Horizon's Broadening Project -- A Reckoning

Frankly, I’m surprised it’s taken this long to reach a real crisis point with my Horizon’s Broadening Project. I made it almost half a year before coming to the conclusion that perhaps this is all a fundamentally flawed effort, and for a person generally with the gaming attention span of a distracted gerbil, I think that’s quite the accomplishment.

That said, I don't think the answer is in abandoning the effort. Instead, I simply wonder if I’m approaching it all in the right way.

For those not following along in your handy Playbill, the Horizon’s Broadening Project was conceived as an expedition of discovery into heretofore untrodden realms of gaming nirvana and, with any luck, eventually a platform from which I could plumb my own depths of self discovery. Thing is, self discovery is much easier when you’re eighteen than when you’re thirty five. I’ve pretty much seen it all from myself, and at this point “what I didn’t know about myself” has transformed into “what I have avoided having to admit about myself.”

Ideally this should be an article about my experiences with April’s HBP game — The World Ends With You. Those of you who listen to the podcast already know that my attempts to peel back the onion layers of this particular game can best be described as a cataclysmic failure. For those of you who do not listen to our humble show, surprise! I hated it!

Actually, hate may not be the right word, because that implies I spent enough time with it to elucidate an informed opinion. I did not. Repulsed might be a better descriptor. I reacted in much the same way that I would had I discovered that my Ham and Cheese Hot Pocket were stuffed with raw sewage instead of the foodstuffs to which I am accustomed. To be fair, I really should have just looked at the box, because it said right on the front Raw Sewage Hot Pockets.

The fault is mine.

I am hesitant to say much more than that, because I realize for one that we have a lot of people here who hold the game in high regard and for another because I simply can not speak from a place of objectivity. You might as well ask me why I am so hostile to the works of Zamfir, Master of the Pan Flute, and while I can find no functional flaw in his artistry I can’t get over the driving rage that makes me want to break his reedy instrument right across his blow-hole.

It was an experience I do not wish to repeat, like eating bad shellfish.

But, on to the broader point which is that so far what I have discovered about myself is that I like the things I pretty much already knew I liked. I feel somewhat like a guy who suddenly sat bolt upright in a chair, announced to a roomful of strangers that he was going to investigate whether water actually flowed downhill, rushed outside and sometime later that year shouted, “Yup! Definitely downhill!”

This is disappointing, not only because I had really hoped that I would quickly find something I’d heretofore been missing out on, but also because I am rapidly finding my existing biases a real barrier. I mean, we can talk all fluff and nonsense about overcoming prejudices and sticking with what at first seems unapproachable for the big-happy cultural growth of it all, but when you’re a guy with a mortgage, a job, two kids and a wife who would occasionally like the passing nod of vague recognition, that becomes a luxury of staggering commitment.

Square this scenario for me.

“What are you playing?” asks my wife as I grimace over the DS.

“A game I hate,” I respond.

“Why?”

And the implications of that resonate in the deep waters. After all, there sits my five year-old ever interested in some precious daddy time. There waits the office with half the border stripped waiting for some fresh paint. There is the lawn, the public shame of the neighborhood, aching for some seed and care. There are the games I actually like to play, their endless siren call ringing ever true. Oh, and look at that, my wife who doesn’t ever actually say, “so you’d rather play a game you hate than have a conversation?”

And, she doesn’t say it now either. Hell, she probably didn’t even think it, though she really should have.

Then again, the Horizon’s Broadening Project was never intended to be a forced march through the hell of games I hate, and I think that is where I’ve slowly gone wrong. Looking back at the debacle of TWEWY, I think the moment I chose a game that I knew I wasn’t going to like, no matter how highly recommended it was, proved a poor decision. Ideally, if we look at this from the self-discovery angle, this needs to be more about playing games that I otherwise have no prescribed existing bias.

As I reach the halfway point and reevaluate my experiment, I find this line of thought gives me much more enthusiasm for carrying forward. The point is not to knock down walls, but explore out the fog-of-war covered areas of the gaming landscape.

And, it is with that impetus that I enter May. Long live horizon’s broadening.

Comments

Malor wrote:

You're very consistent in your misplaced apostrophe, but the Broadening Project does not belong to the Horizon.

This. *twitch*

LobsterMobster wrote:

You could even get "experience" for not playing. My favorite method was saving my game, setting my DS clock ahead a week, loading up, saving again, setting the clock back, loading up, saving, repeat. Lots of fun, that.

If there was any doubt before, which I don't think there was, then it's official now. Lobster is a complete lunatic - and an obsesive one. Which of course makes the Disgea character avatar all the more appropriate.

Save, change clock, load game, repeat is NOT fun, but it is very useful when used alongside a pin faq. The fact that you need to use a guide to even have a chance of knowing how things turn out is just frustrating.

Elysium, you probably should have known better when almost every suggestion of TWEWY ended with warnings about it's style and presentation.

To be fair, I really should have just looked at the box, because it said right on the front Raw Sewage Hot Pockets.

HAHA! Sig'd!

Jonman wrote:

I dunno, I see this as a valid episode of the HBP. Isn't the intent of the project as a whole to push at the boundaries of your usual gaming tastes? TWEWY was simply a boundary that pushed back.

It's all well and good testing one's biases, but sometimes a bias is well-founded. I could watch nothing but period drama for a month, but I'd likely still think they sucked at the end of that month. For you, TWEWY is to videogames what Jane Austen is to me - no matter how much everyone else tells us it's amazing, it remains anathema to us.

