Posts Tagged ‘Love and Gaming’

Another week has passed, and it is time once more to talk about Love. Since we began this little experiment, we’ve seen this game through the eyes of the Explorer and the Team Player, and the gaming conventions Love throws out the window has cast an interesting light on these playstyles. I expected to experience the same as I played as the Loner this week, and I was not disappointed.

We’ve all encountered soloers in MMOs, and most of us have even taken on this role at one point or another. And yet, despite how common the Loner is, the greater MMO community always seems ready to condemn him when he complains about a part of an MMO being too difficult to solo. “Why are you playing an MMO if you don’t want to play with anyone else?” comes the battle cry, and on the surface, this argument does seem perfectly reasonable. The truth is, there are plenty of reasons to solo, ranging from the difficulty in finding a group/guild to run a dungeon/raid, to the extreme pressure a “serious” group of gamers can put on each other, to pure and simple shyness.

Besides, isn’t there something of a romantic air about the lone wolf who wanders from challenge to challenge? Without the community an MMO provides, who would bear witness to your exploits?

So, how does this apply to Love? Again, Love presents a unique challenge. It is presented as extremely open, a world that the players create with their friends (or so the about page claims). However, the game revolves wholly around community, and if you don’t have a settlement, you find yourself alone in a dangerous world armed with nothing but a mere laser gun. And infinite lives. And no death penalty. Oh, and of this week’s patch, the enemy AI seems to have lost its ambition to aggressively hunt down players or build up any advanced weaponry.

Sure, hopping around blowing up AI bases was entertaining the first couple of times. However, without sustained challenge, there wasn’t much to keep me entertained. The worlds of Love are beautiful, but aside from their value as a simulated nature walk, there’s not much to discover.

It is worth mentioning that, in Love, there is no region chat. There is no community chat, or economy chat, or any easily accessible channel with which to communicate to far-flung players. What there is is the radio, a tool that works like, well, a radio.  To get your hands on a radio, you must be part of a settlement, which was against the Loner playstyle I was going for this week. And I discovered something interesting: I may enjoy soloing for a fair portion of my playtime, but I certainly don’t like to be alone. With absolutely no one to interact with, I found myself begin to walk in circles, hitting the same groups of AI over and over again, purposeless and lost.

As a one-week soloer, I imagine that, at least in my case, I don’t solo because I want to play by myself. Rather, I play MMOs for the possibility of interaction, and the possibility of experiencing a new story with my fellow players. It just so happens that it’s easier to fall into soloing, especially when so many games don’t present immediately accessible venues through which to build the connections needed to build up a strong community.

For the past 2 weeks, I’ve been exploring the alpha MMO Love, and the different ways we play games. After a brief introduction, I spent my first week playing the role of the Explorer, a player who simply wants to experience new things and discover new gameplay. This last week, I’ve tried on the shoes of the Team Player, someone who does everything to further the group. This playstyle is perhaps the intended way to play Love, which centers around building up player settlements and defending it from enemy AI incursions.

Several excellent settlements have sprung up through the efforts of players cooperating with each other in-game and over Ventrillo, such as The Waygate Tree and the curiously named Treedong Settlement. Sadly, no single settlement can last for long under the combined threat of the AI and regular server resets, and the truly great settlements require the attention of care of at least a dozen players to thrive. Poor communication tools and a spread-out server population have made these difficult to achieve, but all the more rewarding when you can pull it off.

One point I’d like to address in this writing is the motivation of a community-centric player. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’m more of an explorer myself, though I have been an active member of the occasional guild in the past. MMOs are, theoretically at least, communal games by their very nature. I’ve seen it often enough: someone laments MMO content that requires them to group with other players, or something they can’t solo, and someone else tells them to screw off and play a single player game. For most MMOs, though, finding a group of reliable partners or being active in a guild can be a major time commitment, and some don’t have the time or desire to turn their leisure time into a chore. So, what motivates the Team Player to do exactly that?

To my thinking, there are two primary drivers at work here. First, and perhaps most obvious, are those who want to receive renown or praise. By rising up the ranks of a guild, you have a build-in audience to watch you in all of your glory. Guild leaders are often the most revered players, particularly in politic and war-heavy games like EVE Online and Darkfall, and if you play your cards right you may even find yourself interviewed by the likes of online gaming magazines. The second reason, more abstract than the first, is the desire to be part of something greater than yourself. For the player driven by this desire, stacking one’s own, small contribution upon the contributions of others until they’ve created something grand is enough.

Love caters to exactly one of these drivers, and I’ll leave it to you to guess which one. Here are some hints: when you log into your server for the first time, you are assigned a random name, your avatar is indistinguishable from anyone else’s avatar, and there’s no way of tracking who made what structures, who gathered what resources, or who destroyed what AI base.

