Chain World — Innovative Game Design Sparks Debate

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."

Comments

best buy

[slshwtw]

On the morning of February 24, Rohrer took a break from coding and pedaled to the local Best Buy. He paid $19.99 for a 4-gigabyte USB memory stick sheathed in black plastic.

He overpaid.

Re:best buy

[Trails]

Yeah, Monster ones are the best, they have better fidelity, ensuring your 1's are totally 1 to the max, and the 0's are dead flat.

Re:This has to be the dumbest thing I've heard

[Anonymous Coward]

uhh, when the in-game character dies

Pretentious twits

[Blackeagle_Falcon]

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

Re:Pretentious twits

[Lost Race]

You didn't have to read the article, or even the entire summary. The first four words ("A story at Wired") tell you in no uncertain terms that it's going to be a story of, by, and for pretentious twits.