I have a soft spot for slow games. Games that take place over weeks instead of hours. Glacier games, I call them, knowing full well that the phrase will never catch on.
Al Yang and Ed Zobrist turned me on to this gem, a little European MMOG that answers the question: what would happen if you played a game of Warcraft 2 on a geological time scale? Or, if you prefer: what would happen if Civ II WASN'T a compressed experience, a hyperspeed war 'n' progress sim, played out over turns, but was instead... a multiplayer game of civilizations growing slowly alongside each other?
Regardless, voici:
This game is real-time in the most old-fashioned sense of the phrase. If I send my troops to the other side of the map, it'll take them days to get there and days to get back. Strange: our strategy games come out of the traditions of Chess and Go, where the entire point WAS to compress and distill experiences. Now it seems like there's a growing interest in unpacking all that time and space, of games that recreate and give us deeper experiences, instead of distilling our play into bite-size pieces.
Another interesting tidbit about Travian: the servers reset annually (on a rotating schedule). So a new world is born and populated, nations are built and destroyed, and then just when this crowded arena is resolving into a stalemate, poof, it starts again. There's no attempt to build stability into the game world... this is a place where players can break the balance wide open, given time.
Comments (1)
I played this last year for a good few months. It was cool at the beginning, especially the literal real time aspect, but I found myself growing bored before long... attacking and raiding other villages was only entertaining for a short while for me...
Posted by Cynthia Nie![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://interactive.usc.edu/members/jantonisse/nav-commenters.gif)
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June 28, 2008 12:04 AM
Posted on June 28, 2008 00:04