a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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Yes, people killing their mom doesn't really happen a lot and would be hard to get away with, but it still makes sense to fix it and take the incentive away of doing so. Why is that a problem?
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Hey, Jason, what if the genetic fitness change was based on:
* Your age at death compared to your genetic fitness score (prior to your death)
* Your child's age at death compared to *your child's* genetic fitness score (prior to their death)
I don't know if that's possible to check, but basically it compares your ability to keep your child alive, vs their and their previous parents' ability to keep themselves alive. It means that if you have a kid that normally starves at 5 years old, but you manage to help them stay alive until they're 20, then holy cow, you're a good parent! Similarly, if they normally stay alive until 40-60, but you let them starve at birth, your score goes way down.
I do like the idea from yesterday about only caring about your child's age until they stop being fertile, too.
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And I believe that OHOL comes closer to doing this than any other game in existence. It's not like a story, or a movie. It's definitely a game, through and through. But in its best moments, it gives us brief glimpses of the full, unique artistic potential of games.
What are some other games that came close?
Minecraft? EVE Online? Space station 13?
Dodge, there are no family homes because people have no reason to care about family.
Or at least it could be causally linked in that way. How do we know what's causing what?
You're saying that we don't care about family because we have no family homes, but why would we build homes if we don't care about our family?
I think Dodge is saying that homes would indirectly help us find our family members. Home as a place you regularly visit, perhaps to store your personal stuff. A shelter is not enough: a hotel or a bus stop is a shelter, but not a home. If there was a need to have such a place, family members would naturally either share homes or build them close enough to be able to find each other.
Wouldn't make people care about their family, but it would make it easier to actually find them.
Re: figuring out the direction of the causal link, let's formulate a few hypotheses and do an experiment! We have a controlled environment, we can do science
If the survival of my offspring was my 100%, #1 priority, I bet I would play the game differently.
Nitpick, but I think it's virtually impossible to force players to behave like that. We do have something like free will: the ability to ignore external motivation, be it economic pressure, hardwired evolutionary goals, or the rules of the game.
It is no such thing. It creates ugly works which merely reflect the prejudices of the designer.
On the contrary, games are the only art form where it's possible to actually check the designer's ideas.
Like "lies, damned lies, and statistics": you can still lie with statistics, but it's harder that just making stuff up.
So what? That person is playing the game, not you Jason. They get to make the choice, not you Jason. You should respect their choices.
And he does. (And I'm daring to speak for him because I have my own desire to explore human behavior through games.)
He's not preaching that people should be doing something he wants them to do. He's trying to create a situation where they'll do it by choice.
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Coconut, solving the problem of artistic coherence in video games is the whole point of OHOL and of my entire career. I get that most people just want to play games for fun. And most people just want to blow off steam at the end of the day with a mindless TV show, or read some romance novel on the beach.
But that doesn't mean there aren't TV shows or books that serve other purposes. We can have both Avengers Endgame and Synecdoche New York. We can have both Fifty Shades of Gray and Lolita. We can have both Perfect Strangers and Twin Peaks. I REALLY love Fifty Shades of Gray and Perfect Strangers. On the other hand, Synecdoche New York and Lolita are absolute masterpieces and sky-shattering sublime art.
Whatever Lolita is doing, and whatever purpose it serves, we don't have many video games that do something like that or serve that purpose.
My career is about figuring out HOW video games can do something like this by leveraging their own unique capabilities.
You're probably tired of reading my pedantic messages and I'm sure this will sound kiss-ass and I'm sure you've heard all this before, but you are seriously my game design hero and I absolutely love your approach to it all, how you think it through, how you open source everything even your internal process as you share it all as you're doing it (how???), how you really care about getting the above described things right.
It's so, so hard to find a successful game designer who actually gives a shit about the art of the games they're making (beyond the visual art, of course) and isn't just following the dollars. If my brain was less chaotic and I was able to get my shit together I'd be doing my best to follow a similar path, but it's really encouraging to see people absolutely crushing it in ways far beyond that which I could hope to.
So yeah, hopefully my pedantry comes off as giving a shit about your creation rather than being an asshole. It's a fine line :\ Go Jason!!! *cheerleading commences*
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Total tangent, but does anyone have a favorite game that achieves a similar goal?
Braid immediately comes to mind for me. I don't want to say too much and spoil it but one of the primary themes of the game ends up being -very- aligned with your internal experience as you're trying to finish it and it's just... goosebumps. Non-interactive art can achieve this also, but not to that degree, and much more indirectly.
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I'd like it to not account for age. sometimes it is nice to play a "match" for half an hour, sometimes for more than an hour, for enjoyment. Now for scoring, it is saddening that someone that dies at 10 years old takes your score down for 0,70 or more, nullifying your effort for about two lives/two hours. Yum bonus is a nice scoring system, but to be sincere i don't quite understand how scoring works, if for age, yum or what.
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I'd like it to not account for age. sometimes it is nice to play a "match" for half an hour, sometimes for more than an hour, for enjoyment. Now for scoring, it is saddening that someone that dies at 10 years old takes your score down for 0,70 or more, nullifying your effort for about two lives/two hours. Yum bonus is a nice scoring system, but to be sincere i don't quite understand how scoring works, if for age, yum or what.
nice necro
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