Pokopia: My daughter and I are not the same

I wonder, sometimes, how the things we create reflect who we are, as people.

Maybe real authors, playwrights, songwriters and such can disconnect themselves from their works, and produce great stuff that doesn’t say anything about how they are as people.

But regular people, like us, I doubt we’re any good at separating ourselves from the things we make. Even in video games.

I hadn’t really gone to too many cloud islands when I started on my own. I’d finished the game — completed the Pokedex, gotten a few of the towns to level 10, learned the fate of the humans, seen the credits roll. I still wanted to play, though. I hadn’t done anything with my cloud island. The cloud island, in Pokopia, is the shared version of your world. Other people can visit, and if you let them, do their own building, help complete the Pokedex, all the things you might do. If you’re playing with a friend, you play on a shared cloud island. It has its own Pokedex, and without the free stuff you can find in the main game’s towns, it’s really your chance to mold the world as you like it.

My concept was to make a town surrounding a central square that would have a lot of stuff going on. The Pokemon that lived there would have rides, hot springs, decorations, all sorts of things to do and visit. My town kept getting more crowded. I built apartments in the local mountain, then cut the top off that mountain and started building a museum and some elite homes up there. Crowded apartments. The well-off living above the squalor of the town. The regular Pokemon constantly crowded together.

I loved it. I love it. The hustle and bustle of the place.

And then, I visited my daughter’s cloud island.

Her island was a parklike utopia. Very spread out; this panorama only shows part of it. A joy to visit. Everywhere I went, I found careful planning, beauty, relaxation. She has underground vaults, stages all around…

If I lived in my world, the neighbors would be noisy, there’d always be something going on, there’d never be any peace. In my daughter’s world, well, you might meet a friend on a stroll to your favorite cafe for a late brunch to cap off a lazy morning.

I got to thinking — what’s wrong with me? Why couldn’t I have created something fun and peaceful?

My main game isn’t any better. My Palette Town is just as crowded.

My daughter’s world lets landscaping separate districts and attractions. She’s like a city planner, making the entire place seem like a harmonious whole.

Mine, mine looks like I’m an ADHD dog who just keeps seeing squirrels. I make this, I make that, I make this other thing, and if there’s room left, I toss something else in there. I’m always looking at what would make my Pokemon happier and making custom homes that will have everything they like and be near more stuff they like. My Pokemon, by the way, are very happy.

I would like it if the place I made looked anything like a place I would like to visit.

I showed both panoramas to ChatGPT. Its verdict:

She seems to prefer coherence, openness, and visual calm. You seem to prefer specificity, density, and interesting machinery. Her panorama says, “This should look like a lovely town.” Yours says, “There ought to be something clever on that cliff.”

Well, okay, but I think I would prefer to be the kind of person that could create something that says “visual calm”. But I am just not that kind of person, I guess.

In my own defense, my challenge to myself is to visit a dream island each day, demolish one or more of the structures there, and then use those blocks to make a new home in my cloud island. I’ve gotten some cool ideas from that constraint. But even so…