And that's OK. You've merely confimed that your hatred of Japanese flavour of RPG is not misplaced, and in fact, is very well founded.

Job done. What's next?

Jon said everything I was thinking.

Hell, even Elysium said it was a high risk/high reward choice. Getting over the hump (in this case, the fact it's a jrpg) was the risk, the reward is a fantastically deep game with an interesting story. Oh well.

Oh, and where does Dwarf Fortress fit in the Elysium scale? Is it like venturing into the depths of jrpg-land again, or a gentle dip into strategery like Birth of America?

Badferret wrote:

I saw the screenshots/cover art, and thought seriously? Perhaps it is a generational thing (I'm 36), but I just don't see the appeal that such story/style has to folks.

I'm 34. One of the themes of the game is about ideas and aesthetics clashing, so I think the in-your-face art style is appropriate. I can see how it's an aesthetic turn-off for some, but I enjoyed it. Something like that is purely subjective.

Overall, I tend to agree. I've been following my own sort of HBP. Recently, I've been trying out various MMORPGs, and seeing if one sticks. (Just finished the trial of WoW, and I'm on to WAR.). There is something to be said about not diving too deep too fast. I've probably had more luck than Elysium, because I have been kind of nibbling at the edges. COD4 is a FPS (Which I play a lot of), but it's a warfare based FPS, which I normally avoid like the plague. But, I had a ton of fun with it.

Then there's STALKER, which despite having a style I'm in love with, didn't go so well. (I played more Deus Ex and System Shock 2 than is likely healthy). Too many bugs, didn't really like the controls (They felt kinda floaty), and just overall didn't really hit.

WoW was kind of a miss as well, despite combining a lot of things I like, but WAR is much more of a hit.

Still, there is something to be said for just saying screw it and playing something you like for awhile. Self-imposed hard deadlines in a busy life is a really bad idea. You likely know this already, but it bears repeating. (As for me, I've been just picking stuff as it comes along.)

“What are you playing?” asks my wife as I grimace over the DS.

“A game I hate,” I respond.

“Why?”

And the implications of that resonate in the deep waters.

For the same reason one reads Ulysses or Finnegans Wake.

Okay, TWEWY isn't nearly as important as a Joyce novel, but . . .

garion333 wrote:

Oh, and where does Dwarf Fortress fit in the Elysium scale? Is it like venturing into the depths of jrpg-land again, or a gentle dip into strategery like Birth of America?

This. This site as a whole has provided some fodder for my own person HBP, and I dutifully downloaded Dwarf Fortress. Which led to a half hour-long WTF.

Why, I asked myself am I playing freakin' ASCII games when I've got a box full of cutting edge gaming goodness. Talk about impenetrable - give me spiky haired angsty Japanese kids any day.

On a side now, some of the successes of my HBP have been a rekindled interest in singleplayer FPS, and a disproving of my long-held hypothesis that I didn't like 3rd person action / shooters.

Elysium wrote:

This is disappointing, not only because I had really hoped that I would quickly find something I’d heretofore been missing out on, but also because I am rapidly finding my existing biases a real barrier. I mean, we can talk all fluff and nonsense about overcoming prejudices and sticking with what at first seems unapproachable for the big-happy cultural growth of it all, but when you’re a guy with a mortgage, a job, two kids and a wife who would occasionally like the passing nod of vague recognition, that becomes a luxury of staggering commitment.

That my friend is the essence of the conflict. Time. Why spend any of that precious commodity engaged in recreational pursuits that do not recreate? I find I have a very low tolerance for games that frustrate and abuse me. The time and the dollars I spend on a game had better educate, entertain, enlighten or energize me in some way pretty quickly or else it's off the PC and on to something else.

I broadened my horizons in small ways like with multi-player games or digital downloading (no box to drool over). But my genres (Sci-Fi, Fantasy, WW2 and modern combat) as well as types (FPS, RTS and a little MMO) are pretty stable. Minor deviations like TF2 (team based multi-player) and Empire:TW (muskets!) break me out of the same old same old.

Happy gaming Elysium!

I think there's still value in the project. When I got my 360 I never thought I'd find games to play. I hated shooters and overall I hated games that were violent. Now having finished Halo 1-3, Half Life 2, Portal, Mass Effect, Butcher Bay and many other games, I'm thoroughly delighted that I came in with an open mind and now Saints Row 2, 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand and Crackdown are amongst my favorite games ever. Same with many other stabs like Animal Crossing: Wild World, Viva Pinata, etc. So I'm all for horizon broadening. But you have to be open to it and you have to be ready to bail, yeah. Because with a wife and other obligations there comes a time to fold 'em.

May's game is: Trainz Simulator 2009, World Builder Edition

Trainz? Really? Talk about broadening.

Elysium wrote:

May's game is: Trainz Simulator 2009, World Builder Edition

Just make sure you don't use a texting application while playing, as I hear that those can cause crashes...

Elysium wrote:

May's game is: Trainz Simulator 2009, World Builder Edition

Strange, I thought Ubisoft held the trademark to that lame Z naming convention. Though maybe Trainz had prior art or something.

What, no Dwarf Fortress? You afraid of real beards or something?

Man, that "horizon's broadening project" really bugs me. Atypical for the usual literacy in these parts.

Malor wrote:

Man, that "horizon's broadening project" really bugs me. Atypical for the usual literacy in these parts.

Apostrophe use and the correct spelling of "rogue" seem to elude about half the people on the net, for some strange reason.

Horizon's Rouge: The Game.