Genre: Management / tycoon.
Target audience: Casual/family market.
Relevant info: 3D sequel of highly successful franchise.
Introduction
The objective of this essay is to evaluate the game Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, and more specifically how it enables and deals with creative videogame play.
It can be argued that every game play – electronic or otherwise – is a creative act. After all, the game outcomes are heavily influenced by the player’s interaction, which transforms the game experience according to his performance. However, I will borrow a definition from game designer Ernest Adams and say that creative play “means play that enables you to point at something in the game and say, “Look – I made that.” (Adams, 2005).
Creative play is about inventive, productive and constructive activities within the game world – opposed to a sort of more competitive gameplay, focused on the antagonism player-computer or player-player.
How are games embracing and supporting creative play? Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, a game where the main player’s occupation is building and maintaining, deserves this kind of analysis.
Game modes
Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 counts with two distinct play modes: Career and Sandbox. The basic difference between them is the amount of challenge (or the lack of it).
Career mode present missions for the player to accomplish, using his limited resources. Ernest Adams in fact used the first Roller Coaster Tycoon to describe this kind of “constrained creativity (construction play)” (Adams, 2005).
Sandbox mode, as the name suggests, liberates the player to do whatever he wants, not presenting missions and giving him unlimited resources. This would be, according to Adams, a “Freeform Creative play” (Adams, 2005), a kind of play closer to toys than games. This notion is supported by game theorist Jesper Juul in his article The Game, the Player, the World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness, where he numerates the elements that define games. The absence of one of these elements even takes the Sandbox mode out of the definition of a game. Such element is ‘Valorization of the outcome’. As defined by Juul, “This simply means that some of the possible outcomes of the game are better than others” (Juul, 2003). This is not the case for the Sandbox mode, as the outcomes can only be perceived by the player, but not the game, as superior to others.
Game goals and structure
The main objective of the game (career mode) is to complete each individual scenario presented. There are 18 of them, including the ones that are unlocked by completing previous ones.
It is interesting to notice that Roller Coaster Tycoon does not progress in chronological fashion, but throughout these scenarios. Since they are not interconnected, the fact that the player has to complete some of them to unlock the others is what gives the player the incentive to keep playing.
This structure could actually be counter-productive in a way: The individual missions are relatively short (it takes no more than an hour to finish them). After that, the player starts a new scenario, abandoning (at least temporarily) his parks from previous missions. With no long term attachment to his creation, the park ends up being merely a mean of accomplishing goals. Completely separated missions, where the player starts a new park every couple of hours, dilute any sense of progression.
An alternative to that could be a game structure where the player keeps his park – or more than one (it could lead to interesting cases where the parks have to be balanced so they don’t take costumers away from the other) - during the whole game. Instead of completely separated, pre-scripted missions, they could be generated as the game progressed, presenting a challenge actually related to the conditions of the park at that given moment. Unlocking not new scenarios, but new functionalities and micro-managing options, could provide a better sense of progression.
Mission structure (and how to accomplish them)
On each scenario the player is presented with three sets of missions corresponding to the three levels of the scenario: Apprentice, Entrepreneur and Tycoon. They don’t differ much from each other, except for the level of difficulty and time required to accomplish them. After clearing the missions, the player is free to keep playing, but no new challenges will appear.
Inside every set of missions there are particular challenges, goals to the player to achieve. These goals include:
- Increase Park Value – usually achieved by increasing the number of attractions, maintaining them, keeping the park tidy, etc.
- Increase Park Rating – not only influenced by number of rides, but also themed scenarios, food stalls and advertisement.
- Increase Number of Guests – they can be attracted by a good park rating, new rides and marketing campaigns.
- Increase Ride Income - this can be achieved by placing new rides and adjusting ticket prices.
- Build x Roller coasters attending minimum requirements – Requirements include excitement levels, maximum speed, ride length, etc.
- Please V.I.P – Characters like President Clint Bushton have special needs: they might want to ride an attraction with a minimum requirement, or they can be intolerant to dirt.
- Repay the loan – Money can be raised through the park and ride incomes, and also by demolishing rides and constructions. The latter option affects the gameplay severely, as it allows the player to cheat by demolishing and re-building attractions several times to get the money and clear the objectives.
To achieve these goals, you have to make use
of both Management Tools and Construction Tools. Management Tools are divided into
finance, park operations, staff, research, objectives and attractions. Construction Tools allow you to
build rides (roller coasters, thrill rides, gentle rides, etc), shops, scenery and paths. You can also
edit your terrain and demolish almost any element of the park. Construction tools are also crucial to
the creative play aspect of the game.
Building the rides – and riding them
Since its first version, Roller Coaster Tycoon allowed player-made construction in two different levels: first there is the theme park building, but there is also the construction of individual rides, such as the roller coasters. The in-game construction tool is very well designed, allowing the player to easily make his own rides. The 3D engine makes easy to navigate around the roller coaster while building it, allowing the player too see it from every possible angle. There is also a “Auto-complete” button that automatically finishes the building process, guessing the best way to close the tracks.
Also because of the 3D engine, it is possible to virtually ride the attractions from a first person perspective, experiencing not only the ride itself, but also watching the reaction from the park’s costumers. This camera mode helps making a custom-made ride to become a reward in itself. On the other hand, while in career mode, there could be a bigger incentive for players to make their own roller coasters – by reducing their cost or increasing park rating and value. In this sense, the player might feel that his creativity is not being rewarded.
The interface
Another area that could be improved in Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 is the graphical interface: exploring the different models and categories of roller coaster can be an exhausting task, requiring the player to open the same window several times. This feeling is aggravated by the fact that, especially at the Apprentice level, browsing and finding a specific rollercoaster can be not part of the mission, but the mission on its own.
Conclusion
Overall, the impression is that Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 could have embraced creative play a little bit more, rewarding the player for playing the game creatively and giving his constructions a more central role to the plot – opposed to the feeling of ‘beating the game’.
Sid Meyer famously described games as ‘a series of interesting choices’. There is, in Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, a splendid range of possible choices, but they are made less interesting by the fact that some are obvious winning strategies for specific missions. And after playing them, there is no much for the player to be proud of and claim: “look – I made that”, because it was less fruit of his creativity than imposed by the game short-term goals.
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