After wrapping up with A Boy and His Blob, and deciding that I’d had just about enough of Dragon Age, I found myself in a bit of a game lull for the past few weeks.  My DS still had a stack of games waiting to be played from over the holidays, but my PC and consoles were sitting relatively dry.  Torchlight was still there for some time-wasting, but I was looking for something a little meatier.

And so, as I sat staring at my desktop, trying to decide what to do, I spotted a long forgotten icon tucked away in the corner: The Ur-Quan Masters.

UQM, for those unfamiliar with it, is an open-source remake of one of my favorite games of all time: Star Control II.  Rebuilt by it’s original creators, Toys for Bob, UQM is essentially identical to the original SC2 with a few minor differences.  When UQM was first released a few years back, I immediately grabbed it and began to play through the game again, but at some point drifted off and never came back to it.

When I mentioned to a friend that I was about to start playing it again, he said that he’d given it a try a while back, but found that he was wandering aimless most of the time and didn’t know what he was supposed to do.  Something in that statement rang true in my head, and I recalled a similar feeling when I first jumped into UQM.  The thing was, that wasn’t something I remembered feeling about the original game.  Thus, the question was: were my memories inaccurate, or had something changed about the game?  With that in mind, I loaded up UQM and got down to business.

I’m several hours into UQM now, and what I quickly realized was that my memories weren’t wrong, nor had the game changed: it was the way that I played games that had changed.

The entire opening sequence of SCII is one of my personal favorites; you arrive back in the Sol system in your Precursor ship after being out of contact with Earth for many, many years with no news how the war with the Ur-Quan is faring. The planetary system lay before you, oddly quiet.  As you slowly navigate your skeletal ship forward, you draw closer and closer to Earth until the moment you can finally see that it is surrounded by a devilish red glow. The only sign of life you see is a lone space station still in orbit around the planet.  Drawing closer, you are met by a probe dispatched from the station that informs you that you have violated Ur-Quan space and will be experiencing nasty death in the near future when the Ur-Quan arrive.  The probe speeds off to alert its masters, and you proceed to make contact with the station.

You find the few remaining humans on the station in dire straits, with their power failing and their resources spent.  They barely have the energy to contact you to ask for help, but the message gets through, and you speed off to Mercury to pick them up some radioactives to get their power going again.  Putting your lander down, you gather the required materials and return to the station.  With the power back, the human commander is shocked to see a fellow human in a strange alien vessel, but before you can get nice and caught up on recent events, alien ships enter the system to make trouble for you.  It seems the Ilwrath, a vicious species of spider-aliens, intercepted the Ur-Quan probe and are eager to make a gift of you to their masters.  A battle ensues, and with some flashy battling, the day is yours.

Following that, you learn from the commander that Earth and its allies lost the war, and that Earth has chosen the fate of becoming a fallow slave, forever encased beneath the glowing red shield, never to sail the stars again.  Your arrival triggers new hope, though, and the possibility of breaking free of the yoke of the Ur-Quan seems an achievable, if not incredibly remote, goal.

Now, at this point in the game, the reigns are off; the galaxy is quite literally your oyster, and you are free to fly off in whichever way you choose.  To many, this does feel a little bit like being abandoned in the middle of the ocean, but all is not as it seems.

Modern Gaming Me, who has been spoiled by years of hand-holding and tutorial and hint windows popping up every five seconds at the beginning of games, doesn’t know what to do.  “Give me direction!” I cry to the screen.  But, somewhere in the depths of my memory, Old Gaming Me stirs, reminding me of how things used to be. “Did you try talking to the commander?” he asks.

No, of course I didn’t.  If it was important, the game would’ve told me without any prompting, right?  Right?

Old Gaming Me remembers that games weren’t always like that; there was a time when the player had to take the initiative on their own, to make their own decisions about how to proceed.  So, back to the space station I go, and engage the commander in a little chatting.  It turns out he’s a virtual treasure chest of information, and as I grab a pad and paper to keep track of all he’s telling me, I wrap up our conversation with a list of eight or nine star systems worth visiting, and a few other vague clues about other directions to proceed.  From that point on, I make it a policy to make sure to really talk to everyone I meet, and not to just shrug off what look like needless threads of conversation.  Doing that, I find that almost everyone I come across has at least one or two useful pieces of information to pass along to me.

SCII was made in the days before games recorded everything a player did, and concepts such as “quest journals” were years off.  The journal that seems such a ubiquitous part of almost any RPG these days certainly does make keeping track of who and where the player should be concerned with, but at the same time, I feel it has a downside: I don’t feel the need to pay as much attention anymore.

In Dragon Age, I know that if any important information comes up in a conversation, it will immediately pop up in my journal, and any new map destinations will flare to life if I’m supposed to go there.  While this does make managing the multitude of quests simpler, it makes me far less inclined to really listen to what anyone has to say.  If it warrants a journal, it’s important; if it doesn’t, it’s not.  It has made it far to easy to put myself on autopilot and really ignore the (sometimes quite good) writing.

Now, I know at this point I probably sound like a grumpy old man, and you are waiting for me to inform you to please make your way off my lawn before I am forced to get the hose, but I do think there is an important issue here: automation of information management, while convenient, does create a level of disconnect between the player and the information.

In essence, I think we’ve become quite lazy as players in some fashion.  If games are, on the whole, getting easier, this aspect of automation only adds to it.  So what can be done?  I think it’s a little silly to advocate a return to the pen-and-paper days of yore, but I think there are some ways to take advantage of modern computing power but still require some player engagement.

The Etrian Odyssey series, for instance, requires that the player use the DS touchscreen create their own map of the labyrinth as they move forward.  This certainly does keep the player involved, but it also is something that really only works because of the hardware abilities of the DS.  But, from that, taking the idea of a rough sketch of a map being generated automatically, with the onus on the player to annotate (or not annotate) to their heart’s content could be a good middle ground.  With that compromise, it’s up to the player to decide what they consider important to keep track of, and how detailed to be when doing so.  This is something I think would’ve been great in the UQM, giving the player the ability to mark of the quality/danger level of various planets as they explore the galaxy.

Along the same lines, providing players with a regular “quest journal” system, but leaving it more of an outline, with the ability for the player to record their own pertinent information.  Perhaps make it something as simple as giving the player a way to hit a button during a conversation exchange that records it the journal.  Players could then decide what they think is important, as well as have a way to organize and annotate them to their own liking.  This takes away some of the tedium of pen-and-paper, but still requires effort from the player to keep their focus on the task at hand.

Perhaps I am just being an old curmudgeon, but I really do feel a sense of disconnect from more modern games that I just didn’t feel from a lot of older games.  Perhaps its a by-product of the “cinematic” experience so many devs strive for these days, or perhaps it just a case of too much automation.  At any rate, I think it’s an issue for designers to keep in mind when it comes to creating richer experiences, and one that present a multitude of opportunities to fix.