An emerging form of games, born out of Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress, has occupied my thoughts lately. It doesn’t seem to have a name yet; it grew out of some Minecraft mods and had its seminal work in Factorio. It’s a cousin, or even sibling, to the idle/incremental game, but usually looks more like a management or survival sandbox game. You could call it a resource management and automation game, or a factory simulator, but I’ll use the term “resource escalation game,” because its primary features are:
resources to collect, usually from a world you must explore
crafting of resources into more complex or rich forms
structures for automation of the crafting, allowing you to take a higher-level conceptual view where you are concerned with the logistics of automation rather than foraging
and an escalation created by those resources, where your initial low-level needs become inconsequential and the pace of progression is governed primarily by what complexity of resources you have instead of a more abstract research system1
Factorio gates a lot of things behind research, but research is driven by manufactured resources, not the more typical research-over-time approach seen in strategy games. ↩
Ludus Novus 030 - Transcendentalism, Gentrification, and the Procedural Rhetoric of Stardew Valley
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What does Stardew Valley say about the world with the rules of its simulation, and how does it compare to another Transcendentalist game, Walden, a game?
REFERENCES Barone, Eric. Stardew Valley. Chucklefish, 22 February 2016. https://stardewvalley.net/
Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. MIT Press, 2010.
Brice, Mattie. “My First Year in Stardew Valley.” Alternate Ending, 29 April 2016. http://www.mattiebrice.com/my-first-year-in-stardew-valley/
Fullerton, Tracy et al. Walden: a game. USC Game Innovation Lab, 4 July 2017. https://www.waldengame.com/
La Flèche, Gersande. “The gentleman farmer, labour and land: ecocritical possibilities in Stardew Valley.” Gersande’s Blog, 3 May 2016. https://gersande.com/blog/the-gentleman-farmer-labour-and-land-ecocriticial-possibilities-in-stardew-valley/
Keegan, Brett. “Stardew Valley, Sorge, and Martin Heidegger.” Backyard Philosophy, 27 March 2018. https://backyardphilosophy.com/2018/03/27/stardew-valley-sorge-and-martin-heidegger/
Olson, Dan. “The Stanley Parable, Dark Souls, and Intended Play.” Folding Ideas, 26 July 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHmivGmkjJw
Piel, Michael. “The Video Game Based on Thoreau’s ‘Walden’ Will Bring You Closer to Nature.” Motherboard, 25 October 2017. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/7x4vmz/video-game-based-on-thoreau-walden-will-bring-you-closer-to-nature
Schultz, Kathryn. “Pond scum: Henry David Thoreau’s moral myopia.” The New Yorker, 19 October 2015. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/pond-scum
Thoreau, Henry D. Walden; or, Life in the woods. Ticknor and Fields, 9 August 1854.
