Fate of the World

This weekend, I picked up Fate of the World, since it was sitting around on my Steam wishlist and fit my general price preference. It's a game about solving global disasters, centered around climate change. I think it is the coolest thing ever!

Ok, there are a couple potential flaws. First, the interface is complicated, and to figure out everything that's helpful to know, you have to poke around in it a lot. I had no idea it was possible to look at very specific statistics, like how well trained a country's agriculture workforce is, until I eventually visited the Steam forum about the game (about 3 tries into the second scenario).

Which brings us to the other "flaw" -- or, alternatively, feature I rather like. This game is hard. The downside, some less patient players may get frustrated and give up, I suppose. And I might not put up with this level of difficulty in just any game. But here the difficulty level is an excellent vehicle for the concept that the world is likely to develop a lot of problems as we ignore the environment and keep growing our world's population and commerce. It's not an easy job, even if you start working on it as soon as possible. It's challenging, but if you pay attention to everything, maybe do a little extra research, and you have a plan from the start, you can succeed in saving the world. It seemed like it's part of the point for the game to be hard. It wouldn't be a very effective piece of Eco-Awareness campaigning if it was easy.

The most important bit of non-obvious information: Biofuel can replace oil! But only if you ban oil worldwide from the global HQ (which you have to build beforehand.)

Even if you happen to disbelieve in global warming and feel environmentalism is nonsense, I'd say it's still a good turn-based strategy game. There's a lot of depth to it. And also a scenario where you get to be a villain.

What can we learn from an "easy" old WoW raid

This weekend, I went back into ICC, and it was the most fun I've had in months with WoW.

It wasn't a primary goal for any of us. The group I raid with has trouble fielding enough people anymore to reliably get a group going into the new raid content. Even when we do go to a new boss we've downed before, it's rough; there's none we can easily one-shot. Some more casual players have started to sign up, which would be nice for filling in the ranks, except that the regulars aren't overpowered enough to "carry" them and they don't have the gear or experience on these particular raids to hold their own, yet. I've been a little burnt out, just try to hang around and see if they need people. So, this weekend, I filled in for some no-shows, but we still ended up with only 9 people, so it was decreed: "Backup plan! Let's go to ICC on heroic. With achievements."

Now, I did a lot of ICC in the past. Enough to start to get tired of it, not enough to beat the Lich King. I'd not done more than a couple of fights on heroic ever. Most of the group, however, had been through most of it before on heroic, maybe once, and most had most of the achievements. I decided not to slow the group down by asking for thorough explanations of boss fights (unless I started getting us killed) and instead I just shadowed the other healer from 10 feet away (seemed like a good policy) and this led to one of the best experiences in a while.

I could play through a challenging boss fight, learning on the fly, and still win.

Do you know how long that's been? I mean, maybe it works on dungeon bosses, even some heroic ones. But it's our general policy in raids to look up the boss, run through the strategy in vent, and of course we still wipe at least a few times while everyone gets the hang of what to not stand in.

But here, we had fights which took several minutes. At times, we'd take a lot of damage. There are percentage-based mechanics in there, and on heroic mode, sometimes there's enough going on that someone eats one of the "one-shot" effects that would have killed them in the old days, but don't, since we're over-leveled. It was enough to wipe us on a couple of fights, but only once per each (except we didn't quite get the Lich King down -- it was deemed to be a better fight for the start of an outing than the end, when we were already past the usual stopping time.) There were fights when something went wrong, like the other healer died halfway through Putricide, and I thought we were all doomed (I surely couldn't track all the crazy effects going on at the start of the fight)...and then we still won.

So why was this so much fun?

• It still felt like a challenge, but we were succeeding more than losing. There was a sense that we would soon succeed, even if we messed up.
• We had the chance to recover from our mistakes and learn to do better, over the course of a single fight.
• It was new to me. ICC in the old days got to be rote. Go in, do things the way we always do them; the only variation was with weird group makeups or someone who knew a different strategy.
• It was about my skills, not my knowledge of the fight. I got to prove myself as a good healer, a good player, rather than a good researcher and memorizer. I felt more present in the moment, trying to figure out what was going on and what I should be doing.

This isn't to say that I find no value in raids as they are now. With a good-natured group, it can be fun to bash our heads on the wall, trying to figure out what different strategy will let us win this time. But when the first time you face a fight is when you are the weakest (due to gear and experience), there is no room to stand in the fire that kills you in two seconds, the parasites that spell certain eventual doom, the healer to fail to predict two big hits in a row. If you mess up, the attempt is doomed. That's okay in small doses for some of us who like a challenge. But if it's the only form of challenge we have, maybe it's worth looking at other kinds of experiences to design into a game like WoW.