The Fun is in Getting There

"And now comes Miller Time," proclaims a well known beer commercial. The implication is that a glass of Miller beer is a just reward for a job well done. Most, if not all, American advertising focuses on the reward, the light at the end of the tunnel, as being the ultimate bliss; but as the long-suffering Red Sox fans here in Massachusetts now know, that feeling of bliss is short-lived because as soon as the celebration is over it's time to plan for next year.

Students of life tell us that true happiness is in the doing, not the having. Getting there is more enjoyable than being there. I certainly know from my early days with wind-up trains, then electric trains and model railroads, that building the layout was more engrossing than running it. That's not to say one can't find happiness in operations. It's just that thoroughly engrossing operation, after the get-acquainted period, entails setting goals and trying achieve them. That could be operating to a schedule, completing train orders, and so forth.

What's interesting to me is that different types of simulations hold different types of interest for me. While many people can find happiness operating scenarios in Trainz or activities in MSTS, my form of "getting there" is to build things (as in Trainz routes) or to set up switching challenges (as in the MSTS Timesaver Route) or to try to capture the "decisive moment" "photographing" trains in action by grabbing screen shots.

Strategy sims offer a completely different form of "getting there." Strategy sims include building the route and managing operations as part of the game. "Getting there" IS the sim. There's no possibility of resting on one's laurels, freezing one's creation at a certain point in time, continuing to watch the trains endlessly. It can't be done because the game keeps moving forward. True, you can save the game at certain point and always come back to that point, but the game will always move forward, even as you are watching the trains. In other words, you have to go out of your way to make the game stagnant. That may make it hard to display your accomplishment for others to see, but it is certainly in keeping with life's rythms.

Al