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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."

17 of 178 comments (clear)

  1. best buy by slshwtw · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:best buy by mat+catastrophe · · Score: 5, Insightful

      He overpaid.

      I thought was explained when it said he went to Best Buy.

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      sig not found
    2. Re:best buy by Trails · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:best buy by tehcyder · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's impressive that a first post could get to the real heart of the topic so quickly and so succintly. This is indeed a story about the widely varying costs of USB memory sticks, and obviously nothing to do with either games or religion, as that would just be boring.

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      To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
  2. Weird indeed by tftp · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Weird indeed by blackraven14250 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The entire thing about this has basically nothing to do with the game. It's Minecraft with some custom scripts; it says so in the article. It's the events surrounding it that make this completely fascinating.

  3. 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.

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    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.

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      Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
  4. Good luck with that by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

  5. Not the first by OverlordQ · · Score: 3, Insightful

    [...] different from any game that came before it

    Sorry, the community around pretty much every sandbox game out there does this already.

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    Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
  6. Not different by OverlordQ · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Chain World, Rohrer explained, was a mod, a customized version of Minecraft and a set of scripts that govern how it’s played. And here was the cool part: It all lived on a single USB memory stick. [...] A week after the challenge, Ji posted an eBay auction for the memory stick. “This charity auction is for the third player slot for Chain World,” [...] The winner was an anonymous entity calling itself Positional Super Ko, a reference to a rule in the board game Go. For the right to play a used videogame exactly once, Positional Super Ko agreed to pay $3,300.

    So basically he automated what the minecraft community has been doing already and people went full-on moron.

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    Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
  7. Pretentious twits by Blackeagle_Falcon · · Score: 4, Informative

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

    1. 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.

    2. Re:Pretentious twits by Lost+Race · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    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.
  8. Hack on floppy by Hsien-Ko · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.