When I was a kid, finding myself with few friends and no father, brothers or sisters, I naturally had a lot of time to pursue whatever interested me in a distraction free manner on pretty much my own schedule.
One of these solitary activities that I could sink hours into was video games. Most kids play video games, but I
mastered video games. I dove deep. If there were 99 secret stars to collect I would methodically get them all over the course of a weekend. I could beat Contra on one life. I could win Mega Man without using any of the boss weapons. Don't even get me started on Street Fighter 2. I was and still am pretty damn good at video games. Gwen always gets mad when I beat a game on Friday that I bought on Tuesday.
After 20 years of beating games, there's not a ton of excitement when you see those final credits roll. I think there must be hidden legions of veteran gamers like me because now that we're actually old enough to be producing our own games, a whole new vibe is emerging.
These are games that can't be beaten. They exist simply to be played. The first big move in this direction was The Sims. For the first time a big mainstream game had no pressure, no time limit, and was focused on creation and sustaining rather than conquering. A few other notable games around this time included Animal Crossing, in which your objective was to make friends, keep your town clean, and decorate your house, Harvest Moon, in which you literally spent the whole game watering and harvesting vegetables to be sold at market.
With the advent of the current-gen systems, this unbeatable game genre has really come into its own. There are the music games such as Rock Band, which is basically full ensemble karaoke, Little Big Planet, which takes you from being the little guy running around the level to the actual level designer. Even games that can be "beaten" such as GTA4, Fallout 3 and Fable 2 have switched the focus from completing the game to experiencing the game world. No one plays these games to win them. They play to have an experience in the game's world. This is called "emergent gameplay" in the video games industry.
Recently I've really been loving a little Xbox Arcade game called "A Kingdom for Keflings." The outline of the game is that you are a giant trying to help a community of little people called Keflings to build their kingdom. You can direct the Keflings to do things around town, or do things yourself. How you divide the labor and lay out the town is entirely up to you. There is no time limit, and there's no dying. There's no way even to make a mistake. You follow the building blueprints, which require different combinations of stone, wood, wool, and crystal, which are mined from the surrounded environment. The gameplay only involves one button, which is used to pick up and put down materials or the Keflings themselves. The only goal is to get to the final blueprint of the Castle.
What seems like a shallow and boring game mechanic is incredibly compelling. Absent the constraints of a job and hygeine, I could play this game for days at a time. And like most of these emergent games there is so much to be learned about the real world from these brief forays into a crafted reality.
What has struck me most about A Kingdom for Keflings is its perhaps inadvertent environmental message. You start the game surrounded by trees, rocks, sheep, and crystals. As you send Keflings out to harvest raw materials, you see very little environmental impact at first. An individual Kefling isn't capable of doing much by himself, so the treelines stay intact, the rocky outcroppings remain contoured, and the sheep numbers stay constant.
But soon a funny thing happens. You get involved in making your city. You let the Keflings do the grunt work while you spend time around the Town Square crafting the Mayor's house and other little buildings that offer you some small rewards. And of course the more successful you are in your city building the more Keflings you can create. (In a too-cute touch, to add more Keflings you must first build a house and then add a giant heart to it. Quite literally, no house is complete until you add love)
Things get complicated quickly. No longer do you need plain old rock to build. You need cut stones. So the rock goes through a special building before it can be used. Later you must use brick to build, which requires a further step past the cut stone. Which is all to say that after a few minutes you're spending the bulk of your time creating systems in which the Keflings are carrying things from place to place so that you can get enough of the right materials to build the next thing on your march to the castle. The fun of the game is figuring out how to manage your building location and Kefling workforce to get to the next building as smoothly as possible.
Every once in a while you might take a walk outside of the main area to look for special items that further your progress. These walks are often surprising. Where are all the trees? Didn't there used to be a big pile of stones here? What happened to the sheep? Those Keflings you set to work at the start of the game have been harvesting natural resources the whole time, and while any one of them has no discernable impact on the world, the collective group quickly strips the landscape clean. As a result, the Keflings must go further and further afield in order to get the stones and trees that started out right on your doorstep. But you don't notice it much, because your city is also expanding into the empty space left by the harvested resources.
I found this a very humbling experience when I played through A Kingdom for Keflings the first time. I had no intention of stripping the land clean when I started building my kingdom. But by getting so wrapped up in the evolution of the city I became disconnected from the original resources, and thus didn't notice that they were steadily dissapearing.
In the real world, we tend to think of the environment being despoiled by at worst evil corporate interests and at best ignorant native peoples. We seem to think that the destruction of rainforests, overfishing of oceans, and damming of rivers is done by bad people with shortsighted and greedy intentions.
In truth there are no environment boogeymen. The loggers and strip-miners are as innocent as the Keflings I dispatched to chop wood for my city hall and cottage. They are just cutting the one tree in front of them, because there is a need for it. And this pressure comes from the giants like me, living in the city, worrying over how to build the new Stone Cutter so I can make the Brick Masonry so I can build the Factory so I can finally build the Castle.
I saw in Morocco how the Berbers would cut down the precious few trees left because there was no other source of firewood. Why did they need so much firewood? To keep their new enlarged houses warm. Why were they living in larger houses? Because they had bigger families. Why did they want bigger families? Because that's just what you DO.
In a Kingdom for Keflings, no one ever asks why exactly these little people want a castle so badly. What will they do with it once it's complete? Have a party? Live out the remainder of their days Maypole dancing? The game ends at the castle, but I have a feeling that if it kept going the Keflings would start to eye the valley over with all its trees and primitive Keflings and start asking you to construct catapults and armories with which to invade it with.
And how about us modern types? Why do we insist that a healthy economy must grow 5% every year without fail? What does having an economy that's 5% bigger do for anyone? So we can have 5% more stuff? What 5% of new stuff is going to change our lives in any way? So our kids can be happier and wealthier? Why? Are we not wealthy enough? Does anyone seriously think that having even more stuff surrounding them will make our kids happier? Perhaps we seek to endlessly grow because that's just what you DO.
Last year China completed it's controversial Three Gorges Dam to supply its population with hydroelectricity. Whole ecosystems were destroyed as the course of the Yangtze river was forever altered. All the blame fell on the sinister Chinese government which carelessly "raped the land" in its thirst for progress.
But step back, and ask why China had the resources and motivation to take on such a massive civil works project. Because China is awash in more money than it knows what to do with. And where did that money come from? Manufacturing all those Xboxes, Ipods and Macbooks on which environmentalists rail against China on. Why do we need a new Ipod model every year? Why do we need to carry around 8 gigs of music everywhere? Why do we need even more cutting edge graphics on the next Playstation? Why do we think it's perfectly natural to only pay 15 dollars for a coffee-maker at Walmart? Why do we expect continuing technological and lifestyle improvement year after year after year? Because that's just what we DO.
I can think of only one other system that insists on endless growth no matter what the consequences for the environment it lives in. And that is the cancer cell.
We're not bad people. Almost everyone I know wants to protect our planet. But it's those million unaware decisions we make everyday that will do us in. Responsibilty starts with you. None of our hands are clean. Join me this year in affirming what to any outside observer is completely obvious;
"I have plenty. I am happy."
