Tag Archives: sandbox

The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical), The Android's POG Collection (Retro), The Android's Sandbox (Sandbox/Open World)

Games as a Medium

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I’ve been thinking a little bit lately about using a game to, well… do something besides “play the game”. Here, I’ll tell you where I’m coming from. Back when I was little– six or seven years old or so– we had a game called The Railroad Works.

It looked like this.

The game was basically supposed to be a model train simulator, and it was divided into two different “segments”. The first segment involved building your train track and decorating it with various bits of scenery and the like that you were given, and then the second was playing a sort of proto-Railroad-Tycoon-esque game that involved taking goods from train station to train station and juggling schedules and whatnot.

If you think I ever played that second portion of the game, you’d be wrong.

The entire point of the game, to me, was to build the nicest, most picturesque scenic railroad route I could. There was no game strategy involved in where I placed my train stations and depots; there was only aesthetics. The game basically gave you several dozen grids (screens) on an overarching map and you could build in each of these grids and connect them, and so I made biomes and “zones” so to speak– here was the forest, here were the mountains, this was the farmland, this was the city.

Once I had finished constructing my masterpiece, I’d start the actual game proper, watch my train chug around my world for a few minutes, and then, satisfied, I’d quit. I didn’t have to play the actual game. The joy for me was in the creating.

This is similar to how a lot of people today play Minecraft. While Notch is busy trying to introduce things like dungeons and monsters, most people play the game either as a UI for virtual legos or as a pixel art program. You’d think, before you’ve tried it yourself, that this wouldn’t be as enthralling as it is. And then you try it and suddenly you can almost see why someone would spend weeks using Minecraft to recreate scenes from Pokemon.

This took me about an hour and a half yesterday; I can't even begin to comprehend how long that Pokemon animation must have taken.

I think it’s rather neat when people are able to take an open-ended game like that and do whatever they want with it. It usually adds more replay value than millions of optional sidequests/levels do, that’s for sure.

The Android's Horn-Rimmed Glasses (Indie), The Android's Sandbox (Sandbox/Open World)

There’s Something About a Sandbox

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Lately I’ve been playing a lot of two different games: Minecraft, and Terraria (aka 2-D Minecraft.)

I know, I know, I’ve talked before about how I don’t quite “get” this sort of game, or how I prefer SimCity or whatnot. But after several months of false starts it seems that something has finally clicked, and lately I’ll merrily spend hours listening to music while… digging. Digging.

I was practically born playing this particular game, so maybe that has something to do with it.

I’m not sure what’s gotten in to me– I’m usually off playing old strategy games, after all!– but I do have to admit: it’s remarkably easy and quite relaxing to just sit down for any length of time– from a couple of minutes to a couple of hours– and mess around in a game where there is really no point. It feeds some sort of deep-seated need in the human psyche to build and create for no other reason than to build and create.

…or maybe I really am a basement-dwelling obsessive-compulsive geek who finds satisfaction in making things perfectly symmetrical. I mean, that’s an acceptable answer too.