Game Theory: Summa Contra Sims
Posted 10/01/09 at 11:45:44 AM by Thomas McDonald
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Long ago, I came to the conclusion that The Sims was designed for Someone Else. I don’t know who. Hottentots, perhaps.
I played through The Sims 3 with awe, respect…and profound boredom. It’s a brilliant piece of work, and if God is kind I’ll never have to play it again this side of Purgatory.
Meanwhile, I’ve been returning to Prototype. I like Prototype. I also liked it when it was called Spider-Man 2 and Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. If a game is worth playing once, it’s worth playing two more times with different character models.
Games are all about wish-fulfillment and power fantasies. Some people are content to wield their mighty power to get three gems in a row. Others would prefer to jump 10 stories in the air and punch a helicopter out of the sky. If you have the opportunity to do the latter, I have no idea why you’d choose to do the former, but people are strange.
Adult male gamers tend to follow the groove of their childhood fantasies into adulthood. As a kid, my daydreams tended toward Conan, Professor Challenger, the Six Million Dollar Man, and G.I. Joe. (Also: I wanted a pet werewolf.) If someone makes a game in which a muscular Cimmerian gets fitted for a cybernetic arm with kung-fu grip and leads his Adventure Team into a jungle swarming with dinosaurs that time forgot, I’d never leave the house. Until then, Prototype will do fine.
My childhood fantasies never ran toward being, say, an interior decorator or a guy who humps his way to a crummy job and then home to a barely furnished tract house every day. That’s actually the polar opposite of “fantasy.” Some people call it “reality,” or perhaps just “life.” Others call it The Sims 3.
I’m baffled when people deride a certain piece of art or entertainment as “mere escapism.” What the hell else is it supposed to be? You may escape into high-minded flights of the intellect or emotional insight, or into a place where a man in a loincloth chokes a T-Rex with his mighty pneumatic hand, but you are escaping. I’d rather not spend those precious moments of escape redecorating someone else’s make-believe house.
Thomas L. McDonald has been covering games for 17 years. He is Editor-at-Large of Games Magazine.
So basically...
Submitted by quantumnerd on Fri, 10/02/2009 - 9:38am
Vary the gameplay up, have a good story, and you've got a great game?
Second Paragraph
Submitted by jwalch.hawk on Thu, 10/01/2009 - 6:19pm
I absolutely love the second paragraph - great, hilarious writing there.
Kind of an Ayn Randian/National Socialist approach to gaming?
Submitted by Zazubovich on Thu, 10/01/2009 - 11:40am
Nietzsche's Will to Power? More likely "I'm in a Boat!!"
I think a lot of games, indeed the vast majority, suffer from "me tooism" and the elevation of pretty graphics over content and replayability. Count the Diablo clones and first person shooters based on three themes: scifi shootemup, playing army, and OMG Zombies. Remember playing army or cowboys in the park with cap guns? Then you're probably one of the older people here. Generation Y never played outside, and cops shoot kids with cap guns.
Diablo, Harpoon, and a few others have great replayability because they randomize or have the ability to present different opponent logic. Quake, for example, was the first seriously awesome online multiplayer FPS, and had bots as well. Novalogic's voxelicious atrocities still can be fun to play because you can get online and cross bullets with some guy in Rotterdam or Moscow, some of whom never saw Rambo and thought that was an appropriate tactical model.
Few games (Prototype clearly is one) are really about acting out your adolescent fantasies, or that component of the game is inherent in the fact that you're interested enough to play it. Simulations force you to deal with the realities of a set of circumstances, to greater and lesser degrees; it seems most games are less simulations and more arcade shootemups now thanks to consoles, with lots of rail shooters (e.g., classic flight sims vs. HAWX, Quake vs. Fear). These are too much like going to work as well. Dance Dance Revolution and many Wii games, for example, are like some kind of bizarre training for factory work with Japanese labor principles included.
