Gaming on this side of the Unpleasant Ditch

I've had interesting thoughts. They've tackled the topics of the day. There were many very insightful concepts and perspectives bounced around. They never made them to the page. I've been playing a new game.



It's called GemCraft Chasing Shadows. It's the third iteration of a tower defense game that has you matching special powered gems to blast the bejeezus out of the perpetually marching armies of evil. The bad guys are coming down a track and you have to put gems of power in the right spot to zap them before they get to your fort. It's classic tower defense, with the twist of mixing-and-matching gems of special abilities that get more powerful over time.

The little shiny pentagons-in-squares are my defenders. The marching dudes with the little green health bars are the baddies. The pink energy blasts are the bejeezus.

A lot of people have been playing games recently, some of them being emotionally scarred in the process. I am among them, but not. They've been marching through military maneuvers in a dystopian future. I don't find that quite so appealing.

It's not the content of the game. Oh no. I love myself some dystopian futures, zombie apocalypses, and rampaging action fests. But I want to enjoy them as story and plot. I don't want to participate.  Actually, I'll leave that open. I have not yet found a shooter video game with a world so compelling that I want to participate.

A different level. One where I had to blast the bejeezus out of baddies and a couple of baddie buildings.

But these little tower defense games - and they tend to be in-browser Flash games - I find them compelling enough to draw me in. The story is fine. But it's the balance between game mechanics and incremental difficulty. All you have to do is drag and drop those gems in the right spots, but you have to do it when your energy is correct and the right kind of enemies are coming.  There's timing to it, but not the kind where missing the double-tap to grab a platform results in plummeting into a pit of spikes. It's puzzle timing, where order and sequence are more important than the rhythm of button mashing.

The learning curve is such that each new level is the right sized step.  Boss levels have more to do with strategically limiting your abilities (not all special gems, no special powers) than it does with throwing a huge mountain of hit points in your way. This game just throws a huge mountain of baddies your way, which can be turned into a red smear through the judicious use of more powerful gems.

A boss level. With more blasting and more bejeezus. 

I do enjoy that the levels in GemCraft can be hard, but they don't feel arbitrary. Sometimes, with super difficult games (or sports games, like Bases Loaded for the NES) it feels like the machine can pull out some magic new ability to defeat you at the last minute (or a 12 run 9th inning).  On the other side, that same arbitrary feeling can come from super easy games like Candy Crush. Whatever random generator is dropping flashy candies can do so in a way that backs you into a corner, and starts requiring that you dump cash into the machine.

I didn't blast hard enough. Bad bejeezus.

There's that concept in digital art called the Uncanny Valley. I think there's something similar in games. Call it the Unpleasant Ditch. It's where the gap between being a casual fan and being an expert is so wide and time consuming that it's just better to put the game away.

Some games overcome the Unpleasant Ditch by being strictly casual, meaning any player can pick up at any point and knock out a level or two. Others require such an investment in character building up front that it doesn't make sense to put the game down after spending so much time just getting into the story.

I guess that's where I like these GemCraft tower defense games and really appreciate what the designer, Game In A Bottle, has done. Through smart design, they put the Unpleasant Ditch on the other side of getting through the main story.  After the original story for GemCraft is over, it is possible to go back through all the levels and defeat them on progressively harder settings. That way, if you don't want to gear up for the dedication of time, you still get to enjoy the plot. It is very much like old Nintendo games (except for you, Ninja Gaiden, and your damn eagles).

I'll probably spend a few more hours playing GemCraft to win it. At that point, I may shutdown my game with a full sense of accomplishment and return to thinking my own thoughts again.