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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."
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.
People don't like games where they have only one life. They already are playing such a game, for free - why they need to learn some other universe if one mistake just voids all their effort?
One person at a time is stupid. That's not how anyhing in this Universe is happening. We live in the world where everything happens in parallel, where events can be triggered by other players.
Most gamers don't want to play a single sentient being in the whole universe. This game by definition doesn't permit other human players. Too bad.
The religious stuff is fluff that is TL;DR. I only commented on obvious gaming issues. I will gladly leave the religion to priests.
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.
So, I'll take the USB drive, and put it in my computer, and then I'll
dd if=/dev/sdj of=/dev/sdk
And then there will be two. Oops.
Does Chain World have some of that nasty Internet-based DRM to prevent copying?
uhh, when the in-game character dies
Sorry, the community around pretty much every sandbox game out there does this already.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
So basically he automated what the minecraft community has been doing already and people went full-on moron.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
From reading the article it seems like everyone involved with this is a pretentious twit.
Yes. He called it Chain World.
This sig has been stolen. Return it to its original user for a reward.
Anyone else remember "Obi" or "Obii" from perhaps the Seventies? The idea was something like a note in a bottle, with an expectation of return. This sounds like a game-ified version of the Obi. Since IIRC the Obi was about the shape and size of an egg, the form factors aren't all that incompatible.
I don't really see the draw here. If nothing else, ONLY ONE person gets to see your awesome high score at a time (the current player). Since a huge part of gaming is to best others' scores and have "everyone" know you're the champ, how smug are you gonna feel knowing that only one person at a time is ever gonna know what a l33t g4m3r you are?
In the early '90s I used to play hot potato with a floppy loaded with just Nethack or Hack. We passed it around on a character death so we can build up that death list and laugh at each other.
I remember Passages. You start on the left side of the screen, move towards the right, then die. You get double the score if you choose to have a partner, but your score is irrelevant. That had a glimmer of meaning -- a brief comment on mortality. It had the weight of a typical New Yorker cartoon.
Chain World, from the article, is simply stupid. Religious mysticism is stupidity and confusion. Deliberately cultivating mysticism is deliberately cultivating stupidity and confusion. The entire set-up is intended to subtract meaning, not add it. It's entirely appropriate, though it isn't pointed out, that they use a flash drive for Chain World. Flash drives wear out.
The whole thing sounds like Rohrer forgot about the competition until the day before, then spent an hour throwing together a Minecraft mod, and spent the drive there trying to think up a speech.
No backup. Data that is not backed up could as well not exist. This is not innovative, it is just incompetent.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Players will play the game the way they want to, not the way you intended them to.
That's just plain elementary to all game design (or even anything interactive... remember that awful dungeonmaster who freaked out when you didn't play his campaign "the way you were supposed to"?).
It honestly makes me a bit sad that he took a definitive open-ended sandbox game, and turned it into a bogged down experience where you are arbitrarily expected to do only what the dev (or should I say modder) wants.
Additionally, the tweet where he condemns the guy for doing a charity auction made me lose a lot of respect for Rohrer (as both a person and a game designer). Adding in retroactive expectations of play for a supposedly "organically evolving games-as-art project" shows a distinct lack of foresight and ruins the entire allure of the project for me.
Yes, whats exactly preventing[1] people to copy the game to, say, other 10 USBs? In fact I think this is the interesting bit of the game: A chain reacion.. houndreds of thousands of different iterations and lives. And in the end just mix EVERYTHING and you have your LOC sized virtual world and mdash turns out to be a Zinga sockpuppet freeloading on crowdsourcing for the new gaming "blockbuster", bonus points for viral ... YAY marketing!
[1] Rules, walled gardens, drm, etc can and will be broken.
Well, I'm not an expert in the field, but some people argue that those diseases were wiped out by enhanced sanitary conditions, and that they declined sharply before vaccines came into common use.
The point is that you should be careful to dismiss people as idiots before you know what information they base their decisions on - and after too.
Smallpox transmits like a flu, through inhalation of the airborne virus.
Polio transmits through fecal-oral or oral-oral mechanisms.
If "enhanced sanitary conditions" were the reason for these to be erased (from the entire world in the case of smallpox, let's not forget that) then AIDS would be a minor problem nowadays with its harder infection mechanism (contact with body fluids of an infected person) and diseases like malaria would have been eradicated as well (especially with the efforts involved in killing the mosquito for such long periods. Perhaps the fact that the vaccine for smallpox was first developed at the end of the 18th century and people were consistently vaccinated against it (the 30% mortality rate made it a big, noticeable problem) has something to do with it disappearing... more than just people learning to wash their hands!