Gaming Made Me

The writers of Rock Paper Shotgun just finished a series on what games made them gamers. For the final installment, they asked developers and other critics to contribute their own stories. I wrote one up although my examples tend to show how I became a designer, not necessarily a gamer:

Legacy of the Ancients: Although heavily influenced by the Ultima series, LotA was a lot more accessible and had an interesting twist – no experience points! A few quests rewarded the player with better attributes, and equipment of could be upgraded, but I never had to wander the wilderness gathering up XP from hapless monsters. After slogging through all of Bard’s Tale over a period of months, playing LotA was a revelation to me. The focus was on exploration and adventure, not grinding, so much so that as soon as I beat it, I sat back down and finished it again in under eight hours. I learned from LotA that we don’t need to make players “earn” their fun with camouflaged treadmills.

Seven Cities of Gold:
I was a Spanish conquistador discovering the New World – except it wasn’t the Earth that we already know. Instead it was a new one, randomly generated inside my computer – different enough to surprise but similar enough to feel real. Further, the suggestive allure of my Commodore 64 spinning for multiple minutes creating new continents and mountain ranges and river valleys was immense. It was the future, and I knew it. I learned from Seven Cities that the best game content didn’t need to be hand-written.

Adventure Construction Set: I finally got to make a world of my own! Too bad it’s locked away on a floppy somewhere in my parent’s basement, but the experience of building my own little game definitely made me dream of doing it for real someday. More importantly, ACS showed me the value of a data-driven design – new games could be built entirely on top of a fixed code-base. The design space was defined by which parameters could be altered, which raises an interesting question I am still trying to answer about who it the primary author of a game – the programmer who exposes the variables or the designer who fills them in?

5 thoughts on “Gaming Made Me

  1. Wow… ACS, that brings back some memories. I must have a dozen floppies (also in my parent’s basement) filled with the stuff I built.

  2. OMG! I subscribe to your blog and love reading your posts.

    When I saw that you talked about Legacy of the Ancients my jaw dropped.
    Legacy of the Ancients is probably my favorite games of all time.
    The atmosphere, the epic feeling of it, the pace, it was all awesome. I’m super happy to hear that others feel this way 🙂

    I also had Adventure Construction Set, but I didn’t play it very much.

  3. thanks Robert… yeah, LotA is very underrated. It was not part of a series, so I think it just fell off the radar. However, I often do wonder if I should try out Legend of Blacksilver (the unofficial sequel) on an emulator.

  4. @Soren

    I loved Legend of Blacksilver too!
    LotA is better in my opinion but Blacksilver is 100% worth your time.

    One day I hope to create a LotA/Blacksilver ‘type’ game. I’ve even been throwing around the idea in my head to do it all in javascript like I did with world of solitaire.

    You should not delay, and play Blacksilver 🙂
    I found that I enjoyed it best when I got some graph paper and mapped the dungeons.

  5. Pingback: Gaming Made Me Too - Zack Hiwiller

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