It wasn’t till some way into development of Six Ages: Ride Like The Wind that designer David Dunham realised he was making a game about climate change. Like its 19-year-old predecessor, the seminal King of Dragon Pass, Six Ages is set in Glorantha, a fantasy universe originally cooked up by Greg Stafford, and sees you raising a community in the wilds after being expelled from your ancestral homelands. In the first game, you’re fleeing the ravages of a malevolent wizard. In the second, your clan’s once-proud Golden City has been swallowed up by a glacier.
With their casts of werewolves and nymphs, dinosaurs and talking ducks, neither game has much to say on the surface about present-day cultural upheavals, and they certainly weren’t created for that purpose. While Dunham argues that most games have a political dimension, he’s unconvinced by “message games” that trade nuance for impact. The theme of displacement by a disaster is in some ways just a designer’s dodge, “a convenient excuse to start you off poor and working your way up”, and the parallel in Six Ages with the contemporary effects of global warming is entirely accidental: “it just happened that that was what was going on in Glorantha’s Mythic Era, at the time.” Nonetheless, Dunham admits to “nurturing” the comparison as work on the new game continued. “The root cause of your migration is still an issue, so you’ll meet other refugees from the Golden City during the game,” he says. “None of this was intended as political commentary, but it’s easy to get a message.”
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