From: Darin Sunley (rsunley@escape.ca)
Date: Wed Apr 11 2001 - 13:43:30 MDT
-----Original Message-----
From: Anders Sandberg <asa@nada.kth.se>
>While this is fun, what I would like to see is a true god game: you create
>your own universe, with physical laws and upwards. That way even more
>emergence would appear. Of course, writing a good, understandable and
>beautiful game for it would be very hard.
In my early teens, myself and my brother were positively addicted to Sierra
on Line's adventure games. The Space Quest and King's Quest series, among
others. I confess to pirating large numbers of them, simply because A) I had
no job at the time, but mainly because we ripped through each one so fast
(2-3 days) that it seemed silly.
I wouldn't engage in that kind of wholesale software piracy now. A) I
actually have money, and B) my attitude towards IP has changed considerably.
But that's neither here nor there.
When I first got into programming, in my mid-teens, it seemed to follow
naturally from this interest in adventure puzzle games. Programming a medium
sized project simply felt like the next level of adventure game. But it was
much more of a God game then an adventure game. You're manipulating tokens
together in pursuit of a goal, but the tokens you manipulate are that much
lower level. The big advantage was, that unlike canned adventure games,
/you/ made the goal, and the degree of interactivity you had with the
puzzles, the number of ways you could solve an individual problem was a lot
higher.
Moreover, it's a creative experience. I was programming simulation games,
and that felt a lot like the /real/ "god game" experience you just
described. Setting up a pocket universe, one law of physics at a time :)
So I a sense, your "god game" already exists. But It WOULD be amazing for
someone to produce a more user friendly simulation package, specifically
optimized for the sort of programming that simulations require. I'll have to
put that on my list :)
Darin Sunley
rsunley@escape.ca
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