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.
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.
