My studio is falling apart!

There's a little chaos in my game of The Movies, now in the year 2000. The buildings are all falling apart from disrepair. I think I've promoted too many janitors and builders (I do love a good gags to riches story!) and I can't turn talent back into staff so I'm short-staffed. I've got aging actors that are retiring left and right. The studio itself isn't looking too attractive or doing very well (ranked 8 out of 10) so I think that's why there aren't any new people lining up to replace them. I think I'm in a bit of trouble.

Some stats:

• I've made 94 movies, but only three have gotten a 3 star rating. (BTW, it's out of five.) My movies consistently open somewhere in top 20, but have no staying power and quickly fall in the rankings. No blockbusters to speak of.
  
• I've only gotten a handful of awards, and they've all gone to "best newcomer." I think that's mostly a result of me putting janitors into a starring roles!
  
• Out of 46 actors/directors in all of the studios and 10 in mine, my highest ranked one is a director at 16. Ouch. No people magazine covers to speak of.
  
• Well a huge quantity of bad movies does pay off. I've got $7.2 million, but there's not much I can really spend it on. I guess I could just build entirely new buildings to replace the aging ones that need repair, but who would take care of them? I guess I could pay my talent more and maybe they'd be happier, but they still aren't making good movies. But really, $7.2 million is a lot of dough... what good is all of this money if it can't really solve all my woes?
  

Sadly, I think I'm close to done with my current game... I think I'll play it until I can figure out what happens when I get to a little past the current time. (Are there features in the game that foreshadow the the future with things that haven't been invented in real life yet?) I'm not sure there's really an ending point, a point where I've "beat" the game, so I may just teeter out of this one... but I don't think I'm ready to quit playing The Movies. I think I'm actually nearing the point of starting anew with all the skills and knowledge I've collected. But I do like the game and it's pretty engrossing so I think I'll continue to play it... perhaps while basking in the glow of unemployment come June! Will listing "videogame blogger" on my resume get me a job anywhere?

A New View

It was a little funny to watch someone else play my game!

To start off my gamer interviews (I interviewed two people separately), I observed the participants playing a video game for about 10 minutes to actually "observe" learning while they played. Okay, well, that was the idea, but how much learning could I really observe? How much could I physically see? Not much. But at least it did give us a common gaming experience which we could refer to as the interview progressed.

But I digress. One of the participants played The Movies as a sample game. I started the participant off with a new game and she took it through to the completion of the first movie. She is a fan of SimCity and The Sims so she was pretty familiar with the concept of managing the building of buildings and managing the characters of the game. It was actually quite interesting to watch her play. Sometimes she listened to the prompts, but mostly she interrupted the prompts and went ahead with playing based on her experience with games similar to this. She eventually got moving pretty quickly and I'd say that her learning curve was quite quick in comparison to mine!

Perhaps what was most interesting (at least to me!!) was the progression of how I was feeling as I watched her. Before she clicked on "start game," after so many hours of playing The Movies I felt pretty confident that I was a good player. I felt a sense of pride in what I'd accomplished in the game and, with this new person playing, I was overcome with this sense of... hmm... entitlement? Was I lording my experience over her? I guess I was!

She started placing some buildings and I thought to myself, "Ha! That was really silly to place that building over there! She doesn't know the first thing about The Movies!" [Of course, in that moment, it didn't occur to me that, given that it was her first time playing, she literally didn't know much about The Movies.] But as the game progressed, I could see that she was getting it. She understood what she was doing and started to anticipate the next move--something that did not happen for me for quite a while. It soon became clear that I was outmatched and my arrogance was definitely unwarranted. This young woman, from the 10 minutes of gameplay, made it obvious that she got it and that I was not as great as I thought.

Were the competitive juices flowing? I guess they were. Did I delude myself to thinking that I had more skills than she did? Yeah, I did. Was I humbled? You better believe it. Did I tell her about the internal monologue going on in my head? I definitely did not.

Hmm... maybe it wasn't a fair fight. (Is it a fight if my opponent doesn't know it's a competition?) I started at age 8 on Nintendo and now don't play video games that much. She started at age 4 and mostly played on N64. I missed a few generations in between my Nintendo and Xbox, which I rarely played. Most of all, she's younger than me. She's supposed to get it!

Well, at least that's what I'm going to tell myself.