In a time when customization is king, this can be a hard pill to swallow for some. Games have been feeding our egos and sense of self for so long, to come across this game that asks us to give anonymously, play nice with each other, and build something pretty will take some adjustment. In trying this playstyle in Love, the lack of glory has illuminated one of the major reasons we play this way.

Now that I’ve played nice, it’s time for me to strike out on my own. For the next week, I will be playing the part of the Loner, hunting AI and gathering resources for my own selfish purposes. In this game meant for co-op, let’s see how it likes getting a handful of solo crammed down its throat.

Next week is here, and so is Part 4 of Love and Gaming: The Loner!

Last week, I announced that I would begin my journey into the world of Love, and that I would be taking you all along with me.  Every week I will be experimenting a different playstyle, and for this week I played as the Explorer.

By explorer, I don’t necessarily mean someone who wanders around the world and sticks flags in the ground.  Rather, in my case, I mean utter newb, and so my goal was to simply experience as much varied content as possible. As I mentioned in the last post of Love and Gaming, this is my default approach, so while it served to help me familiarize myself with the game, it also let me do it in a way that came naturally.

It might be tempting to compare Love to sandbox games like Wurm Online, in which you create new settlements and alter the land in permanent, meaningful ways.  However, in my week of play, I have found Love to be more like building sand castles on the beach. You can build the grandest castle, with turrets and a moat and a front gate, but sooner or later the tide will come in and wash it all away. Aggressive AI settlements dot the landscape, and while a single AI enemy is no challenge, they come in great waves and often have access to advanced weaponry that it can take a long time for a player settlement to procure.

That said, the game cycle of building up a settlement from scratch and holding out as long as possible proved to be addictive. As it is still in alpha, the game is continually evolving, and with it we see more varied approaches to settlement. When I started, walls were all the rage, with the longest-lasting settlements surrounded by high, insurmountable bastions. In a recent patch, the AI wised up, and it seems aggressive counter-engagement and teamwork have become more of a necessity.

Love is not a game that is easy to grasp right away.  My first night, I found myself alone in the wilderness without a clue as to what I was doing.  In the spirit of the week’s theme, I set forth to see what I would discover, and what I discovered was death.  Lots of it.

The art of Love looks like an impressionistic painting, and in certain lighting, other characters will often look like mere shadows gliding along the landscape. That first night, all I remember is barrage upon barrage of laser fire all around me, then the tint of red telling me that I was dead. It was not a good night.

Thankfully, I was able to find settlements on most of my following sessions. Love does not lend itself well to traditional exploration, as by default you have no map and there is no objective compass, but as you build up your settlement you have access to greater and more varied tools, with which you can do all kinds of fun things. For instance, with the Config Tool, you can walk right up to certain objects in the games like teleporters, relay cables, and power lines, and reprogram them.  These objects appear all over the world, not just in settlements, so if you can get your hands on one of these you could in theory create massive transportation networks throughout the world.

In the coming week, I will continue to explore the game, but my primary focus will go to my next playstyle: the Team Player. Every time I log in, I will strive to help create the greatest settlement possible, alongside as many players as possible. My concerns will be what’s best for the settlement, and I will engage in no solo endeavors. I suspect Love will lend itself well to this approach, and I look forward to sharing my findings with you next week.

But wait, there’s more! Read AJ’s insights as he explores the world of the Team Player in Part 3 of Love and Gaming.

Yesterday I stumbled upon the alpha of a one-man indie MMO project called Love.  I must admit I hadn’t heard of it before, but reading about it definitely piqued my interest: Love is experimental and free-form, in which you can explore the world and build as you see fit.  Players can work together to build settlements, defend their settlements from hostile NPC outsiders, or even sneak into other settlements and act as a saboteur.  Set in a painting-like world, the absolute freedom gives room for griefers to cause trouble, but presents a fascinating canvas upon which to express oneself.

Of late, I’ve been thinking about playstyles.  MMOs lend themselves naturally to community-centric players, but out of necessity most MMOs also have to accomodate those who would rather hunt alone.  There are those who thrill in competition with others, and yet even in a game like EVE Online we find a majority of players who engage solely in PvE.  As for myself, I tend to explore (My all-time most played game is probably Oblivion, in which I’ve clocked an easy 500 hours discovering player-developed content through mods), and I require dynamic, exciting adventure.

Most games hone in on a selection of playstyles and reward them, encourage them, or build core game mechanics around them. Love has no reward system. Love offers the ability to explore all of these approaches to gaming. And, most important, Love imposes almost no restrictions on what the players can do. So, for the next four weeks, I will be trying out different playstyles in this void. Please, join me on my adventure in Love and Gaming.

If this intrigues you, be sure to check out Part 2, in which AJ tries on the boots of the Explorer in Love and reports his findings.