SEPTEMBER 7, 2008: It’s an overcast Saturday morning, the cold breath of fall in the air. Jonathan Macken pulls up at the Southcenter Game Stop to pick up his copy of Spore. For more than three years, ever since rumors of the videogame hit the discussion boards, Jon has waited for this day. Boxes of the game are stacked by the cash register, ready for the Spore people. At 9:30am, Jon is one of the first.
Jon has taken a week of vacation in honor of the game. While his coworkers at Thales Avionics might use vacation time to fly somewhere with a real sun and ocean, Jon plans to hole up in his apartment flying over false suns and oceans, playing God in an animated universe. He has stocked up on supplies: ice cream bars, spaghetti, coffee, and a case of Coke Zero. “I am not going to worry about shaving or laundry or anything.”
Jon is my brother-in-law. Hovering around six foot three, he’s a towering, gentle person. Between the ages of 18 and 23 he lived primarily on Navy ships, and at 36 he still holds himself like a military man—formal and remote after years of saying “sir.”
In industry terms, Jon is a “hardcore gamer,” as distinguished from the “casual gamer.” While a member of the casual species might play simple videogames a few hours a week, Jonathan devotes whole days to mastering complex games. In the space of a weekend, he can finish a game designed to take weeks. For him, getting lost in the strategy is a fundamental form of joy.
He has been playing videogames since high school in Eugene. Back then he and a couple of buddies were into Dungeons and Dragons, SimCity and Reach for the Stars. They called themselves the Geek Squad. After high school, in the Navy, he played on the ship. “It was good for morale,” he remembers. After the Navy he took a job at Thales, a company that repairs, inspects, and upgrades airplane parts.
Since the dawn of his life as a player, the games have improved, evolved. While Jon might’ve been part of a geek fringe in high school, in the years since then videogames have gone seriously mainstream: It’s now an $18 billion a year industry that has been called “recession-proof.” (In _Spore_’s first three weeks on the market, over 1 million copies were sold.) Many believe games will eclipse movies, just as movies eclipsed books.
Long before he heard about Spore, Jon knew about its creator, Will Wright, the man who created SimCity, The Sims, and The Sims 2. Wright’s games were ideal outlets for a player like Jon, who values complexity over reactive violence and likes his imagination to be engaged. This is Wright’s genius. As he said in a 2006 speech, “[any] ownership we can give players over content” improves upon the game. “Players’ stories will always be more powerful than scripted stories.” The Sims is still one of the best-selling videogame franchises in history.
The Sims (short for “simulated”) occupies a virtual world where people fight, have affairs, run on jogging machines, lose jobs, rebel against parents. Unlike in a game where the object is to blow away enemies, the player’s job is to meet the Sims’ fundamental needs (like Hunger or Fun).
Published: November 2008
