I’ve always had an embarrassing thing for games about boats. It has a connection to the books I read when I was a kid. I read a number of the Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransome, while sitting by the ocean at my grandparents’ house. That’s a good experience. My stepfather also read the Aubrey-Maturin books by Patrick O’Brian and recanted all the stories of the horror of grapeshot and mealworms in the biscuits. I’m not sure which I find more frightening.

I remember playing a lot of Sid Meier’s Pirates as a kid, and a whole lot of KOEI's Uncharted Waters series (the two first games--that is, being the only ones translated into english). I even fell into the trap of trying to play some free-to-play Korean online game about being a naval person (it wasn’t very good). Furthermore, the one and only week I played World of Warcraft was spent almost entirely in the water as I skirted the continents and saw just how far I could get with my character through the world using the night elf powers of invisibility (the answer is pretty far). But even that fun wore thin pretty quickly after the novelty wore off of being the only trial-levelled night elf in the human starting zone on the other side of the world from my own.

For some reason the myriad space exploration, trading, and combat games based on Elite fail to sustain my interest, despite having virtually identical mechanics to the Uncharted Waters games of my adoration. I will still play them, but feel that guilty grime afterward of time wasted pretending to be in a spaceship, instead of the satisfied thrill I have upon buying a whole lot of silk in Istanbul and then sailing down the Nile because I can, before starving to death in Ethiopia, reloading my save, trying to sail around Greenland and to Newfoundland, before starving to death again, and then turning it off, all warm and fuzzy and tired, and responsible for a good number of crew deaths. Space sims commonly deprive the player of crew management, maybe this is their downfall? Or maybe it is the lack of that feeling of being at mercy of the winds, rounding the cape of africa?

Or more likely, it’s for the same reason that playing the original version of the board game Risk, set on our very own earth, is infinitely more compelling than playing one of the versions set in space, or on Middle-Earth; and the same reason that Civilization continues to include an ever popular map to play on, which is an approximation of, again, our own earth.

I haven’t a connection to the journey to Alpha Centauri, because we haven’t gone there yet. It’s a part of the narrative of human culture as a hypothetical, not as a collective memory, as for instance, sailing across an ocean is. When I watch my little boat sailing across a screen, I remember the salty air, and the wind in my ears. I taste stale hardtack. I smell sweat of a hundred crewmates.

...I remember why I’d rather play a game made from this experience, and why I haven’t signed up for the navy.

Every year that goes by I legitimately mourn that there aren’t more games about boats released. Why weren’t the later games in KOEI’s Uncharted Waters series of naval rpgs ever released? Why does every re-release of Sid Meier’s Pirates have to be exactly the same game? Why aren’t more developers trying to push the naval genre forward? The answer must be that not enough people care. But I do. And I must find relief that the ones that do exist, no matter how imperfect, at least do scratch that junkie’s itch.

Anyway, go play Sid Meier’s Pirates (just released for iPhone at 3.99) and cry with me. It’s not fantastic; but it’s kind of the best we’ve got.

My rating

I could:

A. Crush this game with the back of a spoon and snort it.

B. Take it.

C. Leave it.

PS. (in Uncharted Waters news)

In research for this entry, I’ve come to be aware that they DID finally localize Uncharted Waters Online for English players. This is a dangerous realization. Tortuga, here I come!

I remember lego. Do you remember lego? When I was a kid my family took a big piece of canvas and painted a world on it. I made buildings all over this world and lego figurines (minifigs—look it up) endlessly warred. A pirate ship sailed the two seas. That canvas is folded in the closet of my childhood room somewhere. At some point I forgot about lego, wooden blocks, and pillowforts. I stopped building. I haven’t touched those things in a decade.

And I don’t need to. I have minecraft now. 

Minecraft is lego without the minifigs (which were just silly anyways) and without the need to follow faux ikea instructions (those scandinavians sure like their pictographic instruction books!). This independantly developed computer game drops you into a proceedurally generated world (it’s different every time for every person) made from thousands of cubes arranged to look like mountains, rivers, and forests. You are given no goals, and aren’t pointed in any direction. At first I didn’t know what to do and set about building a little house. Then nighttime fell as I was halfway through building my house. The groans which are the universal callsign for frightening monsters began to be audible. Then louder. Then a blocky green abomination appeared out of nowhere and the message “you died” appeared on the screen. Next time I built the house a little faster, and hid inside until morning.

I figured out how the basics went in minecraft: how to survive and how to synthesize ingredients you need. I mined endlessly to get the components for swords, axes, torches, and outfits for my character (which couldn’t even be seen). Then I got bored. That’s when minecraft got good. I had all these cobblestones and nothing to do with them. Throwing them away seemed like a waste, so I built myself a castle. This was also a necessity, as I had failed to understand how to properly light my cave and I was forcibly evicted from my home by exploding people doused in green paint.

I constructed an island in a water where I was safe from dangerous spiders and on top of this island I built a high wall. I ran out of building supplies, and sprinted over to the nearby mountain while I still had daylight. I blocked myself in and dug and dug. Not searching for anything, but merely seeking to excavate as much raw material as possible. I was remaking the world in my desired image. I built the castle to protect myself, but soon it became an obsession. It had four walls, but it needed more… I built a long covered hallway from my island to the mine, so that I could go between them at night, and dug deeper and deeper. I excavated great big rooms like I’d always imagined dwarves from middle-earth doing. This was more of a thrill than any movie or photorealistic videogame could accomplish. I was doing this myself. I was taking a working vacation, building things I’d never imagined.

Next I built an extension for my castle, a two story house suspended over the water. Nice! And from the top of the house I built a tower, with a winding staircase lit by torches at each turn. No one taught me to do this, I was just playing with blocks to bring what I imagined to life. At the top of the tower I built a glass viewing area and lit it brightly. When I stand on the top of the nearby mountain, I can see the tower rising from the fog. A beacon of my presense in this world. What was becoming my world.

Children build—they touch, they feel, they move, they allow themselves to impact their world in small, controlled ways—and that’s how they learn. At what point did we stop doing this? I’m buying all my friends copies of minecraft in the hope that for the price of a single set of lego, I can begin to show them everything they can make with their mind.

Now excuse me, I think it’s about time I started working on my glass city beneath the ocean.

This week I worked six days in a row of eight hour shifts. Two jobs. Bewildered. Forgive me, I'm young--but now I understand why people are cranky all the time and never get anything done. They're too busy being exhausted. 
 
Let's all try to live like children. Let's all get our lives back.