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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."

6 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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  2. 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.

  3. 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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  4. 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.