1. Check out this episode of Unskippable. It's pretty sweet.
2. The other night, boredom and curiosity drove me to try the Endless Forest. Now before you go blasting air through your various lip+tongue+teeth combinations to make the most disgusted "psshhhh" sound ever, hear out an experiment for yourself.
The Endless Forest is something akin to a free MMOG about a forest filled with a herd of that creepy man-faced god-deer from Princess Mononoke. There's just one thing. The game is free form. I mean literally and completely free form. There are no levels. There are no given quests or tasks. In a traditional game sense, there are hardly activities. You can't even type a message to other players. Its a lot like an MMO with everything stripped away except for the scenery, emotes, and some random little interactive items.
So this is nothing like your standard gaming experience. Imagining playing this for an extended period of time does, in fact sound pretty silly. But throw all that away for a moment and try this out. Cast aside your traditional game goals and you should probably also cast aside your qualms about how you should behave as an adult male. Try out the game for 30 minutes to an hour with the purpose of exploring how your social interactions can be made into "games" of their own despite the fact that you have no clue what the players on the other end are actually thinking/aiming at. I doubt you'll find anything deeply profound, but, you will have a unique experience that few other games drive at.
My choice to explore this game was influenced by this article discussing the way that the game reshapes "play." Also, reading this page and this page from the game's website helped me some with getting a hang of what I could actually do.
No comments:
Post a Comment