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: 2001 – present day
If Return to Castle Wolfenstein was my first date with PC gaming, Battlefield 1942 was when she invited me to meet her parents, and the relationship went to the next level. My god, did I really just write that analogy?
Format: PC
Year: 1999
Here’s another game that was introduced to me by my uncle Dave (who to this day, does the best impression of the monk from the first game out of anyone I know – “WOLOLOOOH!”) Anyway, I learned more history from playing Age of Empires 2 than I ever did in school. I experienced the brutal horde of Attila the Hun as he ravaged old Europe. I followed the rise of El Cid, and helped Ghengis Khan flood across Asia. I can’t remember much else actually, because my mind always turns to making a plague of Persian elephants to send at my enemies, crushing all of their puny houses and stamping their cities into the dust, mwhahaha! Ah man, it’s an absolute classic game, the first strategy game I ever played and thanks to the recent HD remake, is still a lot of fun even 18 years later.
I don’t know many people who played Quantum Break, and nobody ever talks about it anymore, so it must have been rather forgettable for those who did. Even as I write this, two days after blasting my way to the end-credits of the 2016 bombastic time-travelling action romp, I am struggling to remember some of […]
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