free-form game–they even included a map in the box, a la Morrowind–but I wasn’t fooled. I never finished the game. All that grid-clearing just got to be too predictable. Perhaps if the storyline had been a little bit more original, I would have felt compelled to see it through to the end. (The terrible inventory system deserves a thumbs-down as well.) I may be just curious enough to pick up Neverwinter Nights 2, however.
I think there will always be a place for goal-oriented, clear-the-grid games. Some people like to unwind by running around town like a crazy person while others like the sense of accomplishment that comes from completing checklists of goals and saving the universe. (Even though I prefer freeform, if a game has a compelling storyline I don’t care what the medium is, I’m hooked.) Rather than free-form being the flash-in-the pan, the exception to the rule, I think it’s the next big thing in gaming. Depending on how well Spore lives up to its hype, we’ll probably see a wave of new freeform games, many of them crap, some of them good. I’d love to see a Star Trek game that would let you build your own ship and crew and see how they hold up on a mission. How well would a crew function under a dictatorial captain with anger management issues? Would the crew on a ship full of beauty parlors, discos and coffeehouses be too distracted to handle combat? Any franchise that spawns massive amounts of fan fiction would be a great choice for a freeform game. Harry Potter? Star Wars?
Jin must never find out.Until they release the LOST sim of my dreams, I’ll work on developing my alien cult and adding to my collection of blue suede shoes.