September's file is up!

    Games, like ice cream, are one of the few inherently good things in the world. A man who doesn't like games is no fun, in all probability. Because games are fun. They occasionally have other purposes as well, but Wittgensteinian musings aside (which is rare for me, so you know I mean it), the main purpose of a game is always to have fun. And there are few things in life that can make that claim.

    Computer games haven't quite been cooperating for me lately. I've been meaning to borrow one called Arcanum from a friend for a bit, because I've heard it's great, but haven't yet. I tried borrowing an adventure-version of Magic: The Gathering, but it only runs on Win95, and I have WinXP. Finally, I have been borrowing Morrowind from a friend for a few months now, but I'm in a place where whenever I leave a certain area, the game crashes.

    Other than that, Morrowind is a fantastic game. It's incredibly deep, a wonderfully large world where there are quests to complete but so much fun stuff to do that you can run around forever at random doing fun things without accomplishing many of the main goals. In this way, it strikes me a lot like life.

    Then again, most games I play for a while tend to strike me a lot like life. Thankfully, Diablo II never did; my life isn't that exciting. But when I used to MUD, I thought it was just like life-- you run around gathering experience, gold, stuff, and meeting random people, for no real reason but to pass the time. When I played more Magic, I would conceive of life as requiring power sources to do things, and people as being mages of one of the five colors. When I played GURPS, it seemed a perfect mirror of life to me, to the point that I even made a character of my own stats to see what it would be like.

    But most recently, the game of choice around here is a brilliant board game called Puerto Rico. Words can barely describe it; it's the game that Settlers of Cataan should have been. Explaining it would take far too long, but each turn there are various roles to choose, and the game is won by the person with the most victory points. However, victory points are obtained through the use of other non-commensurate currencies: Money, colonists, and barrels of production. On a walk tonight with a friend, I theorized that this was similar to life-- Happiness points are what we want to accumulate in the end, but we need money, people, and productivity (and/or stuff) in order to attain them.

    This is an interesting train of thought to me, but I realize that it may be a case of the world looking like nails when I've been playing with a hammer for the last six months. Still, I think it worth considering the strategies involved in the game-- the early victory points will frequently lose out to those who invest in an infrastructure, just as a hedonist may end up less fulfilled than one who builds a network of friends and strong fiscal backing.

    Then again, my friend pointed out that the big difference between life and Puerto Rico is that the game counts your victory points at the end, while in life you want to be attaining happiness throughout. Regardless, in both cases, it's unclear what strategy is best, and such tends to change based on the strategies of other players in the game. And in both cases, I don't necessarily have much strategy, and what strategy I do have generally tends to be thwarted to the point where I have to wing it. But I guess, indeed, that's life.