2001-08-04 - 11:17 p.m.

Planetarion: Putting the Angry Child To Bed (1)

Often times when I am relating the seemingly daily hassles of living in my now-fractured Planetarion galaxy to my pal the Manager, he will ask me the very reasonable question: If it's so unpleasant, why do I continue doing it?

Simple question, complicated answer.

I guess the short answer is that Planetarion seems to be more than an online game. It's like a playground where I am finding out a lot of things about myself, some of them good, others bad. However, more importantly, it also seems to be an arena where I seem to be working on weak places in my character and making progress on myself.

Of course, making that last statement might be considered a little dubious - how can you really learn anything when everything about PA is safe and sheltered from "reality." All the planets in Planetarion are just ones and zeros: a dream in the mind of a computer. Why should what goes on there have any significance at all in the greater scheme of things?

I don’t really know, but this self-knowledge does seem to be a real thing and it does seem to be getting translated into my dealings outside the universe of pretend spaceships.

I've gotten a couple of insights into the psychology of PA by looking at a couple variants of it.

A few weeks ago Lily bought a computer game called StarCraft. She figured since I liked PA so much, I should like StarCraft since they both are space strategy games. However, I've been so preoccupied that it has just sat, unopened, on a shelf. Finally Lily started playing it herself and I got to look over her shoulder. In terms of how the game works, it is very much like PA - in fact so much so that I think a court case could be made that the creators of Planetarion based their game on StarCraft. There are similar ship names, similar material names, etc.

So, how do the two games compare? Well, Starcraft is a fast-paced, interactive game with good graphics. PA is a clunky, page-driven game with no animation at all. Basically, StarCraft looks better than PA, and it plays better than PA. It also lacks some of PA's more annoying features: server downtime, non-working pages, pop-up ads and so on.

And get this: when you get tired and go to bed you can TURN THE DAMN THING OFF!! No more worrying that your planet will get blown up while you sleep!

So then, why is StarCraft sitting on the shelf while I ruin my sleep biorhythms playing Planetarion? Simple, really. The major thing that PA has that StarCraft does not is the social element. Relations between players, galaxies and alliances are a vital element of PA: no matter how good a player you are, you need a decent galaxy and alliance to back you up or you will never even get close to the top. In fact, there seem to be a lot of people who play it JUST for its social element, and don't seem to care that much about their scores or their planets. So it's people that make PA go 'round.

The second variation of Planetarion that helped me understand it better was the beta version, which I was playing for a couple weeks.

For the beta some of the rules and statistics of PA had been changed, but it was basically the same game with the same clunky pages and dreary graphics. However, the major, major difference was that in "real" PA a tick (a turn) takes one hour, while in the beta it takes just two minutes.

This hyper-speeding up of the game makes it totally different. In terms of PA's addictive qualities, "real" PA is a cup of coffee while the beta is a bag of crack cocaine.

It also greatly reduces the co-operative nature of the game: the quick turns make defense all but impossible. Also, the 24-hour-a-day nature of the game demands total devotion from its players. The ones who reach the top literally never sleep. Either that, or they have a partner helping them, but that's totally illegal. (Nudge, wink)

However, eventually I quit the beta, and while I was sorry about it for a little while, I quickly got over it. In the real PA, it literally takes a month and a half to build your planet up to full fighting force. Until you have most of your scans and ships in place, it makes little sense to attack at all.

However, in the beta, all that building gets out of the way in a couple days. Because the beta takes less time and care, people are less personally invested in their planets. I found that I quickly developed an "easy come, easy go" attitude about my planet, in spite of the addictive, obsessive nature of the game.

At one point in the beta, the server went down, and I assumed that round of the beta was finished. However, a few days later I heard that the round was still going. I checked my planet and it was still there, but it was a devastated ruin, as was the rest of my galaxy. In fact there were just two galaxies that seemed to own the game - all the players in them were so huge that they could not be attacked or defended against. The #1 galaxy in particular was impossibly huge: it was over three times the size of the #2 galaxy and had 21 players among the top 40.

However, by about 2/3 of a day of concerted play I was able to build my planet back up to where it was in the top 60. Then the creators shut down that round of the beta for good.

Oh, well. Like I said: easy come, easy go.

(Concluded, tomorrow)