Imagine if real life had an achievement system. Imagine if you could earn ‘points’ for helping around your neighbourhood, which you could then spend on various rewards, such as movie tickets, or a free flight, or a brand new tv. Different acts would have to be valued and assigned a certain reward. Litter picking could grant a small amount of points whereas volunteering at a homeless shelter would surely deserve a bigger prize. The most startling thing about this is that I may not have to imagine this for much longer. Apparantly, my local council is trying to finalise plans to introduce this system sometime in the near future.
They’re hoping to team up with a well established points system such as Nectar, which rewards customers for shopping in a select number of stores. I have one of these cards myself, and so long as I buy my groceries at Sainsburys, fill up at BP, and even buy my new games via the Nectar website, I’ll earn points. Now, the best thing about this is that I’m going to do these things anyway, so what’s the harm in taking an extra couple of seconds to swipe my Nectar card at the checkout and earn a few points? Once I have enough, I’ll be able to buy a new HD TV!
It’s game logic. All good game designers know that we enjoy any game that rewards us for playing it. They have been doing this for a while now, dishing out trophies and achievements for completing any number of often bonus or optional tasks, but are we really on the verge of applying a similar system to real life? Think about the implications this could have on the way you live. I already hate the way achievements tempt me to play my game a certain way, now I’m going to have to resist the same urges to live my life a certain way too? Cripes. The scariest part is I can see more benefits to such a system being introduced than not! Picture it: chavs actually using litter bins instead of the gutter. Sure, they aren’t becoming pleasant citizens out of the goodness of their heart, but we will still have slightly tidier streets. There’s surely no downside to giving people a helping hand in suggesting what the good thing to do is, and rewarding them for it. And of course none of it is compulsory – if you don’t do these good deeds, you won’t get your points.
Is this right though? Who’s going to value each act? How many points is my neighbour Frank going to get for picking up his dog’s turd off the pavement, compared to me recycling my glass at the bottle bank? Will we start demanding points for every little thing we do? Theres definitely something sinister about this whole thing, even though the benefits seem so obvious.
This entire concept was brought to my attention by a writer I’ve known since I was at school, called Max Barry. He’s funny, he appreciates games and writes good books. Go check out this amusing article he did for The Guardian, which is all about the potential for a perfect society built on points.
Dome Keeper is an excellent little spin on the tower defense game, in which you play the role of a jetpacking miner defending his base from swarms of aliens, whilst searching for a hidden relic buried somewhere beneath him. And now, with this huge free update, you can play it with friends.
I want to talk about Cloudpunk, a game where you get to be a flying-car delivery driver in a futuristic cyberpunk city. Its world is an incredible achievement of environmental design, and while the gameplay itself may be basic, the city of Nivalis is a thing of beauty to behold. Nivalis is built out of hundreds of hand-modelled cuboid buildings; there’s nothing procedural about it. Apparently it took 3 years for the devs to design the city, and it really shows.
I do love me some quality pixel art, and it doesn’t get much better than this. Cast n Chill is a cozy side-scrolling fishing game by small indie dev team Wombat Brawler, with absolutely gorgeous visuals. It’s simple to play, and you you can dip in and out of it at your leisure, making it a fine addition to our collection of coffee break games.
A friend on Facebook posted a list of their favourite movies, listed in the year they came out, which I immediately followed up with my own list. There’s only one rule: you must pick your favourite for all of the years that you’ve been alive, and you can only pick one per year. I decided to give it a go for videogames. It’s a lot trickier than you might think! Some years have featured an abundance of incredible titles, whereas other years it’s easy to pick out a clear winner in your mind. So, without further ado, here’s my list of favourite games, one per year since I was born. This was insanely difficult…
The latest trailer for Dune Part Three just dropped. It looks rather splendid.
Return to Castle Wolfenstein introduced me to the world of PC gaming. I have my uncle Dave to thank for this. He used to play two games, Wolfenstein and Fighter Ace, and I loved going round his house because he had a gaming PC, curiously built by a company called Gateway… The PC was something so alien and awesome to me that it made my N64 seem like the toy it always was (I still love you, my 64). Wolfenstein became Enemy Territory, a free standalone multiplayer component, but it was the ‘original’ Return to Castle Wolfenstein that dragged me into PC gaming, and I’ve never looked back since.
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