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The UFP and the Filthy Humans

This isn't really an MMORPG idea, but it's a game idea so I'm filing it with the others of those. Here's the thing: you are an officer, say a commodore, in the military-diplomatic-exploration organization of an interplanetary nation with United Federation of Planets (UFP) membership. You've been tasked with asserting your nation's interests with respect to a certain out-of-the-way planet that happens to be rich in natural resources. Unfortunately, it's already inhabited, by a race of disgusting natives we will call the Filthy Humans.

(26 September 2008)

Text-rewriting for adventure gaming

About 15 years ago I worked briefly on a multiplayer text adventure project. The idea I had in mind was that it would work with as close as possible to full English as the input and output language, and it would change the words to reflect multiple viewpoints. The world of computer gaming has changed a lot since that time and I'm not sure there'd still be interest in this kind of system, but on the other hand, it looks like I'm going to be working as a computational linguist in the next few years and it seems like it might be cool, and might build my skills, to dust this off and work on it again.

(22 June 2008)

Condition variables in SDL

I recently had occasion to want to use condition variables in SDL. I know enough about concurrency to, for instance, know that condition variables were the things I wanted to use; and I've got most of a PhD in computer science and can certainly be expected to read and understand the original work by people like Hoare. However, I never did actually take a concurrency class, and knowing how these things are supposed to work from a computer science point of view doesn't necessarily prepare one for whatever weirdness might be built into SDL's particular implementation. So I went looking on the Web for tutorials and other information on using SDL condition variables in particular, and I discovered to my horror that it was all written by game programmers. So here are my notes on how to use condition variables in SDL, posted both for my own reference and for anyone else who might be in a similar situation. (3 September 2007)

Time travel chaos game

Okay, here's a game sketch.  This idea is supposed to be a game that could live on a Web site somewhere, support a large number of players, but be fun to participate in even if you are brand new, or only connect occasionally, or if there are few or no other players.  Kind of like Wikipedia - except that my idea would actually know it's a game, unlike Wikipedia which thinks it's an encyclopedia.  I'm posting this here to make it harder for anyone to patent. (30 May 2007)

On games that don't suck

When the ever-amusing Jeff Vogel posted his piece about why he hates fantasy RPGs a couple weeks ago, I thought (because of the come-on at the end for what he'll talk about next time) that it was the first half of a two-parter, so I'd wait until the second half came out before commenting.  It's been a while, though, and on re-reading it I now think that his next column is simply going to be another one in the ongoing series instead of specifically a second half for this column, so I'm going to go ahead and comment now.  The thing is, Jeff's gripe is that fantasy RPGs are all about the levelling up.  You start out sucky, most of the game is spent doing otherwise-pointless tasks in order to improve yourself, and it's tedious and boring and too much like real life.  That got me thinking, well, what kind of game could we make that would be just the opposite?  It would have to be a game where you start out really cool, with lots of power to do things, and then you progressively lose that and it becomes harder and harder and a big part of the object is simply to retain enough of your powers until the end of the game to be able to finish.  After going through a few permutations of stuff like "role-play a hero who suffers from a debilitating, advancing illness," I realised that the problem has already been solved.  One of the most popular computer games today exhibits just the properties I'm imagining.  You probably already have a copy.  It's notorious as an addictive time-waster. (25 February 2007)

XCCity (working title)

Simulation game: build a city, much in the manner of SimCity or LinCity, and demonstrate the advanced features of Xconq material model 1. (4 August 2005)

Bishoujo v. Tentaku (working title)

Sub-lethal tactical game:  Busload of schoolgirls accidentally drives within range of a dimensional rift, and tentacled horrors pour out from the other side.  The idea is to work in as many anime cliches as possible, though I haven't yet figured out just where giant robots will come into the scenario. (4 August 2005)

Ottawa 2001 (working title)

