Falling in Love

Online games are strange beasts, and I was never quite sure what the point was to World of Warcraft and Team Fortress 2. That and they are, in many cases, populated by complete bastards. In a peculiar way, it appears that many of the people that embrace the social nature of the internet through these games do so out of a fairly vicious competitive streak. After you've levelled up and got the best gear, or perfected a map strategy, you exist largely for either competition or bragging rights, deriving pleasure from the ability to deny the same feeling to others (BOOM, HEADSHOT!)

It is fairly safe to say that LOVE, Eskil Steenberg's one man mission against all that is continuous and rigid in modern online gaming, is different. That's hard to get used to at times. But it is, and it'll take you to places that you can't possibly imagine after spending years gulping down the victory gin that other games send your way. When I first came across LOVE, about 6 months ago, I saw it described, derisively, as 'Communism: The Game'. Being a politics student doesn't leave me automatically hostile to the idea, and in fact intrigued me further. Discovering that the game would be free to play for a time, I decided to give it a try.

So, is it Communism in digital entertainment form? Yes, no and maybe. The basic elements of LOVE consist of cooperating with other players (!!!) to build a settlement that can survive against several tribes of artificial intelligence that are doing roughly the same thing. You can move, shoot, and use various tools acquired from around the world to build, smooth, retexture, reroute, create power grids and defences, artillery and other means to facilitate your colonisation. The world is procedurally generated and persistent – seas rise and fall, settlements are wiped out and rebuilt, and hills rise toward the sky over time, ensuring that returning to the game world is both familiar and strange. Your base, if you're lucky, may still be there, but forests may have advanced or retreated, and glaciers may have grown or shrunk. Indeed, there was recently some server downtime as Eskil updated the tectonics system. Tectonics?! This is a far cry from the comfortable consistency that allows the players of other games to put down roots and stake their claim to greatness in one or more digital realms.

The biggest fascination for me, though, was the fact that the game hasn't been beaten yet. I was always put off by the knowledge that in online gaming, someone would always be ready to hand my arse to me at the tip of a hat. In LOVE, that doesn't happen. You build together and fight, not against a specific enemy, but against nature itself. This is where the communism analogy breaks down. Allowing for some politics geekery, Marx claimed that communism could emerge properly once man had conquered nature. On any of the LOVE servers or worlds, this hasn't happened yet. Even the AI, with its varying aggression toward the player settlements, is easier to understand as a force of nature, and a horribly efficient one at that. The world wants back what has changed, and this reclaimation happens with horrifying efficiency, leading to the saying on LOVE forums that 'home is where the artillery hits'. The survival of a base for more than a 24 hour period is considered an achievement here, and when it starts raining, its time to get to higher ground because without the right tools, the water is deadly. A settlement I joined once was unable to get hold of the essential configuration tool, leaving us powerless and struggling to survive, frantically shouting over a teamspeak server to coordinate some kind of plan that would save us from being swallowed up by a stormy armageddon.

As it happens, the lack of a configuration tool was a bug, which LOVE still holds in spades. This is perhaps unsurprising given the one man nature of the project, but it was at times like that the geographically disparate group of people I was playing with came together as a unit, and even moreso, my respect to Eskil went through the roof. Even the intimidating graphics, a fair impression of the LSD loaded bastard love-child of Escher, Monet and Van Gogh, create an atmosphere more comparable to a work of traditional art than electronic entertainment, and are a far cry from many of the games that independent designers consistently compromise on to push the project out.

While the free weekend won't last forever, LOVE remains well worth the 10 Euro/month cost of entry, warts and all. It definitely won't be for everyone, but it is worth a shot for at least a month, just for the fact that your ideas of digital entertainment might be blown out of the metaphorical water. Communism: The Game might just give you a glimpse of utopia. It can be found at www.quelsolaar.com.