I’m trying to be less controlled/obsessive about things I write here, as I think it’d be more useful as a loose notebook of ideas not yet fully-formed. And I’ll go less insane when updating it this way.

From Tom’s recent post about how to create a good open world:

The idea is to encourage the player to have a favourite place, and give him a way of making it significant. There aren’t many practical considerations: it doesn’t have to be near anything or easy to get to, since you can fast travel to it. So it gets you looking at the world aesthetically, something a world like Just Cause’s definitely warrants.

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

There’s an area outside World of WarCraft’s Stormwind City called Elwynn Forest. I haven’t played the game in years, but I still remember the area. It’s beautiful, still and packed with tall trees. When I first visited it, I dearly wanted to stay there. To move in, build a hut, pitch a tent, make camp. A large part of my eventual dissastisfaction with World of WarCraft came from the inability to place meaningful roots anywhere in the game.

(Screenshot from the World of Warcraft wikia).

In any game that creates a convincing world, I want to nest. It’s rare that games let me do that, instead favouring progress and movement. There are obvious reasons: staying still is boring, no? Well, no. The Sims, Dungeon Keeper and Dwarf Fortress all prove otherwise, but also largely jettison the environmental exploration of a first or third-person action game. I want both. I just want my progress and exploration to be grounded and given meaning by a consistent and reflective central home.

There are great examples of this in other mediums. In comics, Batman ventures out into Gotham to fight crimes and then returns to Wayne Manor and the Batcave below. Each is a symbol filled with memorabilia commemorating his own life: a giant penny, a playing card, Jason Todd’s old Robin suit, Batman’s car.

Television does it, too, in part out of the financial necessity to build fixed sets. Buffy’s house, the library, the magic shop, all carry emotional significance. In fact, step back to the mythological underpinnings of vampires: they can’t enter your home unless you invite them. Homes have meaning.

Open world games in general demand a base of operations to make sense. I can suspend disbelief enough to accept a sleepless, foodless hero who fights with pause night and day, but I don’t like the disconnect of being a permanent tourist moving Jason Bourne-like through an emotionless landscape. I don’t want to always be gripped by a sense of otherness. I want to connect with my environment and imbue a part of it with meaning.

Frustratingly, this seems like such an obvious, natural desire. I spent endless hours as a kid using chairs, pillows and duvets to build forts, or finding clearings amongst trees and bushes into which to project personal, private hide-outs. Still, even those open world games that give you a base, like FarCry 2′s save houses or Grand Theft Auto’s apartments, don’t let you make them home.

This is why I connect so immediately with Wurm Online. It’s an MMO almost entirely about settling down. The world provides resources (trees, iron, fish) and obstacles (goblins, bears) and you have to survive and flourish amongst it all. The only way to do that is to set up camp: a place to store your items, a place to cook your food, a place in which you’re safe, and in the premium servers, a place to defend. A home!

After building my house in Wurm, fixing it up real nice, I eventually let it decay. I’d dug a cave underneath the house and decided to live in there instead.

(Screenshot from the Half-Life wikia.)

I remember Black Mesa East in Half-Life 2. Your first objective in the game is to get there, and after battling your way out of the hostile, dangerous City 17, you arrive to a haven of friends. You are welcomed with open arms by people who seem to know you and love you. It’s tragic when you an attack forces you to leave. It’s supposed to be tragic – that’s another reason why games could benefit from having more homes – but I can’t help but wishing I’d had more time there.

I want the Half-Life game where you’re not a constantly chased Christ-figure, but simply an ordinary member of the resistance. You perform your work within an oppressed city via a series of safe houses, lashing out at the Combine forces with strategic attacks, but always returning to a hide-out of friends.

(Screenshot from the Lord of the Rings wikia.)

Two final things: I was perhaps the only person who wasn’t annoyed by the long, 30-minute coda at the end of Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, where Frodo and Sam return the Shire. I had just spent ten fucking hours over three years watching them venture across Middle Earth for the sake of their home. I was glad to spend time with them when they got back there, because it gave the journey further context and meaning.

