The system is so pervasive that exceptions become notable. Twenty years on most games don't even ask us to do our own saving, and instead have automatic checkpoints providing an unseen safety net against loss of time and status. I recently replayed some of the original Resident Evil, and heard Cox's words on writing floating back to me as I saved my progress with a typewriter. The Nintendo quit screen message "Everything not saved will be lost" has become a pop-philosophy meme: "We accidentally meant something!" But really it meant something all along, underlining the centrality of incremental advancement to video game structure. Look around, though, and it's obvious that other games, most games, work to this principle too. Destiny is a particularly good example because it's about humanity's entitlement to the stars - what British science-fiction author John Wyndham called "the Outward Urge" - but the actual game is about grinding and levelling, a hard-coded interpretation of the progress-through-checkpoints system that its wider fiction leans on. Or, more specifically, the idea that games - post-coin op games, shaped for the cosy couch market - are modelled on the almost-invisible-to-us course of human development. This is where we came in: with the idea that games might be an expression of the human condition. Then the second thing I thought was: "This is basically like checkpoints". The first thing I thought when I heard this was: "What if dogs could do this?"
tl dr: Not starting from scratch every day is what makes us possible.
Cox's beautiful phrase is that writing "freed the acquisition of knowledge from the limits of human memory", although a recent reddit showerthought post puts it almost as well: "School is meant to bring new humans up to speed on humanity's progress so far." It's a staggering, obvious-once-you-grasp it concept. The defining mechanism of human development, of civilization, is language, and being able to store and pass on our accumulated knowledge through stories. Of course the reason that early homo sapiens couldn't become astronauts is that everything we are and have achieved is built on the achievements of others. It could even be an astronaut." (Or, I thought, a Guardian). Cox explains that our ancestors from around 200,000 years ago had brains much like ours, so that if you could take one and give it a modern education ".there's no reason it couldn't achieve everything a modern child could achieve. The first episode charts humanity's journey from ape man to space man, and in it Cox is on the scene as a trio of cosmonauts return to Earth after six months on the International Space Station, their singed octagonal module - an object that has actually touched space - a dead ringer for those strewn around Destiny's moon. I thought about Destiny and progress while I was watching Professor Brian Cox's new series, Human Universe, which is currently airing on BBC 2. Your man Carl would totally have rolled a Warlock. What brings the things that are keeping me playing Destiny together - what makes farming ascendant shards somehow the same as admiring the cold ruins of a moon base - is one idea: progress. These are our lunar modules on the moon, our spindly scaffold tech. This is the thing, really: that Destiny's science fiction is local, and its future seems reachable. So by fiction what I mean is the one-shot over-arching stuff - the restoration of mankind, and the reclamation of a future that is a recognisable extension of ours. I use the word fiction instead of story because it's fairly obvious at this point that Destiny doesn't have a story. The other reason I keep playing is that there's something I love about Destiny's fiction. Being aware of the ultimate futility of this doesn't blunt the compulsion for me (or indeed for my friends: an email I received this very morning from my Raid group - because that's a thing - reads: "Definitely up for getting this done - I need to increase the potency of my internet space man, guys, and that hasn't happened for a couple of days.") I'm chemically predisposed to respond compulsively to mechanisms which provide randomised rewards on the way to advancement along an arbitrary scale. The first is the most obvious - it is the grind. Two things are keeping me playing Destiny at this point, although they are really the same thing. Also, games might be an expression of the futility of the human condition. Here are some recent thoughts of mine: I am playing too much Destiny.
0 kommentar(er)
