Do Gamers Dream of XP-valued Sheep?

December ’08 Round Table Entry. Sorry for the pessimistic view on things.

(The Ghost of Gaming Future What role will gaming play in your familial relationships in 5 years? 10 years? 20 years? Having already explored both the past and the present, this month’s round table asks us to turn our eyes to our future gaming expectations. If you can’t picture how gaming will impact your own family, feel free to explore what game designers could/should/shouldn’t do to make gaming a more family friendly experience, or even to create and explore a fictional world where gaming is (or isn’t) a major part of every family’s life.)

I sit, crouched over my desk with my head in my hands. My point counter sits in the upper left of my screen, nestled in the shadow of my eyebrow. It slowly rolls up by one. The pity point only increases my frustration. Without a breakthrough, an inspiration beyond my ability, I’ll never gain the experience necessary to apply for college.

My mother’s voice replays, quietly, in my left ear. You need a job. Find some place else to live. What do you want to be? I don’t know why I recorded it, I’ll hear it live again at dinner.

I reset my overlay and switch to recreation. A colorful, hyper-real gild covers the drab fibers of my bedroom. The counter spins upward. Familial relationships, employment, and dream progress are just tabs that cluster around the blurry knob of my nose in the center of my vision. They’ll stay there, a subtle reminder of what I should be doing.

The wall of my bedroom dissolves, and as my body sits paralyzed in my chair, I walk out onto the fronds of a gigantic fern. Nodes of light bloom around me, zooming past, their intensity dependent on their accumulation of points. I trail my finger across one of the brightest and a head appears. From its neck an intricate array of tentacles sprout, each one a thread defining an aspect of the user’s experience. I grab the thickest and reach for another node.

I gather several threads and wrap them together, combining them. Each head seems to fight the concoction, their animations assigned by the user, but they eventually coalesce into one. The eyes show a preview of the playground I’ve created, video projected into the space where the light surface and dark of the pupil usually sit.

I’m pulled into the grinning head and enter a world created on the fly. The rules sit in a book at my feet but I ignore them and step into gloomy darkness, lifting the sword in my grip and looking for something to kill.