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Original post by Tangireon I don't know if this could be considered programming edutainment, but the MMO game Second Life has a whole side thing dealing with scripting in-game objects that you can create from your avatar - while the fun part of it is that you are able to see immediate results that affect your avatar, other avatars, the world, or your/others' objects, probably the downside to that is that you have to go through non-interactive tutorials to understand how to script (especially a bit more difficult if you haven't programmed with a language before).

Ah, yes, Second Life. For some reason Second Life exists in this separate, game-but-not-quite-a-game gray area of my mind. I've heard about the scripting stuff, and I think it's really cool.

It reminds me most of modding. It's like modding a game in real-time (way cool). Modding is something I hadn't really thought about in relation to this problem, but it is definitely a potential solution. I think there are a great number of players that would love to tweak the game they are playing, either to 'fix' it, or to make it more fun. Having real-time mod support in a popular game would be really cool. Of course, running a multiplayer game on dynamic, changing code would probably allow for some really bad situations.

Maybe you could have a game where you start up a 'session' with X other players, and you are able to do whatever you want to the dynamic code running that session. That is, the game starts as a normal instance of whatever that game is, but the players change what that is as they play. When the game is over, the altered session could just disappear forever, or you could let the player save it and re-load it at a separate time. Keeping the games small and mostly private might help to limit the frustrations that come from allowing other players to change the game while you play it.

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Original post by extralongpants Quote: Original post by Fulgent Here is a suggestion I have... Thanks for the suggestion. Interactive, real-time battles would be pretty cool. I would probably let the player save special moves as functions, that can be typed or just clicked on. A 'create once, use everywhere' type of thing. It might be neat if you could do research on enemies, maybe by killing them or taking photos of them (ala Bioshock), that would provide you with interfaces that allow you to query certain characteristics of other enemies of that type, or maybe gather information on what their AI looks like (so that you can program to defeat it). In fact, I think it would be really cool if, in one of these robot-AI games, the player could be given special espionage/hacking abilities that would allow him to view random snippets of the enemy's AI code. Then the player could actively refactor/redesign his code to exploit his enemy's weaknesses (as his enemy does the same).

That actually makes more sense than what I suggested. I forgot programming language is something you keep adding to rather than having to make it more than a few times. Saving it as a function to show that the character has learned the ability to do the attack is much more organized.

If the enemies A.I. follows patterns, then that idea you mentioned would work. For example, if an unknown enemies pattern is to attack, special attack, and attack again in that order, then if you have obtained its data from a simpler enemy and give it to your character, they could automatically do a sword defend, energy defend, and then sword defend again. Then your character would be able to handle hordes of those enemies instead of trying to guess their attacks with its own A.I. If the game is a real time action game, then when you see the information, you could know how to block the attacks by pressing the defend buttons that pertain to each attack and if all attacks are blocked, the enemy is stunned allowing you a chance to attack the enemy without taking any damage. I think there are a number of ways to aproach this idea depending on the genre.

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Original post by extralongpants It also got me thinking about how cool it would be if you could make a robot battling game popular enough to have MMO-like trading/buying systems. You could have players 'crafting' behavioral chips, where the crafting was actually real programming. Man. That would be awesome. I'm surprised the EVE Online guys haven't put that in yet [lol].

That would be amazingly awesome. I am blown away thinking about the potential.

I am also blown away at thinking how hard it would be to do *right*, but that's another story entirely!