 | | Recommended | by darbylarson
30.7 hours on record |
| | Posted 7.7 years ago | Last Played 6.7 years ago |
After about 10 hours of play, I have only died of old-age once. This is equivalent to finishing the game, or making it to the end of the hour. I spawned as a baby boy to an Eve who had just discovered a deserted village rich with resources. All the tools were available to continue where they had left off. My mother raised me here and I began working the carrot farm. My mother kept running off to do other things. I spent most of my life farming carrots because it's all I really knew how to do. My mother had another offspring but I think they died early. My mother died or disappeared while I was a teenager, maybe killed by a bear or something. I continued farming alone until I felt I had enough food to sustain me the rest of my life. When I hit 30 or 40, a feeling of loneliness started to sink in. I realized none of the wealth around me mattered because there was no population. Babies only spawn to females and I was male. My mother had been the only source of creating new players, but she had abandoned me as a teenager so I was doomed to live a life entirely alone. My sense of pointlessness turned to lethargy as I spent time just standing around, not having anything meaningful to do. I let the farms dry out since I had plenty of food. I spent a little time tinkering with the tools around me and learned a bit more of the crafting tree. I decided to venture out and see if I could find other players somewhere. I filled a backpack with carrots and roamed aimlessly around the server, but I never found anyone and I had to return when my food ran out. I thought maybe I should let myself starve to death so I could respawn into a new game, but I waited it out only because I had never died of old-age before and wanted to see it happen. So I waited around and eventually died.
I didn't experience any of that as viscerally in the moment as I did upon reflection. The game remarkably exploits the meaninglessness of wealth unless you have someone to share it with and pass it on. Loneliness drove me into depression, a sense of uselessness, and eventually thoughts of suicide. But it wasn't my imminent death that made the situation heartbreaking, it was that my mother and I were possibly the last chance for reviving a village that still had a lot of potential for growth if successfully re-populated, and that we had disgraced all the previous generations of players who had built it. We had taken it for granted. My only hope was that some other players might stumble upon it after I died and try to do what we couldn't, and that the carrots I had spent my life farming might help them get started.
The question rises, what does "winning" look like when making it to end-game can feel so bleak? Rohrer has made a game that is amazingly in line with what winning in life ought to look like. I haven't experienced it in-game yet, and maybe it's fitting that it's not easy or common. Something like living to an old age, having offspring, having made a contribution to a village that is growing, having had meaningful interactions with the community, watching your children grow old, having made memories. And maybe this isn't "winning" so much as just having had a good game.
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