Adventure Log: ARE YOU NOT EDUTAINED

There was no Adventure Log last week because I spent the entire week ploughing through a huge pile of essays. As compensation, this week I have hired a professional. Sit back and relax as urbanAnchorite and I take you on a tour of the early-90s edutainment software ‘scene’, a scene which turns out to have had a greater influence on both of us than previously suspected.

Below the cut: Granny’s Garden, Winnie the Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood, L: A Mathemagical Adventure, Stickybear Math Town, Hazard/Rescue, Treasure Mountain!, and a couple of runners-up.

Adventure Log: Fallen London (browser-based, 2009-)

Now, when I were a lad, all of this was fields, you could still get a pint of beer for £1, and Fallen London was still called Echo Bazaar.

When you made an Echo Bazaar account, you hooked it up to your Twitter. Then, when you took actions in the game, you had the option of letting the game post a Tweet – a tiny snippet of narrative, summarising whatever it was you’d just achieved. This was called an ‘echo’. So if you had friends on Twitter who were playing the game, every so often you’d see something like:

This is an excitingly risky reproductive strategy (for the game, not the player), because it’s balancing intrigue against irritation. If people get sick of #ebz Tweets sprouting all over their timeline like mushrooms, it’s going to actively prejudice them against the game – so you have to hope that, before irritation sets in, they’ll have been sufficiently tantalised to click on a link and get ensnared.

I was using Twitter in 2011, and several of my friends were playing Echo Bazaar. I could very easily have developed a Pavlovian antipathy to the very words ‘London’, ‘bats’, and ‘delicious’. And, honestly, if you’d tried to elevator-pitch me on the whole concept, I’d have wrinkled my nose. ‘A dark and hilarious Gothic underworld’? Dear God, it sounds whimsical. I bet it’s got flippy-floppy skellingtons like a Tim Burton movie, and the kind of arch, pallid humour that used to characterise about 70% of fandom’s Rose Lalonde dialogue. I bet everyone wears hats.

But I was curious. I clicked a link. Three years later, I was using Echo Bazaar (now hight Fallen London) to plan my wedding.

Adventure Log: Theme Hospital (PC, 1997)

Of all the games I’ve never finished – a long and humiliating list – I’m not sure there’s one I’ve started quite so many times as Theme Hospital.

Theme Hospital is a game where you build and run a hospital. You win a level by amassing a sufficiently high score across several different categories: total funds, number of people cured, etc. Then you get a letter from the Ministry of Health encouraging you to move on to a new challenge, i.e. opening a brand new hospital in a new town (and thereby starting a new level). Most of the crucial scores can be accumulated by making a decent hospital and then keeping it functional for long enough. People cured, for example: you can’t uncure someone, so even if you’re only curing ten people a year, you will still inevitably end up meeting the requirement.

The sticker is a score called Reputation. Reputation can go down as well as up – if you cause a public health disaster, for example – and it can also just stay put: if you’re running a perfectly ordinary hospital that’s not collapsing but also isn’t distinguishing itself, your Reputation is going to hover in more or less the same place, no matter how long you play. In other words, you can’t drag up your Reputation just by treading water and being patient.

This is the first of many useful life lessons that Theme Hospital has taught me.

Adventure Log: Unreal Tournament (PC, 1999)

Like Spelunky, I don't know why I started playing Unreal Tournament. I must have been about fifteen, and I remember discussing it with some of my friends at secondary school, so maybe one of them convinced me to try it out. Again like Spelunky, it's not a kind of game I'm normally drawn to. I've played a few first-person shooters in my time – it was kind of hard to be a young man in the 2000s and not end up playing first-person shooters, since GoldenEye and Halo were both so fundamental to adolescent male social interaction – but it's always a genre I've enjoyed with friends in the same room, rather than as a solo pursuit. (To this day, I think the closest I've ever come to playing and completing a solo FPS is with the Mass Effect games, which are party RPGs clad in a very thin FPS veneer.)

UT, though, I played all by myself, and not even against strangers on the Internet. I have never once entered a UT match against another human being. I played UT exclusively against robots.

Adventure Log: Shadowrun Returns trilogy (PC, 2013-15)

There’s a bit in one issue of Sandman where Lucien, the Librarian of Dream, is giving the reader a tour of his library – which contains every book ever written. He comments that he’s even got your books. What’s that? You haven’t written any books? Yes you have, here’s one: The Bestselling Romantic Spy Thriller I used to think about on the bus that would sell a billion copies and mean I’d never have to work again.

I never actually had that book. Everyone has a novel in them, but I’ve never found mine. (My romantic spy thriller did very well and I’m proud of it, but here I am, still working.) What I did absolutely have, for years and years, was the bestselling video game that I used to think about on the bus that would sell etc. etc.

And oh, that game! What a masterpiece it was. A party-based RPG, with a strong narrative, characters you could care about, a flexible build system so you could be the kind of PC you enjoy being, big dramatic set-piece battles, and – crucially – grid combat. No dull JRPG auto-fights where you hammer the boss with your strongest spells for eighty turns until he finally switches to his second form and becomes immune to poison; no irritating real-time-with-pause compromises where you queue up a bunch of brilliant manoeuvres, hit space, and watch your party completely fail to execute any of them. Real, proper, granular, transparent, beautiful grid combat. Tank holds the bottleneck while the mage charges something cataclysmic in cover and the rogue patiently circles to the higher ground, and you know when you’re in range because there’s a bunch of fucking squares on the floor that tell you so. Exquisite. Oh, this is my stop.

Then it turned out someone had actually made that game, and it was called Shadowrun Returns.

Adventure Log: Spelunky (PC, 2013)

I started playing Spelunky – the ‘enhanced edition’, not the lo-fi original – in March 2014, during the last Oxford vacation I ever spent at my childhood home in Birmingham. I don’t know why I bought it. It was cheap in a sale on GOG, but even so, it’s a famously hard platformer and I am famously bad at platformers. I never honed those nerves and thews on Mario. I miss jumps; I get stressed. I think I lasted half a level in Meat Boy. I ought to have bounced off Spelunky after my first handful of deaths.

Instead, I got hooked. I’d play it a few times (which doesn’t take very long; early in one’s Spelunky career surviving for five minutes is a significant achievement) and then decide it was too hard and not for me. The next day I’d fire it up again, wondering if I’d somehow magically got better at it overnight. This lasted for the rest of the vacation, until I went back to work and lost all my free time again.