Okay, Imagine that you could play a game that is a simplified simulation of life. What is simulated is our lifecycle of being born, growing up, making a living, finding a partner, building a house, making children, taking up a role in the community and ultimately when old dying. Now, those other people are real people, they are not computer controled, never, but controled by real people. So if you get born through your mom, that will be another player, who got pragnend in that world by having sex with another male. Now the objective for you as a player in that world would be as in real life, to furfill the pyramid of needs from Maslow. First of all you want to stay alife, otherwise when you die you have to start all over again, grow a new character. So other players can kill you all the time, just like in real life. Of course, the game would be cheap if there wouldn't be more aspects to the game than simply surviving. In this world you can grow, physicaly, through time when you eat enough. You will have to be shure that you eat enough food regularly to keep fit, strong, and ultimately stay alife. You can eat by eather growing it yourself (farming) or stealing or cooperating with others. You will have to protect that piece of land. In the beginning, the first weeks you play your character you will depend on your parents a lot for food and protection. You might have to help them growing the food, you can play with other children, play with them, learn how to fight, how to seduce, how to be the leader of the group or just a good teammember in teasing the other children. When you become old, big enough you can start thinking at having a boy/girlfriend and having sex with her/him (advise to the player: Watch out though,it might be fun to have sex with other gender but you can get children from it!). You can start your own family, build your own house, grow your own food. The interesting part of this game should be how people start to organize themselves into communities. How they start to cooperate, create social rules and political structures. Okay, I'll leave it until here. I have a lot to explain still but this is the foundation of the game. Any comments, questions, advise, remarks? [edited by - Mandarijn on May 30, 2002 2:41:43 PM] [edited by - Mandarijn on June 4, 2002 7:14:38 AM]

There should be a goal to achieve(a defined one), and you might want show some more control of your character, for instance more strong, or intelligent, and that you can''t have it all, because otherwise, everyone will be equally strong, intelligent, beautiful etc.

Delphi is the best language around.

quote: Original post by Mandarijn
Okay, Imagine that you could play a game that is a simplified simulation of life. What is simulated is our lifecycle of being born, growing up, making a living, finding a partner, building a house, making children, taking up a role in the community and ultimately when old dying.

This game already exists - it is called real life, and you play it by not sitting in front of your computer. Why would people play this game?

quote:
Now, those other people are real people, they are not computer controled, never, but controled by real people. So if you get born through your mom, that will be another player, who got pragnend in that world by having sex with another male.

What if a character gets pregnant, but there are no new players to play the child? Conversely, what if someone wants to play but there are no children for them to take control of?

Note this is not meant as a flame, but I am trying to point out potential weaknesses in the design.

Shadowcore thanks for your reply. You immediately fired the most interesting point here:

quote: Original post by Shadowcore
There should be a goal to achieve(a defined one)

The goal is to stay alife but also, like in real life, you can gain power over others. When you are bigger you are more powerfull and the more little ones, when not protected by other ones will have to listen to you if they do not want to get beaten(damaged)/killed. Another goal in thiss world is the seduction of a partner. Not that you get points when you kissed or had sex with someone, but you simply can do it in this world. Even worse having children costs energy, you have to grow more food, have to protect them, ...

Just as in real life people will do it, I think, because they get something new, something different, something that two lovers share, something to live for.

In this game I will also provide the tools so that they can build political strucures. These tools will be: When chosing a community to get born, you will be able to see how the community is structured, this will be a text written by the founder of this society. They will also be able to import special attributes/clothing that they wear so that people can recognize who''s who, who''s the leader, who''s a fighter, who''s a builder.

I think this game comes close to real life and uses the same open ended strucure. There are no goals defined but the goals are defined in the human species, they follow there thrifts to sex, power, affection, recognization, friendship, etc.. All this can be achieved in this world. I think this will work.

quote:
and you might want show some more control of your character, for instance more strong, or intelligent, and that you can''t have it all, because otherwise, everyone will be equally strong, intelligent, beautiful etc.