But some games aren't just about will to power or realistic simulation or wily opponents. Mechwarrior 2 and Heavy Gear I/II combined all of those things well: driving a giant robot with resource management and strategy and the possibility that your opponents would be smarter or better or faster than you. Novalogic's Delta Force series, despite some shortcomings of Voxelspace, likewise rewarded these three skill sets. I'm hoping the next Mechwarrior will return to that model, after Microsoft pooped all over M4.
Submitted by TimberWolf on Thu, 10/01/2009 - 2:40pm
I keep my old IBM aptevia around for when ever i get the urge to destroy things in MW2. :)
I think the game play in The
Submitted by lunchbox73 on Thu, 10/01/2009 - 11:26am
I think the game play in The Sims games has always been boring but I enjoy building and furnishing the houses. After that it gets dull really fast. I'm still waiting for a new Sim City. Where is it?!?
Same frickin page
Submitted by Modred189 on Thu, 10/01/2009 - 9:29am
Tom, you and me, we're on the same page here.
First, regarding the Sims. Escapism, for me, is just that: escaping from the boring events and stressful situations of real life. Escaping to deal with someone else's eerily similar, but tragically more simple-to-solve issues is not fun.
Now, Prototype. Why is it such a good game? It's not the graphics, that's for sure. The story is well done, but not as gripping, as say, half Life2. No. It's being able to jump off of the Empire State Building, glide towards central park, and elbow-drop onto a tank, blowing it up and tossing surrounding cars and pedestrians into the air in a cloud of destruction and cracked concrete. That's EPIC. That's escaping.
Their's supose to be
Submitted by nekollx on Thu, 10/01/2009 - 8:41am
Their's supose to be substance to a game?
------------------------------
Coming soon to Lulu.com --Tokusatsu Heroes--
Five teenagers, one alien ghost, a robot, and the fate of the world.
Submitted by Tony_Wilson on Thu, 10/01/2009 - 7:55am
I do wish there was more substance to games nowadays. Cool new graphics are great, but if the story is horrible it'll get boring real quickly. This mostly pertains to single player games, not FPS.
I agree. MMO's have become
Submitted by AntiHero on Thu, 10/01/2009 - 10:25am
I agree. MMO's have become tasteless and dull, as a quest to be the best, but there's little to no Lore. Star Wars the Old Republic will probably be the only mmo that does this. As for shooters, they've been going downhill. Resident Evil games tend to keep their stories up, but we only have had 2 in 5 years. Halo 1 was great, but 2 and 3 went stait dwn the tubes for what the developers THINK everyone should want, Multiplayer. I don't care about multiplayer until i beat the single player, which teaches me tricks i can use IN multiplayer. So really, the deal here is that with solid, substantial single player, you get your multiplayer. Call of Duty 4 took maps from the single player to make multiplayer, and that game is the second most popular mmo out there.
Now I'll admit, nobody reads the quests in games like World of Warcraft, but I do read the ones for dungeons and such, because those have stories in them, and when you go places and find books on the tables or floors, i read those, because they add to the experience.
The gaming experience has been cheapened by overdoing graphics to beat out someone else's game, and really, that's not how it should be. I don't care if i can blow somebody apart with a shotgun, that's not realistic, nor is it really that fun. FEAR got so repetitive with stuff like that, and the blood that hung in the air after doing that was irritating. Give me simple death animations, in turn for some better storytelling. Historical FPS games are dull nowadays too, nobody wants the same game 5 times, Call of Duty 1, UO, 2, 3, WaW, Medal of honor (however many of those there are, i know there's a lot) get dull because you can only focus on a 5 year part of history for so long before you get to the point where it's just the same things with different graphics, handed to the general public to think that it's a "whole new game". All in all, it's led me to never buying a game without a demo first, to see if there will be good storytelling. MMORPG's and RPG's are different, but not so bad. Good stoytelling gives good substance. It is nice to have prety landscapes and such, but you NEED to keep the pler busy, because one can only stare at the grass, tree's and water for so long.
I don't like Microsoft, I associate with it.
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