Old-School Festive Bonanza
For the last stream of this calendar year, we asked ourselves about lost loves–lost game loves, that is! To the question “What game was lost to you and will never be found?”, we talked about Echo and Pixie Hollow Online, two online games that Corine and Keerthi spent hours and hours in. These online games, which are so hard to excavate after their time on the internet, are just some of the casualties discussed in The Game Availability Study, our reading for this week. Angus, a self-proclaimed hoarder and someone who has always cared about digital preservation, couldn’t come up with a game that he hasn’t managed to hang onto (which is how you know he’s an archaeologist.)
We had one of our most chaotic play sessions to date, which you might’ve guessed from the fact that we had to restart our stream halfway through. Digging through a list of festive 80’s games, we fired up an emulator and gave our best shot at playing The Official Father Christmas, a game that dares to pair deeply uh, persistent Christmas music with incomprehensible gameplay. The 8-bit version of We Wish You A Merry Christmas is seared into the inside of our skulls permanently. Happy Holidays! We had better luck with Special Delivery: Santa’s Christmas Chaos, and wrapped things up (get it? Like a gift!) with A Popples Christmas Adventure, which led us down a Popples rabbit hole and into a discussion about the standards for a good, publishable game way back when.
Get Ready for the Spring Ball
This stream was all about clothes, fashion, and style. We were unfortunately missing the most stylish member of the PlayTime team as we discussed the “perfect” outfit that Link sports, and the wealth of fashion one could come across in Tera Online. This week’s reading steered us a bit more in the direction of actual real-life brands and the games they “made” or their presence in games (such as Animal Crossing). Most of the specially created brand online/mobile games were unfortunately not available anymore. At least we agreed on one thing: Capes and cloaks deserve a comeback in our present time.
For this stream, we tried a lovely, small game called Historical Fashion Dress Up. All of the costumes were based on real, preserved garments. An in-game catalogue even provided some extra information about the specific clothing item, and displayed the item that inspired it. We got to dress up a dashing fellow for a 19th-century spring ball, and a dazzling lady for a social noon outing. Although the game has limited content at the moment, it is set to receive updates with new clothes from different epochs.
Craft and Draft
In this stream, we asked the question: What’s your favorite crafting mechanic in a game? This question led down a discussion of what “crafting” is, or, what it can be. We talked about games like Pixie Hollow Online (sadly now defunct), in which Keerthi spent some time making clothes and developing style, and games like House Flipper, which we concluded can be seen as a crafting game. Our reading of Sullivan et al. (2020), made us reflect on the associations of crafting with masculine or feminine labour, linking to earlier discussions around cooking.
In the second part of the stream, we got to try a very recently released game: Tavern Keeper (still in Early Access). In this “cozy-chaotic management sim” we started our very own tavern, hired some staff (an elf who set his last working place ablaze), got the first shipment of goods from a friendly cyclops(?), and we were all set to open up and welcome customers. Technically, the game is less of a crafting game and more of a management sim, but the “decoration mode” allows players to virtually create any type of decoration or furniture that they can come up with. These creations can also be shared, and it is very clear from the creativity and resourcefulness of this PCC (player-created content), that building in decoration mode is in fact, a craft. Check out this whole created festive banquet, for example! (We only got as far as a ginormous owl)
