Genre Breakdown: Pirates

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Genre Breakdown: Pirates

Fri, Apr 4, 2008

In reality, the life of pirates was not unlike the life of a man without society in Hobbes' estimation: "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short." Conditions on sailing vessels were dire and grim, and the peril of travel across the sea only increased for those renegades of the high seas. Scurvy was rampant. People died. There was no code of honor among pirates. They were, for all intents and purposes, really dirty thieves confined to the deck of a ship.. Even the gallants were not so gallant. And yet the pirate mythos has never had a stronger hold on our culture. Just ask Keira Knightley and Johnny Depp.

Introduction:

The foundational text of pirate mystique is Robert Louis Steven's Treasure Island. The story of Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver originated many of the motifs in pirate literature. In Treasure Island, X marks the spot for peg-legged sailors with parrots on their shoulders. As a coming of age story, Treasure Island evoked an evolving sense of adventure in readers and imbued the pirating life with glory and gold. Moving on to another coming of age story, J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan crafted Neverland as a place of high adventure and Captain Hook was the natural pirate antagonist. In some ways, these books confronted the possibilities of adulthood and maturity while at the same time as situating themselves on this side of juvenilia.

Looking at the recent surge in pirate-themed movies and properties, headed by Pirates of the Caribbean, it is as though Hollywood big budget pictures have grown tired of the invasive grit of contemporary war and have chosen to set more adventure titles in an environment that can avoid the dark themes of war. Even when confronting the possible demise of the pirating life, it is not seen as a war nearly as much as a loss of individuality. Pirates are emblematic of the good-natured wastrel: a drunk, but the kind of drunk you enjoy being a round. How much of the popularity of pirates is precipitated by Johnny Depp's portrayal of Jack Sparrow is up for debate, but the genre invites the sort of cosplay usually reserved for Star Wars and Star Trek premieres.

Pirates being, as they are, a refuge for the little boys and girls who don't want to grow up, are a favorite topic for video games.

Sid Meier's Pirates! (2004):

This update of the original Sid Meier's Pirates! takes everything from the original game (and Pirates! Gold) to an entirely new level. As one would expect of a new video game, it is 3D with compelling graphics and the same sense of exploration and adventure I discussed in my retrospective. The game, well before its release, had developed quite a following among gamers based on nostalgia for the original game, which is appropriate since the appeal of pirating games is nostalgia for something imagined.

The game takes many of the elements from the earlier editions in the series and expands upon them, including the plot, and updates the game with more mini-games including a rather brutal dancing segment. The game's sales have not been reported that I can locate, but it reviewed well with nostalgic gamers, meriting an 88 at Metacritic.

Sea Dogs (2000):

To be honest, Sea Dogs is essentially rip-off of Pirates!, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. It had a stronger story than the earlier iterations of the Pirates! series and also included RPG elements including multi-tiered conversations in the vein of most computer RPGs.

The game has a decent rating of 71 on Metacritic, but it has largely floated away amid the flotsam of other failed computer games. Like a dead pirate not named Drake or Blackbeard, it has blown away like dust in the wind.

Skies of Arcadia (2000):

One of the surprises for the Dreamcast, Skies of Arcadia is a typical Japanese RPG set in a world of sky pirates. There are some elements of steampunk in the technology that other ships can employ, but the main character Vyse finds his home on a lovely wooden galleon that floats miles above the earth. Despite being an extremely traditional RPG in most respects, Skies of Arcadia won over gamers with its sense of whimsy and heart. The characters in the game were based on stereotypes from the pirate genre but viewed slightly askew. Its sense of atmosphere was stellar, providing a new take on the pirate genre. One of the few complaints about the game was the overwhelming number of random encounters--a frequent .complaint in Japanese RPGs.

Unfortunately, Skies of Arcadia came out toward the end of the life cycle of the Dreamcast and few gamers had a change to play this wonderful title. Fortunately, this oversight was remedied when the game was re-released for the GameCube.

Sadly, despite being well-reviewed, with a Metacritic rating of 93, the game did not sell well on the Dreamcast and it may have sold as few as 75K copies in the U.S. on the GameCube. Rabid fans still hold out hope that a sequel will surface one day.

Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates (2005):

What is with pirate games and exclamation marks? Puzzle Pirates is a massively multiplayer online game in a sanitized world of pirates. Created by Three Ring, all of the normal activities of a pirate are broken down into, and enabled by, puzzles. Here is a spirited description of sword fighting from the Three Rings site:

Sword fighting is the noble art of Piratey combat and can be struck up via a Puzzle Challenge or Brawl, or joined after a Sea Battle when the two Crews meet face to face.

A Swordfighter groups the falling pairs of blocks into colors, then uses the corresponding breaker pieces to shatter the groupings and send vicious sword attacks to his foes. These attacks fall onto the victim's screen as either silver pieces that slowly turn to breakable colors, or the more sinister and potent swords, that hack through other pieces before breaking into silver blocks. It is in the balance of building attacks to shatter and leaving space to defend that lives the art of a Swordfighter.

Sound familiar? It's pretty similar to all of those other colored block games except with the added incentive of boarding a rival pirate's ship! Oh, no. Now I've started doing it.

The game is clever and engrossing without ever becoming a grind like so many other MMOs out there. A large part of the appeal of the game is the number of players in the game who maintain piratey personae. Playing the game is not unlike playing make believe with Legos with some friends and occasionally taking a break to play some Tetris.

The game is free to play, but there are subscription only oceans that offer added content to the obsessed pirate.

As with most MMOs that aren't World of Warcraft, Three Rings is hesitant to release subscription numbers (or user numbers). According to Daniel James, one of the co-founders of Three Rings:

With MMPs, I think we have been selling to the same audience, and I don't think that's going to work. I think there's been some growth, but of PC game players, a lot of them are subscribed to a MMP at any given point, and a lot of them have multiple accounts. This makes some of the subscription numbers very misleading, because these people have a lot of disposable income. We have people who have two accounts on Puzzle Pirates, and some of them seem to have four accounts on Ultima Online, storing items they've had for years and years. So that's a distortion that may come back to bite us. With respect to Puzzle Pirates, I hope, and the jury isn't in on this, I view our market as the 50 million people who played Bejeweled, and they haven't been sold to on this front yet. It's a new experience for them.

At any given time, it seems as though there are about 5K people playing the game, and that isn't so bad for a casual MMO.

Conclusion:

As much as I love pirates, it appears as though most of the games set in pirate worlds fare very poorly at market unless they're backed by a franchise like Pirates of the Caribbean. We would-be renegades should cross our hooks and pray that game developers still have a tiny Jim Hawkins in their hearts yelling out, "Yarrr!"