Lately I’ve gotten quite dangerously hooked on Travian, a browser based social strategy game. I should have seen this coming and just stuck to casual games.
What makes Travian so deeply immersive and so deviously addictive? I’ve summed up a few thoughts based on my ‘empirical’ findings:
- Travian has reduced the visual complexity and realism to the absolute minimum. This might sound counterintuitive, but if you pause to think for a while, it makes perfect sense. In Travian, all visuals are reduced to icons. The idea is not to show how the designers think a military camp should look. Instead, they make you do the thinking (and imagining). Last time I experienced something similar I was role-playing as a kid, or trying to solve the surrealistic adventure games made by Infocom, such as ‘Bureaucracy’ (a pioneering text game written by the late Douglas Adams). This is not to say a completely different approach wouldn’t work – take EVE Online. However, for me, Travian (in its deceptive simplicity) works too well…
A Screenshot of one of my villages
- Travian’s free-form social gaming is fuelled by player creativity. The game itself caters to just the very basic communication needs, such as short messaging. This drives players to take their scheming to the blogosphere, IRC and other mediums. Nothing sends chills down my spine more than an 11 year old dictator, in character, making threats on an IRC channel.
- Travian is in real time. This is probably the most haunting feature of the game. How it works is that you play the game against the clock in real time, for example, start building projects which finish at their own pace. The biggest thrill is to plan a scheme against a neighboring alliance with your co-conspirators, wake up at 3am and start your massive offensive exactly as planned. The same unfortunately goes for defending your own kingdom – anything can happen at any given time – which also has you wake up covered in sweat, and running to your laptop just to check that all is well.
//Paavo