Save the Environment!

I once took a seminar at a youth pastor convention that solely dealt with environments.  Not the Al Gore, save-the-polar-caps environment, but the physical space in which you met and worshiped.  It was both of interest and eye-opening to me, because I’m the type of person who is greatly affected by my environment.   They pointed out how we respond better to more natural light than artificial (open more windows!), how people are more likely to talk if they sit in a circle than just facing front as if you were in school, how smells and sights and arrangements and colors and sounds can make a crucial difference between relaxing and being uptight, between being more social or more isolated.

Winter depresses me, as does a cluttered room, flourescent lights, and any sour smells.  I don’t like “old” smells, like what you experience in a local Salvation Army store.  I take a weekly class in a room that has no windows and no clock, which makes me feel confined and unhooked from what’s really going on “on the outside”.

And yet if you were to see my office, you’d think you were in a kids’ bedroom — I have a couch, easy chairs, toys everywhere, an old SNES, and a pirate flag flying proudly.  I hate Starbucks coffee, but I love hanging out in their shops, because they’re designed to look and feel “cozy”.  And at least on a weekly basis, my wife and I take a drive down a long and winding park that cuts through our urban sprawl and gives us a taste of pure nature.

This is all to say that environment is important.  We have a very real, very emotional reaction depending on our surroundings, which is why most of us connect strongly with some MMOs and various zones, and are repelled by others.  It made me laugh when I found out that next year, Blizzard is transforming what I consider to be their most depressing and dreary zones — Desolace — into a tropic paradise.  I loathed doing quests in that zone because I could feel my will to play draining just from the visuals.

Lately, I’ve been checking out the environment in Fallen Earth.  Fallen Earth is interesting, in that it comes across as both a post-apocalyptic setting and a Western, the latter of which is reinforced by cacti, horses, shanty towns, sheriffs, mines and the like.  The blend of the two genres have propped each other up with a mutally agreeable setting — it’s barren and vast, but that makes sense for both.

And yet, unlike most MMOs I’ve experienced, I haven’t left this arid desert environment for the month and a half that I’ve played the game, except to go in underground bunkers and the like.  I’ve heard that sectors 2 and 3 are a bit more lush, but I’m not expecting radically different settings than what I’ve already seen.  And as much as I love the game, once in a while the desert waste impacts me emotionally, making me feel isolated and on an endless quest through the same-old, same-old scenery.  Fallen Earth’s vastness, which works for its purpose in many ways, also means that its players are sentenced to long stays in the same environment, like it or not.

Of course, this has the effect of making the world feel more natural, and less of an artificial theme park where the climates swing wildly every 500 yards (a bird’s eye view of World of Warcraft or EverQuest reveal how artificial their landscape really is, while LOTRO does a better job blending natural environments together).

Personally, I’m always happiest in tree-lush zones, or Christmas-like winter landscapes, and least satisfied with lava zones or barren rock.  What say you?