“you’ve been playing for 4 hours. You really should go outside and get some fresh air”. If I were 13, it would be my mom telling me this. Since I’m 31, it’s the game itself telling me that I need a small break. It’s not _really_ my intention of writing about the mechanics of this game, but instead to overthink it a little bit. What I’m saying is even if you hate games, stick around.
Er, right. The game. It’s called Dawn of Discovery. The player is given an island, a boat, a dock, a few tools, and told- basically- to create the biggest, baddest city they want to. The complication arises, as it usually does, because there’s not quite enough stuff to do everything you need. What’s a frustrating experience in real life is a fun challenge in the game world.
Since no one island has all the things it needs, the player must develop new islands, and must begin trade with those islands– and other players. This is the first major lesson the game offers: conflict doesn’t work nearly as well as cooperation. War is expensive, and trade is cheep. The game explicitly teaches the value of positive sum relationships. It’s an interesting and well deserved slap at neo-con thinking
There are two types of Islands “Occidental” and “Oriental”. As everyone who’s taken first year Latin knows, these words mean “West” and “East”. Thus we can expect to find these different types of Islands in the– you guessed it North and South. No idea why. I’m just going to point out this XKCD comic and leave it alone.
In order to develop Eastern Southern islands, a player needs to find the Sultan’s Visor’s island, receive permission from him, and then start shipping in massive amounts of raw materials. This provides a, probably unintended, lesson: people in the mid-east can’t do anything without the help of the white man. The game does a great job creating north-south interdependence, but it’s striking that “technical goods” (eg: tools, glass, clothes) flow north to south, but luxury goods (carpets, spices, quartz) flow south.
A point about all that: while it may seem somewhat offensive to modern players, this really is the way the “West” viewed and experienced the “East”. A weird, mystical land where luxury goods came from. It works very well as historical commentary.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, my peasants need something…
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