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Chain World — Innovative Game Design Sparks Debate

Posted by Soulskill on from the more-new-ideas-please dept.

A story at Wired charts the course of Chain World, a video game designed by Jason Rohrer to be different from any game that came before it. Quoting: "It would exist on [a USB flash drive] and nowhere else. According to a set of rules defined by Rohrer, only one person on earth could play the game at a time. The player would modify the game’s environment as they moved through it. Then, after the player died in the game, they would pass the memory stick to the next person, who would play in the digital terrain altered by their predecessor—and on and on for years, decades, generations, epochs. In Rohrer’s mind, his game would share many qualities with religion—a holy ark, a set of commandments, a sense of secrecy and mortality and mystical anticipation. This was the idea, anyway, before things started to get weird."

5 of 178 comments (clear)

  1. Typical game by SnarfQuest · · Score: 5, Funny

    AD 3100. You place the thumb drive in your PC.

    You appear in a vast land, completely paved over with dead bodies to a great depth. The stench overcomes you. You are dead. Please transfer this thumb drive to the next player.

    --
    Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
    1. Re:Typical game by Lord+Juan · · Score: 5, Funny

      AD 3100. You place the thumb drive in your PC.

      You appear in a vast land, overlooked by a prominent Lord Juan statue and completely paved over with dead bodies to a great depth. The stench overcomes you. You are dead. Please transfer this thumb drive to the next player.

      Oh look, we are playing it now.

    2. Re:Typical game by mswhippingboy · · Score: 4, Funny

      You will not be able to plug this into anything in 3100 AD. All electronic devices will be from Apple with no external interfaces. You'll try and convince Apple to load the thumb drive into the App Store, a request which Steve Jobs XIX will absolutely refuse, but will offer to allow you to install iChainWorld instead for a fee.

      --
      Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
  2. Re:Pretentious twits by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    From reading the article it seems like everyone involved with this is a pretentious twit.

    Incredibly so. The only way it would be more pretentious is if it ran from a USB monocle.

  3. Re:Pretentious twits by Dunbal · · Score: 3, Funny

    So the game is Mac only huh?

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    Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.