Working With System Dynamics Fullerton Mind Map:
For this assignment, I played A Dark Room by Canadian indie studio Doublespeak Games. The game is available on web browser here: https://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/
The game’s genre is long term resource management with the game’s target audience naturally being fans of this form.
Being a resource management game, the economic mechanics play a huge part in the game’s system dynamics. The player gathers wood which they then use to construct huts and buildings. As the player constructs a village, they get workers whom they assign to gather or create materials then used to construct new types of buildings. Actually, most of the game was just gathering wood.
This is where I get to a criticism of the game. Besides constructing buildings, if you had the wood available, the other three actions a player could do was gather wood, use traps (which cost wood to build and also get randomly destroyed), and feed wood into the fire. In other words, everything costed wood. This would not be so bad of a fact if not that the gather wood action had a cool down somewhere between 30 to 60 seconds. As such, most of my time was spent just starting at the cool down timer. In other types of idle games I’ve played before, even if the player is waiting, there is always something the player can do, some button to press. Now, to be fair, this game has that button. It’s the button that wastes a single piece of wood for a fire, and why would I press that when I’m waiting for more wood?
The game’s theme and setting also did not resonate with me either. There is something strange in these types of games where I can gather as much wood as 25 people (give or take) in the same amount of time. I wanted to build huts to get more people so that way I can get wood faster. Except, for some reason each hut costed more wood to build than the previous (which is not how that would work). As such, it felt like the game was punishing me for trying to not have the game be as slow as it was.
Around the two hour mark I unlocked an expedition map, and by that point I was really done with the game. Rather than feeling like being rewarded with new content, I felt punished by now having a new system to also painfully slowly deal with, each expedition costing tools that I had to wait to make. As such, for me the biggest takeaway was that in my gaming preference I want to always make sure there is something for the player to do.
Wrapping up, this game values time, dedication, and the accumulation of resources for forms of industry. As for loops and arcs, there is of course the main interaction loop of press button, gain corresponding resources, wait for button time to become available, press button. Other primarily loops include assigning workers to a task and then gaining their resources passively over time, and building a hut, gaining inhabitants, gaining more resources, and then building another hut. The main arc was unlocking specific building types. Of course, that whole process could be counted as a loop, however since there were few instances and each were of a different building the individual occurrences can be viewed as an arc. In this arc, the player sees that a new type of building was available, they had the resources to buy it, curiously they do, and they unlock a new task they can assign people to. Lastly, looking at formal systems in the sense of representing an already established system, the game communicates its structure by utilizing resources in ways that we are familiar with. Wood is used as a construction material, more houses mean more people can live in the town, and hunting animals provides meat and furs. As such, the game then embodies these aspects of the real world.
