#overthinkinggamer

     Pandemic has to be one of the most peculiar board games I have ever played. This puts it in company with such games as Dominion, Munchkins and Don’t Wake Daddy all of which are so odd in their own ways. How pandemic most sticks out is how it relies entirely on cooperation in play, the opponent is the game. This is an easy concept to grasp for any video gamer, however seeing how the game works without AI to guide the games moves, only luck of the draw or our intervention, is just fascinating to me. I can still remember how exciting it was to brain storm with people, trying to come up with the best moves to prevent “out breaks” or cure cities, and to find the cures to the four main diseases; black red blue and yellow. Move here to clear theses block get to this point so I can give you the color cards you need to cure the disease, but remember don’t let more than three block gather in one city or else out break. Amazing how little in game we actually used the words “disease” “epidemic” or “patient” nor did we ever really talk about the people in the cities being sick more often than not the phrases we would use would be “every time something goes wrong it’s Tehran, why Tehran” we called cities by their names and referred to them like they were opposing characters as unhelpful children getting in our way of collecting the cards we needed.

      Ralph Koster, one game theorist said that “People tend to dress up game systems with some fiction. Designers put artwork on them that is suggestive of some real world context.” He further goes to express a feeling that these “fictions” are just “side dishes” that they don’t serve the game at its core. Until I played pandemic I found it hard to even see what he meant but thinking back, as I played through the game the only connection I made to the theme of an epidemic were some of the terms used to refer to actions in the game, and even then I never thought of them on the level serious world diseases. Only cubes on a map that I had to remove, it did not surprise me then to learn that pandemic had a re-skin in a zombie game Pandemic-Z, as the theme, and the “Story” have no real effect on the game play or how I remember playing.

I did not grow up fully enveloped in the gaming community, most of my early gaming years were spent with at most one or two games, Spyro and PutPut were the faces I most knew. It wasn’t until late in the life of the Xbox that I finally had my own console and not until the Xbox 360 that I finally fully dove into the world of video games. As such I never had much of an experience with the more classic examples of game history, I have never really played a Mega Man game, I hadn’t experienced super Mario brothers until long after Halo 3, and I have never heard of characters like “Simon Belmont” or “Bill Rizer” and yet they all seem so familiar. As I play through the game Super Mario Crossover I am struck most by how familiar it all feels to me. The music and map I do recognize from the super Mario game but as I am cycled through different characters, as I change their skins and weapons and the enemies they face, it all feels very familiar. Perhaps it is how everything here follows the caricature visual style, so they all seem to inhabit the same graphical world. Perhaps because their games all followed the 2D side scroller perspective, o their controls and movements all match the world around them, in fact as I play them I see how they are all so similar for all these reasons and how they can be so different. I start off with Mario a character I am very familiar with I jump and stop in ways I recognize until I fall of a cliff, suddenly I respawn as an entirely new character named Ryu. I have no clue who this character is or how he works, I quickly learn he can’t stomp in the same fashion as Mario and as I miss judge a jump and see that I will soon fall to my death on top of a koopa, I look away, but the usual death music doesn’t play, when I turn back to the screen Ryu is holding onto a cliff edge immediately above the threat, this site so reflective of how I felt causes me to laugh.

Although all these characters have such a similar feel to them even though they seem to match the world of the super Mario brothers, they don’t quite fit. Their moves do allow them to move through the world but its never the same game, and for someone who never experienced the originals there is no way for me to figure out each character without long periods of trial and error. The world feels too much like super Mario brothers in the look and sound and the way the enemies behave, and though some of this is up to me to change around and play with many characters feel so out of place in the way the map is designed. My weirdest experience of the first level is when I was given a character who could double jump and nothing else, I found myself moving in ways that the enemies and the map just couldn’t deal with as I could out jump any threat, but never really beat them. I wanted this character in a more vertical world with less enemies but with enemies who moved around much more, it just didn’t feel right in the super Mario world.

I want him to be handsome, and intelligent, scratch that I want him to be the most intelligent person in town, I want him to be an artist and a singer, he will be a scientist, and he will be the goal of all women. When designing a someone in “Sims” I’m not sure if I end up creating what I hope I can help my future child to become, or if I’m just trying to fulfill my perfect fantasy. It’s probably mostly the latter, but then that raises a new question why do I enjoy tormenting this person at times. If I just want to have a “me” that is nothing but happy why don’t I allow him to just sit in front of a TV and eat? Why do I force him to spend time practicing piano, playing chess, going to work doing classes and anything else I can to make him intelligent and creative? Perhaps some part of the way Sims runs, encourages this growth, the desire to become better and smarter, to become not the fantasy of pleasure but a fantasy of success.