The control that you have over your character are:

-the look, you can manipulate your character in such a way that he looks unique in the world.
-strongness/bigness, depending on the amount you eat you will be stronger/bigger than others. For this you will have to grow a lot of food, you will need more land. You can do this by force and simply kill your neighbouirs. But if the community is organized and the members support social rules than you will be punished when you do this. So you might have to negotiate or do other things in order to get more food.

-Quality of partner. The rules and characteristics of the world are made as such that a girl when chosing her partner will have to try to take the partner that is able to support her and the children. For that he will have to be strong and/or have good relations with the others so that he earns enough food to support her when she is pregnant and needs a lot food and can''t grow food herself. (I haven''t thought out the exact parameters and quantities, numbers but it should be possible to make the world as such that the girl is stumaulated to only have sex with a man that will stay with her and support her otherwise she will be unsuccessfull (maybe die because not enough food)

-Quality of friends; This will depend on your interpersonal relationships. Ar you capable of making friends? Here you can learn how to, even will have to learn it when you want to be successfull and become a leader.

Hi Sa,dman, thanks for your reply.

First of all I want to mention that this is not a simulation of real life just for the sake of it. When simulating something from real life ou can learn from it. Simulating a cockpit enables you to learn how to fly the plane without having the danger to crash when making a mistake.

This game is a social simulation. It simulates some social relationships we know from real life such as parent-child, boyfriend-girlfriend, husband-wife, leader-citizen. Here in this world you can learn how to seduce a girl, become a leader, without losing your face, your valuable reputation in real life when failing, only your virtual character his reputation will be ruined. But as it is a game you can try it all over again and now a little bit different.

Your second remark sandman is right. Indeed I haven''t found a solution to that one yet. How to start the game, or what to do when there are no other people pregnand and you want to get born.

I think these might have simple solutions. For example to strt the game than you simply have to cheat and let people into the world as a baby without being born.
When there are lots of children and few pregnant women you simply let the mother have multiple babys at ones and vice versa. So the mothers never know howmany babys they''ll have.

But these problems are details. The important things are: Would you play it? Will it work? Is it interesting? When this is true the minor details can be fixed.

it seems that all you did was take the sims, make it multiplayer, and throw in a few more extra features for shits and giggles.

Honestly, it looks like and expanded version of the sims online.

And people will buy it, and play it, because if there is one thing that the sim series of games have taught us, its that people will shell out 50 bucks to perform horridly mundane things on there computer

Ummmm... like the idea, but it''s being done, I believe. Sims Online.

This is Mandarijn, I desided to go through cyberlife with my real life name.

Ok, black_Mage is this simply The Sims Online?

No it is not, although it takes some concepts from it: the rich personalization of your avatar, the rich communication features an avatar has (behavioural expressions) and the more open-ended gameplay (not 1 goal set forth by the gamedesigner but a lot of different posssibilities created by the gamedesigner, simply a rich environment where players can create, choose, set forth there own goal)

What I miss in the sims online is the cooperative aspect or simply how Will Wright handled the worldrules. I''m not shures wheather these rules are still in but for example how he handles player killing. When you get killed you become a ghost and when you return to your home you are back alife. In this design this problem is solved by motivating the players to cooperate because that way they gain more resources, are more succesfull.

I also do not think that he uses the life-cycle feature of getting born, growing and dying when old.

Other differences are this game is
-1st person view, set in a
-cartoony funny idiotic avatars, fantasy setting.
-You can play multiple characters in the same world (not at the same time as you can only control 1 person)
-You can conquer land
-You can''t hide, you are constantly part of the group, can''t close your door of your ome and be safe.

The emphasis lays more on the group aspect and the other avatars than on the environment. It is more a tribal community feeling than a town feeling of today.

Wow! Seems intersting and a tab bit weird! Good idea though!

Where does the first person come from? Is time on that earth shorter so that we don''t die before our character? Can you become a dictator of a country and take over the world?

Just some questions to help not offend.