Roller Coaster Tycoon is a fairly aged game that, during its time (1999), was quite popular and caught on in the “casual” game crowd. It is a simulation business strategy computer game in which the player must successfully run a theme park, complete with gentle kiddie rides, needlessly dizzy spin machines, proper food and drink stalls, restrooms, staff, and of course, roller coasters. The game is played across a variety of scenarios, each one offering a unique landscape or partially functioning theme park and a set of specific goals that must be reached. In most cases the scenarios either call for a certain number of guests or park value to be reached by a certain time limit, although in the expansion packs there are some interesting scenarios where all the time and money restrictions are lifted, or where you have to finish several incomplete roller coasters.
In the game you are placed in a godlike restriction where your only restriction seems to be money (and in some scenarios even that restriction is lifted), your abilities reaching as far as picking up any individual and placing him anywhere within your park, including any large bodies of water. The color of your rides, the layout, the terrain, and the scenery are all changeable provided you have the proper budget, but with enough money there are no consequences for plucking out all of the wildlife, leveling all the mountains, and building over lakes or the ocean. Only in one scenario are you told “local wildlife officials prohibit you from removing trees”, but this serves not as a delicate environmental awareness, but a nuisance and annoying hindrance to the player who must simply build around them. Likewise, in the world of your theme parks there is ever no representations of outrage or politics at what you do, the theme park merely exists and is given space to exist, with no interference from communities protesting against whatever construction or destruction you choose to enact.
In this way, Roller Coaster Tycoon creates something of a toy world, with its own strange currency, physics, and aesthetics. The bright and colorful graphics are evocative of the colorful and childlike aesthetics of theme parks themselves, and the graphics go for more cartoonish than realistic representations. However, the roller coaster aspect of the game takes itself quite “seriously”, offering graphs measuring g-forces, ride times, train length, etc. Customization gets extremely detailed in some cases and the assault of statistics codes the roller coaster aspect of the game as highly technical, masculine, and “real”. On the other hand, people are simplified down to the level of commodity; you can peek into the inner lives of guests, and immediately see their statistics ranging from aspects of their current mood to their ride preferences to their money on hand to their thoughts. This level of godly omnipotence is interesting in of itself, but even more so is how race, gender, and any other identifiers are wiped from guest identities. When picking up people, your hand icon turns into a little toy crane device, further reinforcing the idea of “toy world”, that these guests are not their for their enjoyment but your success.
Ultimately, I feel that Roller Coaster Tycoon draws on similar appeals The Sims and other casual games do with a sort of dollhouse/toy world aesthetic. With seemingly godlike control over your little amusement park world, the absence of “real world” concerns to impede your progress and the detailed statistics of rides creates this idealization of running a “perfect” or “toy world” utopian theme park where environment is either a tool or a obstacle, identity only exists in a few relevant statistics, and rides are given more detail and realism than anything else in this gamic world. The end result is at least an interesting study in what is considered to be “relevant” in a highly destructive and obtrusive business in real life.
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