GioCities

blogs by Gio

Tagged: personal

šŸŽ® The Last Clockwinder Retrospective

  • Posted in gaming

I played The Last Clockwinder last week, and it changed the way I think about production games.

Factory gamesĀ§

The Steam page describes The Last Clockwinder as a ā€œVR puzzle-automation game.ā€ I like production and automation games. But Iā€™m used to FTB and Factorio and Zachtronics and Universal Paperclip. Iā€™m used to the look automation-production games gravitate towards.

Factorio

Factorioā€™s top-down design invites you to create sprawling factories that completely overtake the landscape. What little detail there is in the landscape is purely mechanical; resources you can extract and process, or enemies you have to either avoid or exploit for more resources.

Positioning the camera to give yourself a comfortable view of the structures you build and the items youā€™re manipulating leaves the actual character as a tiny focal point; more of a crosshair than a character or even an avatar.

Factorio scales enemy difficulty to ā€œpollutionā€ but this is always designed to be overcome, not be a legitimately limiting factor.

Infinfactory

In Infinifactory, youā€™re captured by aliens and forced to engineer efficient factories in exchange for food pellets. Each puzzle takes place in a set of stark, desolate environments. Itā€™s first-person, but you never directly interact with another character; the most you get are notes about how much your predecessors hated it.

As soon as you solve a puzzle, youā€™re presented with a histogram: how could you optimize your solution further? Could you be faster? Use fewer blocks? Are you better than your friends, or falling behind?

Universal Paperclip (gif)

Universal Paperclipā€™s minimalist HTML interface makes it a graphical outlier, but the bare-metal minimally-styled HTML invokes a sense of brutalism that reenforces the gameā€™s theme of efficiency in the pursuit of a goal to the exclusion of everything else.

And then thereā€™s The Last Clockwinder.

The Last ClockwinderĀ§

Itā€™s undeniably hard sci-fi. The first thing you do is arrive in spaceship. Throughout the game youā€™re on the radio with your friend idling in orbit, and the whole story revolves around interplanetary travel.

But then the first thing you see is a tree-patio with a hammock. It almost feels like a treehouse. The purpose of the tree is archival and preservation of rare and culturally significant plants; itā€™s a reserve, and thatā€™s what gives it such importance. Inside the tree is the one room you stay inside for the entire game, and itā€™s a living space.

šŸŽ® Events in games bother me

  • Posted in gaming

I donā€™t like ā€œeventsā€. I donā€™t like it when things are limited with requirements of spacial presence and time. I donā€™t like experiences that only exist in one moment and then can never be relived. I donā€™t like ephemera. I prefer things. Toys I can play with, tools I can use, books I can read, movies I can watch, all at my own discretion. I have agency over my things. The actual lived experience from occurrence to occurrence is always different, of course, but the externalities can be repeated. I love being able to preserve the essence of a thing.

Itā€™s one of the reasons I like computers. Or maybe itā€™s a psychological trait I developed because I had access to computers growing up. It probably is, I think. But either way, I love the purity of digital storage and interface. I love having an environment where experiences can be preserved and replayed at my discretion without my having to make any demands on other people.

And so thatā€™s one of the reasons I love video games. Their mechanics are defined and can be understood and mastered. Their levels are defined and can be understood and mastered. Despite the extreme rates of ā€œchurnā€ ā€” video games go out of print much faster than books or other physical media ā€” the software is digital, and can be saved, stored, and replayed. I can look up the flash games I played as a kid and replay them, exactly as they were, and understand myself a little better for it.

Of course there are exceptions; itā€™s impossible to have a multiplayer game without an implicit demand that other people play with you. When an old game ā€œdiesā€, itā€™s often not because the necessary hosting software is being intentionally withheld, but that there just isnā€™t a pool of people casually playing it like there used to be. Thatā€™s still a loss, and itā€™s sad, but thatā€™s an unavoidable reality, and itā€™s not nearly as complete a loss as a one-off event being over.

So I donā€™t like when games force seasonal events on me. Limited-time events introduce something new, but they also necessitate the inevitable loss of that thing. And that assumes you were playing everything from the start; events introduce content that can be ā€œmissableā€ in a meaningful way, so if youā€™re werenā€™t playing the game at the right time, even if you own the game and finish everything you can access your experience can still be rendered incomplete. One of the things I like about games is that theyā€™re safe, and the introduction of time-based loss compromises that safety.

That constant cycle of stress and pressure to enjoy things before they were lost is one of the main reasons I stopped playing Overwatch. I realized the seasonal events in particular werenā€™t good for me; they turned a game that should have been fun into an obligation that caused me anxiety.

But Iā€™ve been thinking about this lately not because of Overwatch, but because Splatoon 3 is coming out soon. Splatoon isnā€™t nearly as bad as all that, I donā€™t think itā€™s deliberately predatory aside from Nintendoā€™s standard insistence on denying people autonomy. Splatoon 3 invokes that ā€œpeople will stop playing Splatoon 2ā€ loss, but even before that, Splatoon (a game I love) left a bad taste in my mouth because of its events.

āš– Alma Mater

I went to my old university today.1 I wanted to use the library.

It was a strange experience. There were things about my time there I missed, but I didnā€™t miss my time there. There was too much wrong. Ways I didnā€™t fit.

I looked around. It was passing period, and there was a throng of students coming and going both ways. The pavement was nice, new construction. People were laughing and talking and introducing each other.

Was I wrong? Should I be missing this? There is still so much good here. So I asked myself what it was I saw, exactly. And I looked out.