Unique "Ecosystem" simulator that really always boils down to an "Economics" simulator instead, but when you get a good server its a very involved community effort and unlike anything else. Its systems really needed better balancing (Ironically gatekeeping as well, too many of any one role was a real problem that never sorted itself out the way seemed to intend for it to) and could do with some more fleshing out. out. The nature of it being so community-oriented making the time commitments land on a coinflip was a worthy tradeoff when it lands correctly and you feel a part of something bigger than yourself in a special, unique way, but an very egregious and morose waste of time when it doesn't.

In Dan Olsen's recent video "Why It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft" he brings forward a distinction anthropologists have been digging at for years between Free Play and Instrumental Play with the primary focus being how game systems often trend towards the optimization and mass adoption of Instrumental Play. Instrumental Play is playing with an explicit purpose and optimizing towards that purpose as best possible, and free play is playing without an explicit goal in mind, usually for emergent entertainment experience.

How a self limiting role play character is often seen within these systems is usually they are the first to be scorned. This rejection of the Roleplayer is exactly what makes games like Space Station 13 so important as it's a game where being good at roleplaying is the optimization. For example, when I play as a Security Officer in that game I'm adopting the role of surveillance and control, but the important thing is that I need to be lenient and at least a little bad at my job in order for emergent gameplay storytelling to come out of it, for the antagonists to be able to bring necessary creative friction and conflict to the story. Meanwhile if I play as the occupation of a geneticist my occupation is to mess around and change the DNA of random people who want it.

This is not a write up about Space Station 13, or WoW, this is about Eco. In Eco, you are tasked with playing a 1 month long MMO experience where the primary goal is to get to a level of technology and knowledge that defeats a looming meteor within 1 month. You have to work in solidarity with at best around 30 people in a large market economy trading and selling products in order to help get your own profession. If you run into trouble with other player behaviors like for example massive deforestation, you can have representative create policy around it. This policy network is a fundamental building block that transcends the game beyond just a mundane market simulation as the coding allows for you to make ridiculous automated stimulus and taxations, and allow for for example hunters to hunt on anybodies property etc. It also gives a vector for people to express power, at least in theory.

If you can follow what I'm saying so far, and you're a long time reader who tends in agreement with me, you might notice where the friction here starts. Specifically through who gets chosen to wield this executive power, the checks and balances, but also in how non-cooperative free market economies tend to be. In order to have a large factory in the game you need to set the price for factory goods like say a Car well beyond the value it actually is, so that with said profit you can build more room for more machines. But before you can get the small room for the automobile machine, you need to attain money and materials from strangers through either spending a lot of time and labor to do so, or by selling food stuff you've gathered higher than their value. You can usually find a few people who have not priced their goods mindfully and you can usually get an advantage that way. People are also hilariously bad at regulating the economy as its often seen as 'unfair' and can turn players away, so the free market system because the default expectation which isn't ever questioned due to the fact the game is so easy that disaster states never happen.

This is fine but there's a few problems with the game as it is at the moment, the game is only difficult because you have to rely on strangers in order to do their professions to beat the meteor. Which means that people who have grouped up with different professions can actually speed through this system. If you're sharing stuff, you don't have to pay taxes for the goods you are sharing in every server except one official one called White Tiger. That means that all it takes to break the game in almost every server is a group of 5, and thus usually means the threat of the meteor isn't a threat at all, and once that conflict with the meteor is gone the server dies.

The other issue is that the wielding of power or acting in behavior that would be seen as inventing conflict is also unacceptable on most servers. The server owner is always there to basically dictate the play experience and in a mad rush to pull as much of the player base as possible, these server owners have to dictate conflict immediately rather than let it play out through the government policy systems. You can think of this as the equivalent of playing in another kids sandbox wrong and explicitly told if you don't play it right, you will be kicked out. The hard power of conformity set by these guys pretty much ruins the possible fun of the game.

Again, the official servers, including White Tiger, don't suffer from this issue, as long as you follow the minimal rules against hate speech etc. there is no overt guiding light. However, every server that isn't White Tiger still suffers from the group speedrunning trick (not to mention the difficulty as it is is way too easy anyway) since White Tiger is the only place that has systems to prevent this in place it's the only place that is worth playing. However, the amount of legal information you have to read makes it inaccessible to most of the playerbase which doesn't in itself make it mediocre, but it does mean you'd be spending a dozen hours over a month to grasp the basics of the system in a server with these Sandbox Dictators only to prepare for the 'hard mode' of Eco in 1 server where joining the Eco official discord is defacto necessary in order to play.

But here's the real issue: Due to the length of the game and the focus on tasks, Instrumental play becomes so dominant that Roleplaying withers away. There is no RP scene in Eco, and the result is that you become a clown for trying to engage in RP when everyone else is just trying to mine rocks. RP is treated with suspicion in this game as its seen pre-emptively as a set of actions and values that by themselves create conflict, its seen as rude. In Dan Olsen's video he gives the example of a barefoot dwarf that walks around everywhere which pulls the players away from working as efficiently as possible to finish the raid. This is the similar experience any Roleplayer has when trying to play games in which optimization is valued. Being someone you clearly aren't is not optimal. This becomes especially true when considering the fact that over the month less players are around and the ones that remain become increasingly tired with your shit.

The other issue, at least in my case, that being trans itself is seen as a sort of 'bad roleplaying' by most cis people (the majority of people). So I have no 'authentic' self I can retreat to that would satiate the patriarchal expectations of the much older player base (around early to mid 30s), in order to play as a man it would already be a form of roleplaying, so why not stress that falsity further for entertainment? If I were to be trans, for them, it would be going from 1 form of annoying roleplaying to another even if people aren't being openly transphobic, this is how its viewed. They want me to roleplay in a way that doesn't stress their preconceived biases. Thus I've always saw roleplaying in itself as an act that can support queer acceptance, and a safe haven for us. As it lets people get used to being around others that act far outside the scope of expectation you are used to.

The lack of RP or RP acceptance in Eco is my main issue with it, I think the main way this would be fixed by the game being more popular and advertising the game to younger people. By doing that there would be enough different players engaging with the game that there could be RP servers. This is the ultimate blueprint for an RP game in many ways but its squandered by the the player base and needless incentivization of Instrumental play. I've struggled with articulating this tension for why I spent 1000 hours playing a game I don't really like. I think I thought I could get joy from play by becoming good enough that the RP could be seen as not a detriment, but this was always a fruitless goal. This is a system built entirely for trying to reflect society, and it has effectively done that in its incredible ability to repress flamboyance. If you see people RP'ing in a game you wouldn't expect them to, you can probably guess that person is LGBT. It's free play we go to in order to almost get away from the bigotries against ourselves. That being said, I will never bother voicing or RPing in a space that clearly doesn't accept me. I despise these people and this community, the patriarchal normativity is more toxic than league by far and I have nothing but contempt for the rigidity these people abide by.

There are moments where I can shine through, but nobody wants to play on RP terms, so it just ends up an exercise in social self isolation. Just go play Space Station 13 instead.

Instances like this are exactly why I believe that games can become tools of repression and be cultivated for that reason, and why I think it's important to be so critical of them. Unlike Dan Olsen I don't just see this system as 'recreating the real drama of life' but instead the disjunction shows the failure of a system to allow for creative play. Without creative play you're left with rote compulsion loops and patriarchal normativity, and I think it's important as players and designers to move away from that as much as possible.