Saturday night we had a LAN party at my friend Shaan’s house. We played Warcraft III, which is a real-time strategy game. The particular maps we played on were a game called ‘tower defense.’ There were several variations on this game type, but I’ll elaborate on the one that held my attention the best.
The point of ‘tower defense’ is simple. You have a little base to defend, and some distance from this based is a portal, out from which large monsters will periodically emerge. They try to make their way to your base, and you try build up your towers to kill them before they get there. Every time you kill a monster, you get a little bit of money, which you can use to build more towers, or upgrade your existing towers. Every time a monster gets through to your base, he disappears and you use one life; once you lose your allotted number (usually around 50), the game is over for you. As the game progresses, the monsters that come through the portal get tougher and tougher.
After playing and losing a couple of times, I realized that in order to succeed you have to set your towers up into a maze, increasing the distance the monsters have to travel to get to your base, and therefore the amount of time your towers have to shoot at the monsters before they are killed. Every time I played the game, I’d do a little better than I had before, and I kept tweaking what I thought the ‘ideal strategy’ would be.
I never tired of it though – long after everyone else was sick of having played the same map over and over, I wanted to keep going. I figure this is because I still had ideas that I wanted to try out. I find myself to be this way with pretty much any type of game – I feel the need to keep playing it untill I understand the dynamics of the system, at which point I get bored with it. Once you know how the thing works, it’s no longer entertaining. Could it be that I find video games so entertaning because they’re just another form of learning?