Hell is Other People and also Crafting Systems

There's a kind of individualist mania that MMOs provoke in me. I'm not saying I don't enjoy playing with others, but I do bristle when the social aspects of a game supplant opportunities to figure stuff out for myself. Having an experienced player dump stacks of necessary items next to my nude and fearful avatar feels like a deprivation of gameplay agency for the same reason that being snapped at for choosing the "wrong" character in Overwatch feels nasty and limiting. A crucial part of any game is the learning process by which you come to understand the rules, and when this process is fast-tracked by well-intentioned players making decisions for you, you get the sense of skipping something important. Sure, you hit the ground running, but you don't feel like you've earned your momentum.

So when playing One Hour, One Life, I tried to correct my autodidactic tendencies. In the occasions when I was born into an established village, I would make an effort to insert myself into the community as a self-effacing worker. Overwhelmed by the sheer scope and agonizingly unintuitive design of the crafting system, I deferred to the wisdom of other players to learn what exactly I was supposed to be doing. Sometimes I was tasked with retrieving eggs, sometimes with tilling soil. This was almost always communicated along the model of "go here and bring [x] back to our home base" or "take this item and perform task [y]." Ok. Can do. It was charmingly simple at first, and it was nice to feel like I was contributing to the maintenance of a broad community space, but as a result of the perfunctory instruction that I received, I never quite felt like it was "my village" that I was helping to maintain. The "I'm helping!" sheen wore off and I grew bored of being born into other people's systems with no flow of communication except for the brusque demands of experienced players. I was carrying out a task, but I still didn't know what the hell I was doing. I was using items whose origins were incomprehensible to me and I couldn't help thinking that I would feel some more connection to my labor if I felt like I knew where the tools came from and how it all worked. I felt kind of guilty fetching water when I still had no idea how I would have made the bowl I was using.

So the next chance I got, I went all Chris McCandless and fled into the wild to try and learn some fundamental game skills. Maybe I could be more useful to the collective if I knew more than two crafting recipes. The voluntary isolation was helpful for learning the basics, but less helpful for survival. My naked cartoon misanthropes died many a pitiful death in their enlightened quest to produce stick-with-string, and I started to realize that the only way I was going to make One Life last One Hour was in returning to my no-collar job as an unquestioning water-lackey. I ambled back to civilization, where I was promptly stabbed for not having child-bearing genitals.

Ultimately, I found that the network in Rohrer's game, though necessary for prolonging gameplay, made gameplay kind of frustrating. The over-presence of experienced players and the imposed window of mortality meant that the pedagogical aspect of the game was accelerated or replaced entirely with context-free instruction. For me at least, the result of this "optimized communication" between players was a feeling of alienation from the works of others and a yearning for escape in-game. It made me want an option to play exclusively with people who had the same level of unfamiliarity with the game as I did, but I realize that would negate the whole "civilization-building" aspect that is so centrally attractive. I think there's also some thematic importance to the alienation that one experiences in having to hit the ground running, but I wish other players had committed to the role-play enough to fill me in a little more on what their goals, projects, and history were. These three pieces of context are important to a sense of satisfying networked play; they're what distinguish cooperation from conscription. Deprived of common goals and reduced to a clueless assembly line worker, the player is not playing "with" but playing "for." If I'm going to feel alienated from the other players anyway, I'd rather just own it and die nude and alone in the woods, in the company of banana peels and a string-less stick.