![]() ![]() My cat died last week and climbing that mountaintop with the unnamed stranger in Journey has expressed something intangible and yet inarguably authentic about my relationship to other humans.Īre these really the feelings we think we’re paying for? Perhaps the issue is that wishful thinking, such as the notion that one is important or magical or smart or even interesting, or maybe Batman, still pulls a lot of weight in making videogame systems appealing to play with. ![]() The Citadel in City 17 provides a master class in showing how the player’s goal remains unreachable until the player reaches it at the end Perhaps this is why we’re compelled to justify afterward all that inordinate time and attention spent, not only with quantifiable things like achievement points, but also with meaningful observations and conclusions like You understand exactly what you are buying.Īlthough Nintendo sometimes implores you to take a break, the average videogame does not ever acknowledge the vast amount of time and attention it demands (whereas time and attention are the mechanical backbone of Pocket Planes). Like in last year’s unforgiving Dark Souls, you can’t avoid examining your impulses and perhaps your guilt. Playing Pocket Planes, you might actually become disgusted with yourself. ![]() What was so important that you couldn’t wait 20 minutes for Mary Jimenez to reach Istanbul? Moreover, why do you even need all of these new planes and airports if you’re fundamentally performing the same act regardless? The Bux throw your impatience as well as your boredom into sharp relief. You could run your airline into the ground with very poor decisions and the little people would still look at you the same way. But Pocket Planes clearly does not care how much money, coins, or Bux you have. They just want you to spend money!!!!!11-you’ve been warned by the fair play brigade. The sticking point for Pocket Planes detractors is that you can use real money to buy Bux. The thing is that the same Bux let you instantly complete flights, doing away with the waiting game and you can also exchange Bux for more coins. If you want the newest planes that carry the most and fly the fastest, you need to spend Bux, a rarer fare. ![]() You have to fund flights and buy new airports with gold coins. It’s filled with to-do lists that you never manage to empty. Pocket Planes might be mistaken for a productivity app. NimbleBit’s little Bitizens don’t have the heart to explain the meaning of my life. The gameplay is a quick sequence of taps: 1) Tap a departure city on the world map 2) tap the plane icon 3) scroll through a list of departing people and cargo 4) tap on them 5) tap the flight icon 6) tap a destination city 7) tap the FLY! button. When the time has passed, planes back on the ground, you can start again. Depending on the virtual distance, the flights could take anywhere from one minute to several hours of real time. You build an airline by loading planes with passengers and cargo and sending them to their destination cities, ideally making a profit. To be sure, the game does create a meaningful fiction, but only since its images are figurative. Its data sits merely suspended in a can, nothing but numbers. So I find the totally meaningless play of Pocket Planes refreshing. Meaning is hard-wrought in sandbox games like Minecraft, where it is laid brick by brick and Spelunky, where it gets blown out of the earth (at great risk to your health). In this era the most meaningful play is thought to emerge from human-powered story engines like EVE Online, an online space opera whose players engage in market manipulation and real-life corporate theft and Journey, a collaborative desert pilgrimage that plays like artistic speed dating. Your dormant airline company won’t be in debt, and even when all the polar ice caps have melted in a century, the Earth in your pocket will be intact. The aurora borealis will be fixed in the same arc over Reykjavik. You can leave a woman stranded on layover in Guangzhou and when you come back in five years she will still be standing in her slot, her idiotic eyes burrowing two blank pixels onto your touchscreen, waiting to be lifted over to Budapest. The paradox is that nothing inside Pocket Planes ever ages. #Pocket planes planes simulator#“I was playing Pocket Planes every day until I started playing that new procedurally generated famine simulator with the electroacoustic soundtrack. “Like it’s fun until you realize it’s not really fun.” In a conversation about Pocket Planes the remark most often made is that Pocket Planes will get old. The independent developer NimbleBit released Pocket Planes on Apple devices last month to general snark and reluctant tapping. ![]()
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