 |
Science Fiction
Dictionary
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
|
 |
Games Of Tomorrow Built By Players Wiki-Style
According to Sim's creator Will Wright and MS Xbox team head J. Allard, most of tomorrow's computer games will be built by the players, not by big budget departments.

(Spore sample world)
Wright's newest game - Spore - will allow players to take over any part of the experience, not just the protagonist. Players should be directors and producers as well.
"(Gaming) is the only medium where we yield control of the protagonist. Let's yield control of the director--and the producer," said Allard, a vice president at Microsoft. "We're going to take on the Wikipedia model. We're going to take on...the open-source model, if you will, for gaming."
Considering the fact that Wikipedia is a non-profit foundation, there seems to be a lot of discussion in corporations about how much money there is to be made in letting consumers do the work of personalizing their experience. The personalize-your-phone ring-tone market brought in more than $600 million last year. Tivo lets you tailor what you see, iPods let you pick the place you watch it. All at a price, of course.
Spore will allow players to control a species as it evolves from single-cell organisms all the way to interstellar space-traveling "Galactic God," creating the appearance of the species and, later on, the very planets they inhabit. Teams of programmers, game designers and artists take much longer than 6 days to create a world; it's cheaper to let the inhabitants do the work. Each player's creations will be uploaded to the company and then downloaded to other players.
Microsoft's Allard also said that the Xbox 360 will increasingly encourage developers to let players add on to worlds and even sell their creations through a central Xbox store system.
The basic idea of letting players build their own games started offline in home-brewed Dungeons and Dragons style gaming environments. Computer users transfered this idea online into Multi-user Dungeons (or domains) in the late 1970's, running on university computer networks and then on dial-up bulletin boards. Ultima Online is the oldest massively multiplayer online game, introduced in 1997.
Science fiction writer Neal Stephenson did as much as anyone to popularize the idea with his 1992 novel Snow Crash. In the novel, he refers to the online characters that correspond to real individuals - he calls them avatars. Here's a description of an online scene; note the importance of personalization by the user:
The couples coming off the monorail can't afford to have custom avatars made and don't know how to write their own. They have to buy off-the-shelf avatars. One of the girls has a pretty nice one. It would be considered quite the fashion statement among the K-Tel set. Looks like she has bought the Avatar Construction Set (tm) and put together her own, customized model out of miscellaneous parts. It might even look something like its owner. Her date doesn't look half bad himself.
(Read more about Neal Stephenson's avatars)
Take a look at a unique online environment - an online multiplayer church - see Church of Fools. And don't miss Rapture of the Avatar. Read more about this story at CNet News. Read a brief review of Spore.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 2/3/2006)
Follow this kind of news @Technovelgy.
| Email | RSS | Blog It | Stumble | del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit |
Would
you like to contribute a story tip?
It's easy:
Get the URL of the story, and the related sf author, and add
it here.
Comment/Join discussion ( 7 )
Related News Stories -
("
Computer
")
Great. Now AIs Have Access To Hacking Tools
'... when you and the Flatline punch through that ice and scramble the cores.' - William Gibson, 1984.
Tongue-Controlled Tong Wearable Mouth Computer
'Griff found the white and pink map distracting and switched it off using his tongue mouse.' - Greg Bear, 2007.
Interpol Launches Metaverse For Law Enforcement
'CopSpace sheds some light on matters, of course. Blink and it descends in its full glory.' - Charles Stress, 2007.
AVATECT Prevents Spoofing Of Avatars
'Your physical appearance is a graphical encryption that the human mind is uniquely qualified to decode.' - Daniel Suarez, 2009.
Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!)
is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for
the Invention Category that interests
you, the Glossary, the Invention
Timeline, or see what's New.
|
 |
Science Fiction
Timeline
1600-1899
1900-1939
1940's 1950's
1960's 1970's
1980's 1990's
2000's 2010's
Current News
Barista Robot Perfects Latte Swirl With Multi-DOF Wriggle
'It's done with a flip of the third joint of the tentacle on the down beat.'
Vendetta 2023 All-Terrain Skateboard Could Use Neal Stephenson's Smartwheels
'If you surf over a bump... If you surf over a pothole...'
Safe Street Rebel Autonomous Vehicle Luddites And Schachner's 1931 Robot-Deranger
'Then the spreading beam of the deranging ray struck them, and they stood an instant transfixed...'
The Electric Balance Bicycle And The Decline Of Western Civilization
'Noiselessly, on rubber-tired wheels, they journeyed...'
'Droplet' Battery Microscale Power Pack
'...a power pack the size of a pea.'
ARX-5 Doing Robot Arm Dancing
It's Data's day - at last.
CD, DVD Bit Rot And PKD's Civic Notification Distorter
'...copy two of the original document no longer can be superimposed on copy one.'
Inbiodroid Prometheus 2.0 Telepresence Avatar Robot
My prize robot, tall, dashing would speak and act for me...
Amazon One Is Frank Herbert's Palm Lock
'A palm lock must be keyed to one individual's hand shape and palm lines.'
DroneDog Ground Security Robot Dogs From Asylon
'I have transferred the ego of a dog to a synthetic dog brain in the skull case of a robot dog.'
Who Knows What Might Be Found When Visiting A Metal Asteroid?
'...inspect the tiny speck of matter that swam toward them out of the bottomless void.'
Giant Lunar Surface Test Bed Built On Earth
Astronauts first walked the site, then flew over the site at a few hundred feet in a small Cessna.
FlyCroTug Drones Work In Teams Now
'It slid smoothly out of its cell like a metal wasp emerging from its nest, and hung in midair.'
Zai Pits (West Sahel) And Dew Collectors (Dune)
'Each is planted most tenderly in its own little pit.'
Delivery Robots Being Bullied, Robbed
'Robots have worse problems than anybody.' (A Present for Pat)
Zoom Education Idea Is 100 Years Old
'... the frosted glass squares began, one by one, to show the faces and shoulders of a peculiar type of young men.'
More SF in the News Stories
More Beyond Technovelgy science news stories
|
 |