I was quite amused by this take on gaming by a cat named Rabbit. He essentially says that games make him work and that's not what games are supposed to do. They're supposed to allow you to have fun, so why keep some large portion of what's distributed undiscovered and unplayed simply because a gamer hasn't gone through the ardor of levelling up. It's a complaint I've felt but it never really itched me enough to scratch in public. Now after some thought, I think there something else to be said. First, to wit:
"I play games to escape. To go somewhere else. But our industry has so ingrained this concept of 'earning' our fun that the best is somehow always saved for last. Like modern day Puritans, we've convinced ourselves that we are not worthy of that for which we've already paid. Sinners in the hands of an angry god, we don't deserve our fun until we pay in blood."
Like Rabbit, I'm a gamer with a job, which is to say specifically, I am not one of those strange individuals whose 'life' consists of levelling up and destroying other online players and mouthing off about it. Like in any competitive endeavor gaming has its share or people who make a point of addressing the humanity of others strictly through the prism of the game itself. If you've ever been to a bank teller who looks at you differently depending upon how much money you have in your account, you know what I mean.
So I'm thinking about Rabbit's gripe and then I think about kids online who spend half their time using cheat codes, glitching and modding. Sure it might be the programmer's fault for allowing cheats, glitches and mods, but the gamer who hacks the game is destructive of the spirit of the game. These are not the kinds of people I want to game with or spend any time with in real life. I prefer folks who enjoy playing by the rules, even if, and probably especially if that means work.
I just learned, for example, in Oblivion, that there is a cheat. You essentially can kill a particular individual in such a way that his pocket never empties of gold. He has about 50 pieces of gold, and so if you kill him 1000 times, you can 'earn' 50,000 in gold, which is enough to buy weapons of mass destruction and beat the game in no time. BTW, I've spent about 95 hours in the game and I'm level 25. I've finished about 38 quests and generally had a ball doing so.
What makes Oblivion in particular an interesting game vis a vis its hewing to the Puritan standard is how well its challenges match your skills all through the game. In a way the game is learning along with you. If you go to Black Dog Camp when you are level 1, there will probably be a wolf there to challenge you. You can beat a wolf with an ordinary iron sword. If you return to the same place in the game at level 20, there will probably be 2 bears and an evil wizard.
What I can't stand, I say repeating myself, is listening to knuckleheads bragging about how they breezed through Black Dog Camp by jumping up and down in the fire three times so that the bad guys disappear through a glitch in the softwear. See what I'm saying?
Now there is a game that has made good sense of Rabbit's complaint - since surely it has occurred to game developers before. That game is my other favorite, Project Gotham Racing 3. In the prior version, you essentially had to beat every AI driven car in every race on every track to get the fastest car in the game. At the time it was the Cerbera Speed Twelve. This time around every track is unlocked and you can buy the fastest car in short order. The trade off is apparent. In this case it's the Ferrari F50GT. Like the Cerbera, it has got quirky power and speed, so it takes some time to learn how to control it. In other words, newbs will crash it into every wall as will cheaters. In the first version, there was a way to purchase a download of the Cerbera. When we witnessed people crashing it, we knew they were newbs.
The point is simply this, in sophisticated games, you can tell who has earned their way up and who has cheated their way up. For single player games I might concur with Rabbit's sentiment, but online as in real life, I prefer playing with people who work.
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