Hi, as you’ve probably noticed you’re the first person to start playing. Sorry I haven’t been around but I’ve been pretty busy (and also wasn’t really sure if anyone else would be interested in this). I’m sure a wiki game like this has a lot of potential, so feel free to make any changes/suggestions. Jonty
OK, I’ve been checking out the changes you made. I agree with you about trying to make the game more realistic…I guess I was tying to create a simple (if unrealistic) world that was playable, and then once the game mechanics worked we could start to make changes to make the game more realistic. But I completely understand where you are coming from, especially about things like the seeds being weightless.
I think the key would be to make the fundamental rules as realistic as possible, then we can make the game more complex simply by adding new technologies/species within these rules. Also I think with this kind of thing it would be possible to make playing the game very simple, but actually much more complex once you got more involved.
Hopefully all of that made sense…maybe the best thing would be to put things into real units, like joules of sunlight and grams for weight etc… let me know what you think. Jonty.
Another problem is how often changes occur. What I mean is whether we want to aim for a game you can play continuously, because new stuff is always growing etc… or a game where people log in each day and make a few changes… Ultimately a game where you can do either would be best. If we made it so small things grew regularly, then regular players could keep moving around harvesting these. But if you only need to eat say once a day and could survive for a week with out food then it wouldn’t matter if you couldn’t play for a few days… maybe it is best to keep it so that people only need food to move, rather than just survive, although if a player went away for a few weeks he could always arrange for someone else to feed his character… there is definately a lot of things that need to be sorted out… Jonty
Thanks for being so inviting. I was worried I had gone too far.
I agree that complexity is a very large problem. But simplicity is something I usually go overboard with, so part of my ‘enriching’ this environment is probably an artifact of my personal struggle to force myself to break away from my stupidly extreme simplicity. I hope we can find a good balance.
I imagine the fun we have here will be short lived, as this technology (wiki) really isn’t enough (currently) to cause the periodic changes needed to even roughly represent a biome. But I have been dreaming and planning to make some such game for several years now. My ramblings about it are at http://ecocomics.org/Ecocom.html and a list of Free Software that might be worth building upon is at http://ecocomics.org/Game.html
A specific question I have for now is: how should we best represent our movements… so that after we move our character around a bit, that others can view our ‘path’ or somehow see what we have accomplished etc.
Anyway, I imagine we could eventually hook up some kind of MOO that looks like a wiki, but I’m still too dumb to do that. http://moo.ca has a pretty fancy interface lately, but maybe too fancy. – Ownut
I know what you mean about simplicity, I am probably the same. I think maybe it would be best for now just to keep adding any ideas and hope that it all falls into place. Obviously for it to work as a game it will need to be controlled, but we don’t have to worry about that until we’ve set-up a bigger world and got more people interested.
As for wikis not being able to cause periodic changes, I was thinking it could work so that users change things but are limited by time limits. So say you have a tree with a fruit growing on it, if someone picks the fruit then they leave something saying “A fruit will finish growing here at [time/date]”. Then if you get there after that time you can either pick the new fruit or just change it to say “A fruit is here”…
“Ramblings” is a good word to describe that page coz I couldn’t really make much sense of it, but seemed like some interesting ideas. I would be interested in learning how to make games with other software, but I really created this because there must be somekind of games that would work on wiki, and I thought something like this might work.
“how should we best represent our movements” - I thought people would have to edit each page that they move through…basically the only way anything will work is if every action that effects the game involves an edit, that way everything will be stored in the page history.
That Moo thing seems interesting, but like I said, even if we made something on other software, I really want to work out somekind of game that would work well in a wiki… Jonty