Required Criteria
Places by ktch0. Target audience is anyone. However, it appeals to people who like art and nature sceneries. Game is hosted on a web browser with WebGL porting.
Central Argument
Traditional storytelling is often built upon the story of a protagonist, where the medium follows the journey of someone throughout a conflict, either with themselves, someone else, society, nature, etc. While this mode of storytelling is universal across mediums, walking simulator games take a unique approach to the storytelling experience–they center the world around the player themself and the story becomes the player’s decisions and interactions with the world.
Mechanics
Places is a game that allows for first person view and 3D exploration of a place. The places themselves are typically nature scenes, often located around a forest or a lake in some type of weather or time. For example, Sketches 5 is set up in a forest in the morning of a winter. Places 6 and Sketch 3 are set up in a forest next to a lake. Controls are WASD with shift to move faster. Players can walk around scenery and traverse terrain, tread water, and look at trees and plants. The only interactions that the player can make is travel through the world, which in itself is a part of the story.
The game from the beginning has no prompts at all. You are placed in the scene with a pop-up that tells you how to move and enter full-screen. As you walk around, you can run through grass, swim through water, and walk around trees. With enough exploration, you find that you are confined in an in-game boundary that holds the whole world. The lack of prompting except how to move motivates you to do just that: move around the world. With a camera, you can look around as if you are turning your head.
Story
There is no traditional storyline to the piece. The world environment itself is something that you explore as an evocative space, and what you choose to do forms the basis of the story. There are no antagonistic elements, such as energy, the elements, predators, nor are there any goals. Movement through the environment is not hindered by obstacles either, allowing for free movement and exploration.
Through the simple mechanics of the game and the naturesque aesthetic of the game, Places emphasizes sensation and discovery. It is akin to looking at a landscape painting, to wander your eyes around and admire the technical beauty and realism that attempts to capture nature’s beauty. But in this case, instead of a painting it is a walking simulator game. The game quite literally immerses the player into the scene.
Aesthetics
Compared to other games, this game prioritizes discovery and sensation as elements of enjoyment. There are no objectives to the game besides discovering all of the animated parts of the scene. This allows for better interaction with the artwork; there is no objective goal to follow but your own. One interesting thing to note is that the world is not necessarily interactable. You cannot pick up objects or collide or interfere with them, adding to the idea that you are simply an observer in this natural landscape. In doing so, there is a subtle, implicit objective: to observe the scene. This likens to what people are expected to do so in nature, to walk around, explore, and admire its beauty. There is no explicit story when one explores nature; similarly there is no explicit story here. It runs purely on curiosity and mirrors how one would walk and admire nature in real life.
Caption. Walking through Place 6. Running through fields of grass and looking at trees. It reminds me of CS 147 blender assignments. It’s kinda cool.
Caption. Variety of nature scenes in different climates.
Ethics
Violence does not play any role in the walking simulator. There is no concept of being hurt or hurting anyone or anything. The lack of violence, or really the lack of any objective is a key design choice in Places.
The exclusion of violence in the game allows for a stronger emphasis on the lack of objective in the game. In doing so, the game invites the player to create intention in their game playing, moving around the environment and interacting with it more. This is a key difference in how games interact with players and the world. Take for an example such as Skyrim, where the world building is a large part of the game experience. There is really good graphics and rendering of the world around them, as well as an open ended storyline and side quests to make the reality more immersive. While there is obviously higher fidelity and quality world in Skyrim compared to Places, there is a larger emphasis on the game objectives of killing people and completing quests in Skyrim compared to Places. Where Places has a lower quality world, the simplicity of the game allows for a stronger appreciation of the world assets and its beauty. Where Skyrim has its world as a setting for an adventure, Places has its world as the game itself.
