IncendiaryDevice
Self-Ejected
- Joined
- Nov 3, 2014
- Messages
- 7,407
Over the course of the last couple of years I've had a couple of nephews pass by my old gaming CDs, picking out games that might amuse them for an hour or two in between doing more regular family stuff.
It might surprise you, but there's not a lot of games that are ideal for 10 year olds in my collections of games, so I'll usually just put on something that has a lot to do that is fairly quick to get going but I also know they'll have no hope of ever beating in the short times of their visits...
... such as Civilisation 3.
In both instances when 2 different 10 year olds have sat down and taken their first moves in Civ3 their approach to the game has been the same:
They have no grand objective.
They don't really care how anything works.
They just want to march their units around the board exploring stuff.
Their first instinct upon meeting other Civs is to attack them.
And this is the primal instinct that Bethesda tuned into. A game where you have no grand objectives, no real need to know how anything works and you can just march around exploring stuff and attack things as you happen upon them if you feel like it.
They discovered a way to make pure exploration slightly more involved enough to be considered "a game".
It might surprise you, but there's not a lot of games that are ideal for 10 year olds in my collections of games, so I'll usually just put on something that has a lot to do that is fairly quick to get going but I also know they'll have no hope of ever beating in the short times of their visits...
... such as Civilisation 3.
In both instances when 2 different 10 year olds have sat down and taken their first moves in Civ3 their approach to the game has been the same:
They have no grand objective.
They don't really care how anything works.
They just want to march their units around the board exploring stuff.
Their first instinct upon meeting other Civs is to attack them.
And this is the primal instinct that Bethesda tuned into. A game where you have no grand objectives, no real need to know how anything works and you can just march around exploring stuff and attack things as you happen upon them if you feel like it.
They discovered a way to make pure exploration slightly more involved enough to be considered "a game".