Chapter 210 - : Spirit of Don’t Starve (1/2)

There were many points which attracted players to Don’t Starve, but it all comes back to the ‘Survival’ aspect.

According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory, needs are divided into five major categories: physiological needs, safety needs, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization.

The five needs form a pyramid, with the most bottom playing being physiological, and self-actualization on the top.

The lower the need, the easier it is to realise, but also the most important and urgent.

That means if a person lacked food, safety, and esteem, they should feel the strongest for food. In that moment, safety and esteem wouldn’t be as important.

This was why under incredible food stress, humans would hunt large beasts (giving up safety) or beg for food (give up esteem).

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs can also be applied to different industries, including video games.

Many game designers build the complete hierarchy of Maslow’s needs in the game, using to drive players to chase fictional numbers in the game, and be so immersed they can’t stop themselves.

A simple example would be pay to win games that sell ‘strength’, which focused on safety and esteem in the hierarchy of needs.

The weaker players would face the danger of being killed every moment they are in game. As they face a lack of safety, this drives them to spend more time and money in game in order to regain safety,

The stronger players on the other hand have a certain amount of safety, so they pivot to chase the needs in esteem or self-actualization, such as taking from the others, forming a guild, gathering this underlings to battle others as they fork out more and more money just to chase the high.

Normally, very few games reach the ‘physiological needs’ level on the pyramid as it was difficult to develop, and didn’t fit into a majority of games.

The physiological needs of humans are quite simple, consisting of food, water, health, and reproduction. However, games wouldn’t usually have their players run around to gather food or water. They usually wouldn’t have hunger in the game as they could only fit in so much content in the game, with better ways to spend the time of the players.

Don’t Starve exploits this oversight, conveying all aspects of survival.

Moreover, Don’t Starve wasn’t just a simple game. As one delved deeper into the gameplay, they will realise that there was a lot of content in the game.

It was different from many main characters with huge motivations. Wilson’s existence was just for himself, he didn’t need to save the world or save others. His only aim was to survive, and everything he does in the world of Don’t Starve was literally just that.

Don’t Starve is a highly stylized game with a very mature mindset.

The world of Don’t’ Starve wasn’t well realised nor have a deep story, it could even be said that it escaped reality. The art style and music was filled with dark humour, yet feeled incredibly real in the face of death.

The feeling of absurdity and reality runs through the Don’t Starve, which is strengthened when combined with technology and magic in the game.