Maybe there were others but "old games" I noticed the most were arcade-style: Pacman, Missle command, platform hoppers, shooters, fighting games ("$random Combat!!!"), etc. and they always drew out adrenalin from the player(s). It was always very satisfying to shoot some random alien mothership from the sky, collect all jewels, blow buildings up etc. - it was simply fun. It's why action movies are popular and kids "play war".
I guess the calmest games available since the dawn of gaming were non-combat (civilian) airplane simulations - cruising through skies, noticing random pixels on the simulated ground (simulating buildings) passing by. The very advanced ones even had clouds! Or so I heard. They were too calm for me to take to them. There were also "gadgets" - programs not necessarily made to be games but used as such. I used to spend hours generating fractals and color cycling their palettes in Fractint. There was an application I remember that had only one single purpose in its existence - to generate fractal clouds. Just a blue background and white fluffy clouds created from a dozen of configurable parameters. It was fun. It was also fairly zoning, even if the interaction with the system consisted of changing numeric parameters and then waiting until the slow CPU created the final image. It was possibly similar to programming and then compiling.
Maybe it's just a thing of perception, but I conspicously noticed at least two games (incidentally both have Sony involved with them) that basically "do nothing" except draw pretty pictures in realtime, with minimal interaction from the player:
Some puzzle games also rely on gorgeous graphics and the player figuring out the magic interaction that would trigger even more gorgeous graphics for the reward, but this is something else. These games are incredibly zone-invoking because they easily pull the player into the game-world, and make him care what happens to the item being controlled, but are also very non-threatening - the player-controlled item will not crash, burn or die, and it's moved very fluidly, literalliry flowing around the world.
Both games (and it looks like they are trend-setting) have become very popular very quick. I've spent about a half a day playing Flow when it was new and it worked for me. I could still play it, but I don't want lose another half a day :) It's a very relaxing game, almost mind-numbing, but it has just enough inner rules and consistency to make it interesting if the player gets bored and wants some action.
Does the interest in these games mean anything? I think people like the "zone-in" feeling and also don't like feeling threatened (the adrenaline factor) so something that provides both can be very attractive. On the other hand, they also provide a temporary mind-numbing effect - I guess that if someone looks at the players' EEG, they will find them relaxed, something possibly similar to a hypnotized state.
To me this looks like something different than the zone-in feeling of the old, adrenaline-filled games. Maybe this is just it - the noninvolvement of adrenaline makes players not suddenly feel tired or bored after some time of playing - they could literally go forever. Thus it looks more like a "low state zone" when compared to the other ones. I don't know if it's a good or bad thing, it's just interesting. Or maybe I'm just reading more into it than there really is.
Post your comment here!
Comments are subject to moderation and will be deleted if deemed inappropriate. All content is © Ivan Voras. Comments are owned by their authors... who agree to basically surrender all rights by publishing them here :)