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.
Format: PC
Year: 2000
It may look clunky as hell thanks to the original Unreal engine, but Deus Ex was a pioneer in videogames because it gave the player so many choices to make. It resulted in one of the deepest gaming experiences of the time, because it went to great effort to show the consequences of those choices. The story was spread across many ‘hub’ levels, giving you total freedom to approach your objectives whichever way you wanted, aided by an RPG style upgrade tree that you invested in as you played. Wanna finish it without killing a single soul? That is entirely possible. Prefer to tool up with a rocket launcher and just murder your way to the end? Nothing could stop you. Your NPC allies would respond differently back in the Unatco base, depending on what you did out in the field. This level of responsiveness was unparalleled for a long time, to the point that even if you walked into the ladies toilets, your boss would scold you for it during the mission debrief later on. It was many little moments like that which made the game so memorable for me.
One of my all-time favourite gaming memories is playing Haunting Ground with my mates at the flat in Baldock for 16 hours straight. It was me holding the controller for almost all of those 16 hours. It’s a bit obscure, so if you haven’t heard of it, it’s a survival horror game by Capcom, in which you play as a pretty little fragile girl called Fiona, who must escape from a huge labyrinthine castle. Oh, and you can’t fight. Your only option is to run away and hide from the nasty people that are out to get you. You do have a companion throughout though, the best dog in gaming, a white German Shepherd called Hewie.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a depressing game. It’s epic and majestic, but undoubtedly bleak. Luckily, it also has some hilarious moments timed with comedic perfection, which somehow never feel out of place. It’s a credit to the writers, and the performances of the voice actors. These are my favourite funny moments of Expedition 33.
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