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Things can get pretty intense in online-multiplayer games. With no regulation comes unmitigated bitterness and salt, rage and shattered glass—it’s just too easy to throw stones from behind a screen. And so it’s no wonder why, when home over summer break, I was hesitant to start down this toxic path.
As we sit on the verge of an AI revolution and our emails autocomplete as our art is being generated, it’s easy to feel that the human experience is losing a shred of its aura. Because after being thoroughly throttled by bots on the chessboard, and now reading villanelles penned by poet ChatGPT, we of humble humanity are posed with a question: What do we still have over the machines?
There’s a key in the corner and a locked drawer center stage. The logic, it seems, is quite simple. A mechanism, a promise and so one goes to turn the bolt—expectant to find, in this drawer, answers.
Many games allow their players to be Gods. They tune their worlds to the pitch of our whistles and fill our sails with the boon of strong winds. They give us vast oceans, a drive and a dream, and then they lead us straight to the treasure.
There’s nothing more scrumptiously subversive than a game that deals in delayed gratification. It’s something not commonly associated with screens, with spending hours upon hours in the world of instant inputs, stunning colors and frantic beep-bloops.
Over this year’s holiday break, in a moment of serendipitous nostalgia, I stumbled upon my childhood copy of “Kirby’s Epic Yarn.” And lifting the case from its stack of stagnant clamshells, I was struck by some vaguely profound memories.
There is a lot of discourse surrounding the accessibility of games. I am not referring to accessibility for those with physical disabilities, which is something I think games should have; I’m talking about the accessibility of a game’s aesthetic experience, the approachability of a game and the scope of its audience.
Imagine a carnival with no attendees; a wrestling match with no audience; a baseball game with no spectators. This may not be very hard to envision given our post-Covid experience, but there was someone who was remotely hosting such grand-scale events before it was even a requirement of the Center for Disease Control.
Why do we love open world games? What makes an open world worth exploring? To answer this, I’d like to look back on an open world Role Playing Game (RPG) that has recently been getting a lot of attention due to its incredibly dedicated community: The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall—not Skyrim, not Oblivion, but Daggerfall.
It was difficult to avoid hearing about Cult of the Lamb (2022) while browsing Twitter and other social media circles, and having finally finished the game myself, I can see what the buzz is all about.
