------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- UnReal World author interviewed on finnish national radio (YLE1) 02-Nov-2004 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ENGLISH TRANSLATION Finnish computer games have taken their content and expressions from movie spectacles, like Max Payne does, or from fast-paced sports and snowboarding. A stranger among Finnish games is the roguelike Unreal World. The game models life in a hunting culture, in iron age Finland. Instead of surprises and combat, the roleplaying game is based on repetition, constancy and a campfire on the shore of a pond. It has been coded for ten years -with ten-year-old equipment- by Sami Maaranen. Joni Palomäki met him in Kuopio. An old working-class house near the center of Kuopio. Outside there are old bicycles and magpies, in the porch fragrant apples. Further inside the house a collection of ancient bows . Sami Maaranen is playing, and I'm watching. Sami Maaranen is a game maker. By appearance the game is undecorated, a relic. "Oh, did it just...?" "Now it crashed, let's punch it in again..." At this point, a computer or console game should usually be making quite a bit of banging and beeping. There should at least be a robotic voice warning about an approaching nuclear strike or a sound effect indicating that a special battleaxe has just cut deep into the repulsive flesh of the enemy. "the current market economy, national economy is rising, things becoming more technical, overall things are supposed to be rising and growing. New and more things are introduced all the time and I also feel that the same idea is applied to many new computer games, that, whatever it is, everything should be growing: You get to the next level, gain new super powers, gain your hitpoints and skillpoints, gain credits and whatever. Instead, in the world of Unreal World, things are very constant. There's a forest, a lake, a field and villages... And actually life goes along the very same tracks as it has gone back when, in the sense that everything doesn't need to grow all the time, and the charm lies in how you can go to the forest for hunting time after time. All you gotta do is create a credible enough sphere of life where one can do the same things over and over again, without the need to be creating something new all the time that would affect the game. The way this game works might sound boring in the sense that there's always the same sphere of life where you live doing the same old things. But in this game all the situations you'll encounter have been created in a way where all things are related to other things. At simplest, this means you don't always catch any fish, or the same kinds of fish, and if you go to to travel a familiar trapping route, there's always the chance something unexpected comes up. The basic elements of life, or constancy, pretty much equals having shelter and food, and then finding something meaningful to do if that's not enough. What the mission of this game has been is to create a credible setting, a working, fertile world and to give the character skills and equipment that he can use to interact with the world, and be in interaction with." The computer based roleplaying game by Sami Maaranen aims to simulate Finland during iron age: The sub-arctic every day life of a hunting culture, where the simulation is focused on the unbypassable and continuous interaction with the nature. There are no blinking lights, but the seasons and times of day change, weathers fluctuate, hunger grows and food must be found. Ancient mythology is also looming in the background, but neither the player nor the historic toiler can prove that spirits of the forest really do exist. "In the game it's realized so that the character has, and during his life learns various spells, incantations, words of power, fragments of songs, which can then be used for communicating with the supernatural or affecting it, or for keeping up a relationship with spirits, the spirit world. Sometimes during the heat of the game there are references to how the spirit world affects the character's life. You are told that some place has nature spirits, and that you should fear them or heed them, and it's also stressed that basically everything the character does also has effects on the supernatural, and when moving in the forest, for example, you never move there alone and you can't assume you can do just anything you want there. You have to sort of imagine all the time, you can imagine you're a part of the bigger picture, where there are people, as well as animals and the supernatural. Basically the visible part of it are the rituals and spells. When walking in the forest it's common to see a rabbit or some such jumping from behind a tree, but maybe sometime in the future you could see right there on the screen how a house elf dashes somewhere from behind the sauna, or something like that. For now, the supernatural world is invisible in the game, but it's still there." The immersion, or the captivating charm of the game is created by a world that's as credible as possible; In this case the forest dwelling and hunting culture.Registered players can be found all over the world. "I don't think it's possible to build a watertight image of any era. I wouldn't claim that life during iron age has been like this. The end result probably more resembles what it could have been. Nowadays I'd say that anything that's added, that has been added during the last few years, is checked from books and research. We're aiming for historical validity." "How much have you had to read up on historical facts while making this game?" "I've been reading much. Very much, and anyway the game's world is built up from small blocks, for example if you take hunting culture, you can see for example that trapping has been very carefully modelled in the game. There have been constructions where miles worth of trapfence has been built, where gaps have been left in some spots and those spots have had pits dug in them, and then the game, game animals have travelled along the side of the fence and crossed over to the other side from the gaps, but have fallen to the pits. But since the character can naturally live any way he wants, he can diverge from this line, or if you don't necessarily want to lead a historically accurate life you can just dig a random pit somewhere and put a little fence around it. I think some players get tons of amusement out of really having options: For example trapping, making trap fences and trap pits, and being able to read from a book or somewhere, if you're into history, that "Oh, a wolf trap is made like that", and then being able to actually make that in the game." So the goal has been to find the world behind the game and to make a game that leads out from the game world. "A flipside, or counterstrike of sorts, to what games of today represent, how everything is sort of really hectic and fast and restless, and how you almost have to get a new computer for many new games too, in order to make them work,everything has to be newest new and state of the art, and within half a year all the techniques and such that were used have become outdated. I may not have considered these things very carefully during this project, but I've got a feeling that much of this has passed on to the game through my very nature. Seriously, as a game this is a relic, it hasn't kept up with the advancement of technology, but I think it's pretty funny how some people have compared it to some commercial hit products." "Does the game carry some message?" "At least it stirs something, I don't know about the player, but at least the character, to seek meaningfulness from the circumstances surroudnding his life.Nobody is there to say what is fun and what you should do; The character has to find out that himself, and since in the game world the appeal comes mostly from doing some seemingly simple tasks - going to the lakeside to fish, sitting down next to the campfire in the evening and pondering upon your life, and when that becomes boring, building a shelter somewhere and spending a few days drying meat - that a life like this can still be interesting, even today. In the end it would have to be the highlighting of independent initiative, self sufficiency and such; How much content a person can himself create to his own life, and it's also a tribute to a natural way of life, indigenous people and so on."