The Evolution of the Metaverse

[icycalm]

[Due to challenging life circumstances (see my irl blog in the Cult Discord #offline channel) I am unable to properly update the site right now, but I still have things I want to post. So, since I only get a few productive moments per day, I will break down my essays into small forum posts, and when the essay is complete I'll move it to the Art Theory section. -icy]



Back around 2015 when I was writing my still unfinished Planetary Annihilation essay I had accumulated hundreds of notes amounting to dozens of pages of material on the game. And then my laptop hard drive died and I lost all of them. Since then I have been meaning to sit down and reconstruct those notes and continue the essay, but never got round to it. I haven't even gotten to analyzing the art style and soundtrack yet, both of which are phenomenal. Even more phenomenal however is the game's complete lack of invisible walls, which after the infinite scalability (which I've already analyzed) is the game's standout feature.

This was brought home to me when, during a short break from the game, the guys and I fired up AoE2 and I could no longer get into it at all. Even beyond the lack of third and fourth layers, the gameworld just seemed flat and unbelievable in ways I had never noticed before. Above all, why wasn't I able to just walk around an enemy when he was standing with his side to "the wall", i.e. the black invincible fog surrounding the battlefield? How is that acceptable as a military tactic? Incredibly, I myself had been using this tactic for decades in dozens of games but without even realizing I was using it, or that it rendered the whole simulation ridiculous. Suddenly AoE's sprawling maps appeared to me for what they are: ludicrous little black squares where the only viable strategy was to build with your back "to the wall" and then seek out your enemies on the other side "of the square", since there was nowhere else for them to be.


To be continued...