Rambling

 
Within the set of relatively open-ended games in which players can accumulate resources, I have taken to pondering (not much!) the resources in these games. Mainly it strikes me that in some games the amount of resources in the world is fixed, while in others it expands. People playing World of Warcraft, for example, constantly find more money, gear, ore, cloth, etc. generated ex nihilo. The resources existing in World of Warcraft keep increasing, although maybe not faster than the population does. On the other hand, so far as I understand Dwarf Fortress it is a game with fixed resources, or intended to become such. The world is generated with minerals, with a population, and then the game proceeds from the interaction of whatever already exists. I think the game has not yet achieved that state perfectly, but it does seem to be the goal. The amount of iron in the whole world is limited by the amount of iron generated initially, and so forth. I think I was most recently prompted to think about this by the Fairy Garden game on Facebook, which is clearly a game of expanding resources. More gold is on offer to every player every three hours, helping people out can mean a reward of still more gold, at no cost to your beneficiary. The longer people play the game the more gold (and diamonds, and etc.) exist in the world. NetHack is a game on the border, I think. There are only so many artifacts in the game, and monsters become extinct when enough are killed, preventing and unlimited number of item drops from being harvested, however there are ways around that which can be exploited to farm for new items nearly indefinitely. Angband features expanding resources a bit more clearly. Although there are only a limited number of artifacts and unique enemies in the game, the fact levels appear only once when entered and can never be returned to means there are an effectively endless number of places to visit and find items at (or monsters to kill and find items on the corpses of), which I'm told tends to facilitate grinding for whatever items are still felt as lacking from the player character's kit. Oh! Nearly forgot another example, although by now it is getting far off-track from the sort of game I originally defined. In Doom / DoomRL each level is generated with a set number of monsters and items and cannot be returned to once cleared. The only way to get more items than were originally created is to let an arch-vile revive an enemy that drops ammunition, then kill it again. So far I haven't thought of any such games that don't have increasing resources... I wonder what I am missing. Well, any game in which defeated enemies (or whatever) drop resources and which can be reattempted for the same reward is going to have an increase in resources over time. Unless doing so is a net loss for the player, of course. I think I stop here.