What Happens Before Game Design?
What is it that happens before the design of a video game? What sorts of cultural designs are showing through the games that we play? Exploration of these ideas is the intended target of our discussion.
When Animal Crossing came to the GameCube, I found myself mesmerized by this insanely detailed, yet sarcastic world that Nintendo created. The game made fun of itself so much yet really had this amazing and endearing charm. Sadly, the game fell out of my favor when I was forced to sell a lot of video games in order to cover some random crisis and I missed the DS version because of the same reasons. However, I did get to get City Folk for the Wii. So I was reading about this game and i stumbled on a completely crazy design decision. When you're playing this game, you have to run around town and do various chores and socializing events. As with all Nintendo games, this one has subtle ways of reminding you that you've been playing for an exorbitant amount of time. It can be a short warning between the loading of a level or a character mentioning how long you've been playing. Animal Crossing has all of these things. The loading character will mention how often you've been logging on, the characters in the game will talk about how often they've talked to you, and there are various mentions through letters and what not. However, this wasn't really enough. Nintendo knows just how addicting their game can be. So, if you play this game a ton, you run all over town doing this stuff. The more you run around the town, the more the grass degrades. If you keep playing, and keep running around on the grass, and let the grass disappear more and more, the citizens of the town will move out and the Happy Room Academy (the in game score keeper), will score you very poorly.I think this is the first time i've seen a game punish you for playing too much. I mean, games that require a ton of time like WoW or some RPG like Fable II or Final Fantasy XII just let you keep playing because it's in their interest to keep you playing. It's in their interest, especially for the MMO, to keep you strung along from quest to quest ad nauseum. It's only recently that things like too much playtime entered the public forum.It will be fun to watch these sorts of things come around more often. Responsibility seems to be the theme for the next four years, at least.
