Harvest Moon
I loved Harvest Moon in high school. While my friends were perfecting their Counterstrike headshot, or doing yet another Protoss Carrier swarm tactic on Starcraft, I was often found ploughing my virtual fields and living the quiet life of a Japanese villager. I played other games a plenty, and Harvest Moon was by no means the majority of my playing time, but when I played it I felt that it was good for me.
You start out with a pathetic heap of a farm: a place overgrown with weeds, a field littered with stones, a tiny one room house, and a pittance of savings. Though it is spring and the town market offers a huge array of produce seeds and livestock for sale, you can only afford to buy enough turnips for one or two small parcels of your field's potential. You toil all morning trying to tame your land into some semblance of civilization, and you spend all your remaining free time in the hills, scrounging berries and tubers to supplement your income.
But what of the villagers? They want you there, openly inviting this young, silent stranger with dark hair into their lives and homes. They invite you to visit them and participate in the act of being a part of the community. One cannot forget that they have pretty young daughters as well, and there are five eligible ladies who, if not overtly interested in you, are at least willing to talk to you any time you wish. Pretty good odds for a shy kid. The fact that winning over their hearts involves repeatedly giving them presents simplifies the interactions into something completely stress-free, as wooing her with words is a difficult task for a mute Nintendo character.
Before you know it, you are bringing in huge cash crops, adding extensions to your home, and having babies with your new bride. A capitalist success story, accomplishing the American dream in an agrarian way. You now live for the holidays, training your horse and dog to be good at the races, insuring your cows' milk win all the prizes, and maintaining your friendships with a community that by now adores you. All that extra time? Just go fishing.
The virtue of the game was in that first year as a poor farmer. Everyday you'd work your little pixelated character to utter exhaustion (try to swing a ho and he would just fall over and sort of cry and sweat for a minute), so that by winter you could make a profit. The special game items you sought were not things to make life more regal and pleasant, but things to give you more endurance so you might work a little longer. All personal relationships had to be maintained by frequent, if not daily, interaction. Hard work and kindness. I even want to say "hardwork" - a compound word, a basic and necessary phrase.
The reason the game was successful in conveying its educational message was because that message was simply a byproduct of making the game. There weren't little cheerful people preaching at you in tutorials, you did not get points, the game didn't even really have an ending if you didn't want it to stop. Your rewards in the game were that you had a nice house now, that you had a wife and strangely animated little baby. No one told you that you succeeded or failed. If you wished to play the whole game earning just enough to go get drunk every night at the town bar, you could do just that*. At the time in my life while I was playing it I was sixteen and "preparing for life" with grand expectations upon me that should I become anything less than the first astronaut-president-CEO-Bodhisattva I would some how be disappointing people. I still have my N64 and the game, and once in a while the impulse to play it does come upon me, though I'd like to think that the escapism from those expectations is no longer needed.
*I actually played a game like that once... while humorous to an extent it was also very depressing.
You start out with a pathetic heap of a farm: a place overgrown with weeds, a field littered with stones, a tiny one room house, and a pittance of savings. Though it is spring and the town market offers a huge array of produce seeds and livestock for sale, you can only afford to buy enough turnips for one or two small parcels of your field's potential. You toil all morning trying to tame your land into some semblance of civilization, and you spend all your remaining free time in the hills, scrounging berries and tubers to supplement your income.
But what of the villagers? They want you there, openly inviting this young, silent stranger with dark hair into their lives and homes. They invite you to visit them and participate in the act of being a part of the community. One cannot forget that they have pretty young daughters as well, and there are five eligible ladies who, if not overtly interested in you, are at least willing to talk to you any time you wish. Pretty good odds for a shy kid. The fact that winning over their hearts involves repeatedly giving them presents simplifies the interactions into something completely stress-free, as wooing her with words is a difficult task for a mute Nintendo character.
Before you know it, you are bringing in huge cash crops, adding extensions to your home, and having babies with your new bride. A capitalist success story, accomplishing the American dream in an agrarian way. You now live for the holidays, training your horse and dog to be good at the races, insuring your cows' milk win all the prizes, and maintaining your friendships with a community that by now adores you. All that extra time? Just go fishing.
The virtue of the game was in that first year as a poor farmer. Everyday you'd work your little pixelated character to utter exhaustion (try to swing a ho and he would just fall over and sort of cry and sweat for a minute), so that by winter you could make a profit. The special game items you sought were not things to make life more regal and pleasant, but things to give you more endurance so you might work a little longer. All personal relationships had to be maintained by frequent, if not daily, interaction. Hard work and kindness. I even want to say "hardwork" - a compound word, a basic and necessary phrase.
The reason the game was successful in conveying its educational message was because that message was simply a byproduct of making the game. There weren't little cheerful people preaching at you in tutorials, you did not get points, the game didn't even really have an ending if you didn't want it to stop. Your rewards in the game were that you had a nice house now, that you had a wife and strangely animated little baby. No one told you that you succeeded or failed. If you wished to play the whole game earning just enough to go get drunk every night at the town bar, you could do just that*. At the time in my life while I was playing it I was sixteen and "preparing for life" with grand expectations upon me that should I become anything less than the first astronaut-president-CEO-Bodhisattva I would some how be disappointing people. I still have my N64 and the game, and once in a while the impulse to play it does come upon me, though I'd like to think that the escapism from those expectations is no longer needed.
*I actually played a game like that once... while humorous to an extent it was also very depressing.