Sub-lethal tactical game:  The N17 anti-globalization protests of Ottawa, 2001.  Police, peaceful protestors, the Black Block, tear gas, pepper spray, etc.  Intended to be a reasonably accurate simulation, with input from interviews with people who were present, while still being a fun game; the hope would be that the rule set would be applicable to other similar events (real and imagined) in the late 20th/early 21st Centuries, by swapping out the map and the initial units. (4 August 2005)

SRE: Solar Regions Explorer

Interstellar strategic game: players explore the galaxy and eventually come into conflict with each other. Originated in a test case for advanced hacks of Xconq's terrain generator; evolved into the preferred test case for materials model 1. (4 August 2005)

AntarctiConq (working title)

Operational-level game focused on exploring Antarctica - for oil or for magical power, riffing on H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness and similar works. (4 August 2005)

Stateless gaming

I had another of my late-night ideas this morning.  We've spent a lot of time talking about how to manage property in MMORPGs.  Many of the articles in my MMORPG category are on that theme.  Some people don't like the idea of players being able to sell game property; on the other hand, the fact that it's impossible to prevent such sales suggests that rather than trying to catch and punish people who do it, game operators might do better to simply allow sales and try to design games that will continue to be fun when sales are occurring.  I've written a bit on the technical aspects of a system to allow sales while reducing centralization; and I recently saw an interesting article considering the causes and effects of item sales in economic terms (note:  I haven't read this article carefully and at first glance I think the assumptions it makes simplify the problem too much for the conclusions to be useful; but it's worth at least a skim).  My rule is to challenge assumptions, though, and I've realised that there's still one assumption I haven't seen anyone challenge yet. (4 May 2005)

The monster with ten thousand secrets

On thinking some more about the hash cash for virtual real estate idea, one possibility I imagined was that it could be applied to possession of items as well as real estate.  I imagine a game something like Legend of the Red Dragon (LORD), which was very popular back in the BBS era. (21 March 2005)

Synthetic Statehood

I recently had occasion to take another look at the Ceejbot blog, run by talk.bizarre alumna C.J. Silverio (and possibly other people, too; the way it's set up isn't 100% clear to me).  Lots of interesting stuff in there, and I think I'll be adding it to my Rippy configuration, but the article that caught my attention today was the link to Terranova's commentary on the WoW Naked Gnome Protest. (3 February 2005)

Hash cash for virtual real estate

I've been thinking a bit more recently about peer-to-peer MMORPG systems à la Kosmos Online.  Here are some thoughts on that. (20 January 2005)

Zero of Queens

It was a brilliant and beautiful game concept, and extremely popular. (17 October 2004)

LawMeme covers virtual property

This article from James Grimmelmann in LawMeme is absolutely fascinating, and I recommend you read it carefully.  It's all about the legal and social questions raised by the concept of "property" in online communities, as discussed at the State of Play conference.  We've all been thinking about "intellectual property" in meatspace, but the existence of systems like MMORPGs creates a whole parallel set of "virtual property" issues which are sort of like "intellectual property", sort of not, and interact with intellectual and real property in complicated ways.  Attempts to solve virtual property issues may have consequences for intellectual and real property issues as well. (3 December 2003)

Peer-to-peer storytelling

I used to be part of a project, spearheaded by Nicholas "Mordred" Vining who writes Braincrash, called Kosmos Online.  The idea of KO was to build a massively multiplayer online role-playing game similar in general nature to systems like Everquest, but with some important differences:  KO was to be open-source, KO was to be peer-to-peer with little or no central authority, and KO was to be immune to cheating.  Well, in recent weeks Nicholas has been talking about resurrecting KO in some form, and I've thought about it a bit.  Here's my proposal (likely long and technical) for a system which might be cool.  It's not meant to be the same thing that KO was intended to be, but it's inspired by some of the ideas I had while working on KO. (23 April 2003)

Caves of Golorp v0.0.1

A Roguelike game written in Prolog (1 January 2000)