I haven't finished the Human Resource
Machine, but this is the concluding article. A combination of other
events and an increasing difficulty thwarted my attempts to solve the
remaining puzzles in a reasonable time. And so I finish with these
parting thoughts.
The game does not offer any instruction
or help for solving puzzles. In The Talos Principle tools were
introduced with elementary puzzles and the difficulty scaled over
time. In HRM each puzzle requires a new technique, with insufficient
assistance or explanation to begin to implement it. In the World of
Goo, a game created by the same core developers, they chose to
include the ability to skip a limited number of levels. These skips
were earned and could be stored up, but HRM forgets this helpful
tool. It would have been useful to move past a puzzle the player is
stuck on, allowing them to try a different thought process instead of
remaining frustrated and frozen on the same one.
The game includes a simple story
communicated through short cut-screens every five to seven puzzles.
The developers display a quirky and dark sense of humor as your
avatar struggles in a confining corporate environment. Occasional
news bulletin viewed by secretaries in the break-room hint at an ever
increasing danger outside the office. These intimations are combined
with a deterioration of the office rooms, until the building is
falling apart in massive chunks. Eventually it becomes obvious that
a robot revolution is threatening, and in the final cut-scene this is
confirmed, along with the news that your avatar's work has created a
computer. There must have been computers already, as is evidenced by
the complex robots terrorizing the workers at the end, so the
achievement doesn't seems like much, but coveys the atmosphere well.
There resided within a desire to
complete the game, some measure of perseverance and ego to succeed.
Searching the internet would have yielded the solutions to the last
few problems. But there was no rewarding reason to do so. The only
payoff the game offers for the difficult employment of completing
puzzles is the satisfaction of solution by ones own effort.
Outsourcing the work to the internet brings no pleasure, only a
hollow victory.
Though the game might be useful in the
basics of theoretical computing, it seems to have no practical
relevance. Playing Human Resource Machine to learn to code would be
like playing Guitar Hero to learn to play the guitar. It might be
fun, but not a efficient method by which to develop a skill.
Ironically, I've learned more about programming on constructing the
blog. Understand I use the premade blogger by Google, but I've
learned how to automatically resize images, adjust individual video
sizes, cut away links, ensure that left clicking a link opens up a
new tab, and create links that leap to the specific part of a website
instead of the top. These aren't amazing feats by any means, but
they have made the site easier to use.
In conclusion, programming (in HRM) is
not like writing. Both have a flow to them, but programming is so
full of jumps that move on from place to place. It reuses and
repeats, an undesirable trait in most writing. Constructing a
program seemed like create a series of disparate and separate
programs which then were linked together. One could argue that
writing is the same, but in writing each part impacts the whole. In
HRM each section could be created independently and then once they
were all finished, combined with only minor alterations. The
technical word is beyond me, but each function is a separate entity,
not like a paragraph in a novel.
Next Monday, a new game.
Human Resource
Machine Series:
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