A majority of criticism and evaluations on The Sims, has followed a couple of specific ideas. Firstly as has been expressed by the Values at Play group, “The Sims has been said to inculcate materialist values: players are encouraged to earn money, and spend it on acquiring goods” in the book Values at Play, and their essay A Method for Discovering Values in Digital Games. Growing up with the original Sims and Sims 2, I never really understood how you brought in money for a family, and as such I played like it wasn’t an issue, I started the game by looking up whatever code I had to enter to give my family unlimited wealth and then provide them with whatever I had decided that this type of family needed. Was it a family of four, well they need good family rooms dining rooms a play place and a law. Was it a father with a son I had pre-determined would be a genius, than they need a piano and chess set and a smaller house for this prodigy to suddenly emerge from. Latter on I started playing the game without the cheats Id raise some kids making sure they got straight A’s and then send them off to college so they would be able to enter a house already having a good job and a chance to be better off than their parents. Through neither of these ways of playing did this idea of the game being about becoming the richest person and owning the most useless crap ever get through to me. The game gave no obvious rewards for the more expensive stuff besides it working for longer or being slightly better than everything else. In truth the way of tracking experience gained in skills was what dragged me in most, what seemed to be the focal point of the game. A huge congratulation bubble appeared every time you gained a new skill, you could see exactly how far you had come in each of the available skills and the Sims character would show obvious improvement as time went on, and one interesting mechanics choice was how during skill training the Sims iconic gem would disappear and instead become a loading bar. The fact that this huge part of the game would change, combined with how easy it was to observe progress both in a statistical way and a practical way seemed to give huge support to the talent chaser that I was. I almost never bought the huge TV because I was more concerned with maxing my logic skill, I never built a pool (lest I needed to off an annoying character) because my creativity was always so close to perfection.

Of the weeks of time I have spent playing the Valve titles Left For Dead and Left For Dead 2, I have learned the greatest tactics to hold off hordes of simple zombies, I have learned the importance of checking very corner of a room before relaxing my guard, I have learned the intricacies of different types of mutations that may occur in the zombies and how to best deal with these situations based on dozens of different environments and weapons available. However I hadn’t until recently given much of a thought to the real story within the game. Four survivors trying to move across these vast areas, encountering nothing but mazes and antagonistic zombies where ever they look, turning from an unprepared survivor into a team of professional runners and zombie killers.

                As a game that is most supportive of multiple players in communication with each other for survival and eventual escape of the zombie hordes, the actual narrative tends to take a back seat to the stories and adventures of the people playing. And yet the story of the four survivors, Rochelle, Nick, Coach and Ellis never truly disappears, and that I believe is the true strength of Left for Dead’s narrative abilities. The game was designed to allow four friends (traditionally) to get together online and work their way through 5 different campaigns, moving from safe house to safe house until they finally escape. Unlike the original game this sequel actually made majors moves to increase narrative emersion by allowing each campaign to flow into the next, at the end of the first campaign you escape on a helicopter at the beginning of the next the group is stranded and arguing about why they needed to kill a pilot who was turning into a zombie. The characters themselves often give their own opinions of what’s happening or what they have discovered, but only when things suddenly turn against you or have been quiet for a long time, I found myself always excited the moment Ellis would begin one of his long stories of what hid friend Keith once did. However the narrative with the avatars, the reason the world is suddenly infested with zombies the reason these people grouped together is never really explained, however the stories buried in the world give hints to what life was like for other survivors, an attic with a single zombie dressed in gear of a survivor made me stop and look at the walls marked with the number of kills the man had achieved before he finally turned, and I remember spending time in each safe room reading all the graffiti on the walls learning how others moved through this world, but these would always fade away in the middle of combat or when trying to sprint through the puzzle like areas, or when encountering the mutated zombies that were truly threatening. The true strength of the Left For Dead series’ narrative is how it fills in the moments between game play instead of controlling exactly how you have to see the world. While playing through campaigns I felt like I was in a group of eight survivors my three friends and I as the strategic zombie killing adventurer survivors, and the four avatar characters who would break up the monotony of survival with stories arguments and some of the most obvious and ridiculous observations ever made, but they never truly interrupted the stories my friends and I made. I can still remember the times one of my friends and I out ran the most dangerous zombie in the game for over half a map, a feat still talked about amongst the others we play with, we also have developed an ongoing joke from one event where three of the same types of zombies, dubbed boomers, came at us to which I responded “at least they only ever come in groups of three” suddenly we were all filled with the sense of dread and unstoppable laughter when one of our party shouted out “There’s a fourth one. THEY’ER LEARNING!”