GameSpotting

Greg Kasavin
Executive Editor

Now Playing: Impossible Creatures (PC), Panzer Dragoon Orta (Xbox), War of the Monsters (PS2), The Getaway (PS2), Animal Crossing (GC)
Most Anticipated 2003 Games: Advance Wars 2 (GBA), Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (GBA), The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (GC), Psychonauts (Xbox), Halo 2 (Xbox), Doom III (PC)
Game I Played the Most Over the Holidays: Animal Crossing (GC)

Virtual Life and Death

A clear, satisfying sense of progress is what drives us, as gamers, to continue playing. In particular, role-playing games are set up around this idea, and the best of them reward players with the sense that they're constantly getting new and better stuff, becoming stronger, exploring new places, or discovering new information. The more progress we make and the more adversity we overcome, the better we feel, ideally. All games inherently revolve around a conflict of some sort, and in most games, that conflict is of a violent nature. Even if it's a lighthearted Mario game, you're still trying to avoid getting killed. That's OK--not getting killed is a good thing, a concept we all naturally understand. So it's interesting to see, lately, the advent of a number of new and upcoming games that specifically try to defy this most basic gaming convention and instead try to focus on providing the player with a satisfying sense of progress, peaceably.

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Everyone should play this game.
The best of these games is Animal Crossing, a game that we rightfully nominated for our Video Game of the Year award and a game that, in all seriousness, was by far the closest contender with Metroid Prime, the game that ultimately most deserved to win. It's no accident that Animal Crossing has become one of the most talked about games both in these weekly GameSpotting episodes and also among GameSpot's editors. The game is purely addictive, extremely clever, genuinely funny, innovative, and plain cool. Those words quickly come to mind when I think of Animal Crossing, so on the one hand I find it odd that, when speaking to others who are into the game, I often find that they're completely at a loss about how to describe it or explain why they enjoy it so much. On the other hand, I know exactly why: Animal Crossing neither looks great nor has an obvious objective. In Halo, you're humanity's last, best hope and have to single-handedly stop the Covenant, a powerful and seemingly unstoppable alien menace. In Animal Crossing, you, uh...you try to collect nice-looking furniture for your house.

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Your choice: You could either hit the gym in The Sims Online, or hit the gym in real life.
The thing about games is that they're usually plot-driven. When you describe games to other people, you probably focus more on what happens in them than on their execution. That's because it's easier to describe them that way. It's much harder to put your finger on why Animal Crossing is so fun and addictive than it is to point out that, in Half-Life, an experiment goes horribly awry and many surprising and action-packed shootouts ensue. This is why most games center on a dangerous conflict--it's something we can get behind and get excited about. Rescue the princess, save the world--you name it. That sort of thing rightfully sounds a lot more exciting than the prospect of, say, being a friendly neighbor. We could just as easily do that in real life if we wanted to.

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A good game doesn't need a good premise, and a good premise can't save a bad game.
Clearly, though, there's a real demand for low-stress gaming these days. There are people out there who want to play games without feeling their hearts beating in their chests. Some of us would say that games that aren't intense aren't worth playing. But not those of us who've played Animal Crossing, the Seinfeld of video games. Nothing much actually happens in Animal Crossing, but the experience of playing the game is purely fun and enjoyable, and the game is an outstandingly good value that can last you for months or longer. This game proves that intensity and fun are neither directly proportional nor even related to each other when it comes to gaming, a point that's been made before by the best-selling computer game of all time, The Sims. Other games, such as the recent The Sims Online, are clearly inspired by the same notion--the notion that, theoretically, a game could be really engaging and appealing precisely because it doesn't involve a lot of action.

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Myst did an amazing job of making you feel like a solitary explorer. What happens when you add a bunch of other players and real-time voice communication to the formula?
Then there's stuff on the horizon such as There.com, Second Life, and the unfortunately titled Uru: Online Ages Beyond Myst, things that seem more easily described as "virtual worlds" rather than online games. Let me say straight up that I have absolutely zero desire to belong to any "virtual community," though to be fair, I have no interest in belonging to a real community, either. At any rate, in the event that I want to socialize, I'd rather talk to real people rather than digital avatars representing real people. But apparently a good portion of the population feels differently. Otherwise, all these virtual community products wouldn't be emerging.

It's possible that I've become jaded in this regard, but I'm no longer inherently interested in communicating with strangers over the Internet. Sure, 10 years ago I was amazed at America Online's real-time chat rooms. But now I'll take the clever, interesting, funny, cute characters of Animal Crossing over the generally far more boring, far less interesting, and far less literate players of The Sims Online any day of the week. And you know what? Not only do I like them much better, but the Animal Crossing characters are also just as real to me as the sims in The Sims Online.

So in some sense I'm surprised to see so many virtual-life games these days, since I know I'm not the only one who thinks interacting with others online usually isn't very enjoyable, and that games designed around this concept are doomed. Of course, just because a game is action-packed doesn't mean it's fun to play. Think of how many games have good or at least promising concepts but fail in the execution. In the coming months, between all the flashy but fundamentally unenjoyable action games and this new trend of kinder, gentler gaming, gamers and game designers alike are going to find themselves thinking carefully about what it is that they find most appealing about gaming. Here we've already thought it through: It's the satisfaction of causing things to quickly develop in a meaningful way. It doesn't matter whether that sense comes from storming Omaha Beach and crushing the Axis forces in Battlefield 1942 or from buying a table that perfectly matches your bed and desk in Animal Crossing--games like these, first and foremost, are fun to play. And what they're like, what they're about, and who you play them with isn't nearly as relevant as that simple fact.

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