Dwarf Fortress does almost everything I want wonderfully, except it’s an inaccessible jumble of letters. Still: you build a home, and that home changes to reflect the events that happen as you play. If your dwarves are attacked and gored by angry, rampaging elephants, then they will carve the walls of their home with giant, blood-smeared elephant effigies.

That’s all I really want.

Fuel is unplayable on my home machine, due to scenery pop-up so bad that the ground beneath my car doesn’t appear unless I stop and look directly at it for 15 seconds. The only natural response to this was to start playing Lotus III: The Ultimate Challenge.

Lotus 3 was released in 1992 and developed by Magnetic Fields. They had probably my favourite logo of any Amiga-era developer. It sounds so epic, and seemed so grown up to my childbrain.

Returning to Lotus 3 prompted three weekends spent playing Amiga games, including Lotus 2, Overdrive, Ruff ‘n’ Tumble, The Chaos Engine, The Settlers, Walker, Prince of Persia and Flashback. Observations so far: Superfrog is as shit as I remember, and Lotus 3 is even more awesome.

Playing it now, I’m realising that I never really made it beyond stage 3, even on the easiest difficulty settings. I think there are a whole bunch of games from my childhood that I absolutely love, but that I never got further than the first twenty minutes. I sucked, but didn’t care. I had no competitive drive in most games; no idea that there was an end to be reached, and very little sense of my own failure.

It’s also only now that I realise that the race tracks are randomised. The string of letters displayed on the screen before each level, which I always mistook for some far-off Scandanavian location, were actually a code representing the track. Lotus 3 comes with a track editor called RECS, the Racing Environment Construction Set. You don’t place specific pieces of road, but instead play with percentages: 60% corners, 15% obstacles, this weather, and so on.

Create your track and you get an XX-letter string with a two-digit number, which you can then enter at any point to return to your created track. It’s pretty powerful.

The result is that you’re never able to learn the tracks. Fail, and the next time you play it’ll be different. While in something like Spelunky, randomly generated levels stops the repetition becoming boring, racing games normally thrive on that repetition. It’s how you improve: learning the corners, perfecting your time. So Lotus 3 isn’t about cornering.

This is made even more obvious when you consider that the game does most of the cornering for you. Even on the hardest difficulty, the car still automatically moves most of the way around each bend. You’ll go off the edge slightly and slow down if you do nothing at all, but it still shifts the challenge to other areas.

The challenge – the ultimate challenge, I guess – instead lies in overtaking. I can’t be sure, but I think the other cars in the road deliberately move in front of you to block your path.

It lies in managing your fuel load. Longer races mean having to stop off at designated areas to re-fuel, something which the computer drivers don’t have to do.

It lies in dodging obstacles. In the woodland areas, these are puddles and fallen logs. In the desert areas, it’s sand dunes. In windy areas, you’re fighting against a gust pushing you off the track (visually indicated by rolling tumbleweeds – who needs Fuel for weather effects?). And, in the futuristic sci-fi races – yes – you’re at the whim of timed laser shields that flash across the track.

Removing the focus on cornering is maybe a consequence of the limited technology of the time. Racing games from the era – those with Lotus 3′s perspective, at least – normally had your car sitting stationary while the track moved around you. That changes the feel of taking a corner. There’s certainly no sense of the backend of the car swinging around, or powersliding into bends. There are no physics, there couldn’t have been. So Lotus 3 facilitates fun in other parts of its racing simulation.

This is helped by the fantastic music. Before each race, you’re presented with your car radio, through which you select what music you want to drive to. This had such an enormous effect on me as a kid. This car I’m driving, it has a car radio, like a real car. The music? I chose it. The soundtrack is what I’ve remembered most about the game for the last 15 years, particularly the title track. It’s had me dancing in my kitchen for weeks now, and listening to it via YouTube videos at work.