“Some say your friends are your definition. I say you are defined by your home address.
“After work I usually hop over to the Cafe on 8th, where I watch people pass by the window. They all have a momentum I can observe from my seat without fear of loitering because coffee is the price of admission.
“Even more exciting is walking on the city streets and looking up at the apartment windows. Most of the time only a bookcase can be seen, but when it occupies an entire ten-foot wall, your heaviest emotion is envy. Sometimes I’ll take the long way to get somewhere, and these rescued minutes of mine are spent between avenues, catching glimpses of the apartments. What is the lighting like in the mornings? How comfortable is it to come home at night? When the owners look out their window, do they want to be glimpsed by people like me? I acknowledge their status even from my incomplete view down on the street.
“Creepy? Perhaps. At least there is no touching involved.”
Imagine a game where the majority of its world is a street between two city avenues, where every room in every building is populated with furniture and objects. Each room in a given apartment building has the same blueprint, each room decorated in the owner’s style. Every owner can be interacted with, every owner has a personality. Sims-like behavior within a first person adventure.
You start off in a neighborhood whose only sign of wealth is a neon sign advertising good fried food, fast free delivery. Your main HQ is a one bedroom dump. Thank your construction job that pays shit, because if it didn’t, why are you living in a toilet?
This room lives in isolation, is merely a point on a map that you fast-travel to so you can store your items or advance time. You don’t work everyday which is why you have to call in, and even if there is work open, you can decline. Dialogue trees allow you to pick your excuse, ranging from “no” to “my asshole won’t stop vomiting.”
The times you accept, you fast-travel to a construction site - an apartment building where a month’s rent is equal to ten of your paychecks. Your work objectives cycle; one day you might be installing lights, another will have you working on flooring. The gameplay during these segments plays like a first person shooter but instead of gunning down baddies, you are putting up walls with a nail gun. You even have an inventory screen similar to a Deus EX or a System Shock 2. After all, it is unreasonable to think construction workers have utility belts?
On days off you can go to that place between two avenues. At one end is a cafe; a drugstore at the other. A couple antique shops, a doctor’s office, a flower shop with a brick facade. The rest is apartments, the tallest one ten stories.
During the day you might be able to glimpse what is beyond the apartment windows; it’s during the night when the owners are home is when you get the best view. Sometimes all you see is a bookcase, a framed print. Sometimes you see someone pass by the window. Linger at the right time and you might see the same person wave to the doorman and then exit the building. But don’t loiter too long because the doorman will get suspicious.
Perhaps after a while you begin to notice something about the people who live here. That man with the checkered necktie looks up from his Blackberry whenever a female passes by. The kid in the blazer-hoodie combo likes to walk with his left hand in pocket. The woman in the cafe has a habit of hooking behind her ear a tendril of hair whenever she looks at her watch.
What other fidgets do they have? What are her habits when she has company? What is her routine? Perhaps you spend more time at the cafe, which is where she spends every other night between seven and eight. She likes to read, prefers to look down at the book flat on the table. Sometimes her phone rings. The cafe is loud with chatter yet maybe you are only concerned with her conversations.
You know her apartment is on the second floor. The color of her living room is white, while the study has a red velvet color. Well, from the street it looks like the study. Does her kitchen have an island? What color is the hardwood floor? Do they creak? What part of the couch does she like to read on? These are the questions you want to know, but you simply can’t walk up to her door and activate it open because it's locked.
You can activate her and start a dialogue tree. Pick the right choices -based on your eavesdropping, her books or other possessions - and she might become friendly. Continue the relationship and you might be able to ask her out. Charm her and she will invite you upstairs. You're on the other side now.
Every film fits in a genre, carries with it certain elements. A romantic comedy won’t ask you to digest anything heavier than love at first sight. Someone will die in a horror movie. Action-adventure, we have explosives.
Games carry expectations also. Level-grinding in JRPGs; dialogue-trees for the west. 3rd person action games, we usually don’t have to be told that the right analog controls the camera. Adventures games won’t ask us to drive to the target’s location and kill him without being spotted.
Perhaps you’ve noticed that when you’re not at work, you don’t have any objectives. There are no flashing indicators. Look around, there are no arrows telling you who the apartment owners are. Perhaps you’ve also noticed that your inventory screen carries over from the job segments. After all, is it unreasonable to think you carry a shoulder bag?
In first person shooters, if you’re in a location occupied by story-time NPCs, your currently equipped weapon will most likely either lower, not appear at all or be disabled when the crosshair hovers over the NPC.
Perhaps then you notice you can not only equip items from your inventory but use them without any constraints. And where are these items coming from? Well, you can buy stuff from the antique shop. Or the drug store. Roses from the flower shop? The other location you can take items from is the construction site.
You have to ask yourself, “there must be a reason why such mechanics are in place, why this particular camera has been chosen for this game.”
And then you have to ask:
“What kind of monster are you?”
You see, I like Practice not because I can change the speed of a song but because it loads much faster than playing in Tour - I've got to pick a city, a venue, a gig, at least 2 songs, and then I gotta sit through an autosave and a "communicating with the rock central servers" load. I’m the dude who likes his MP3 player to go from on to autoplay in one button press.
