What an absolutely fascinating story. Thank you so much for sharing it with us. As a maker I am always thinking about the rules of what we make, and then once released in the wild we sometimes want to pull our creations back in, and sometimes we can, and other-times we can't. And when we can, those that thought that we were sharing our creations with them, for them to explore and change, feel alienated and rejected, and when we can't those that believed in our original intentions feel betrayed by their trust in us. It's a beautiful and terrifying relationship, and I am glad to be a part of it. Perhaps someday, I'll get to be part of Chain World too.
It's interesting that Rohrer played around with the idea of taking Chain World online-- when I heard about Chain World, the first bit of sacrilege that came to my mind was "well, why should this be restricted to a USB stick? There's no reason a multiplayer server couldn't be governed to do this."
I wrote Lonecraft as a way of replicating the Chain World idea, but using an Amazon EC2 instance as a multiplayer server with a few custom Minecraft server plugins and a Heroku instance as a web app to govern the rules of the game (to make sure only one player plays at once and no one plays more than once).
The code is here: http://www.github.com/ckolderup/lonecraft It needs some more work to flesh out the idea of resetting the world after a set number of players and exposing the blog entries of each player after the world resets, but the general game mechanic is there and functional.
My instance of it is technically up and running, too, but one thing my friends and I quickly discovered while testing it is that people who have been playing Minecraft for a while have a nasty habit of not... really... dying. Once you've learned the ropes it's pretty easy to make armor, carry food, and fight monsters. Death usually comes only occasionally and as the result of a careless mistake.
I've toyed with the idea of imposing a time limit or a number of logins that you're allowed before you're also kicked off, but that seemed to defeat the whole purpose of giving meaning to the in-game death.
Games are usually not profound and thought provoking for the same reason food is usually not profound and thought provoking. That's just not the path to enjoyment that the medium is naturally inclined toward.
Food, above all else, must be tasty. Likewise, games, above all else, must be fun to play -- or more precisely, must provide unusually fulfilling analogs of the plights and labours of real life.
If you manage to make food that is both tasty and cerebrally stimulating, that's pretty awesome. But food that is strictly cerebral is always going to have marginal appeal at best. And you can't accuse chefs of being lazy and unimaginative just because their food isn't cerebral.
(For the nitpickers: yes, food is an extreme analogy. There is more room for expressiveness in games than in food, and it's probably underexploited. But you see the point I am making?)
If someone wanted to extend this concept a bit further, how about a one-play-only game that could only be passed on as a bequest. That is, no one else gets to play it until you are dead, for real. Bit of a technical challenge, to ensure the game data structures and code could always be run, no matter how much time passed. Also, to use a storage medium with a reliable lifetime of centuries - which Flash isn't.
Some people built an everlasting clock inside a mountain. http://longnow.org/clock/ It would be interesting to try building a 'game seat' like that - can only be reached by a hazardous journey, will be there and playable for a thousand years, you only get one go at it.
Rohrer is one of the few game-artist around. I'd encourage everyone to check out his life, career or works of art.
It kind of sucks that people can't just treat it as is - a game, and go with it, but whatever...a cool idea, nonetheless.
Something along those lines that I'd really like to see (or maybe create someday) would be a decentralized virtual universe. Minecraft and such games are usually run on a server which is under someone's control; it would be funny to have a consensus-based distributed world (drawing inspiration from Freenet and possibly Bitcoin for the technical implementation) which would exist in the network of the players, be the same for everyone, and survive as long as people are playing it.
If this were just art, an artist couldn't hope for a better annoying foil than Jia Ji (as described in the article at least).
As it is, I'm just barely skeptical of the whole story -- could just be one of those weird stories. If Rohrer takes the fine art approach to monetizing his games, then his next one will be high concept, and even harder to get, somehow.
Not so sure about rule #9. Maybe never play the game in a long time like 9 years may be better. It's like visiting a new country, if the experience is good, I would definitely like to go back and experience the old and the new variations of it.
For a game to be bigger than religion, it must take on a life of it's own that transcends the "lives" of the players.
Chain World sounds very cool, but it's lacking one crucial element, replication. An online version sounds intriguing, but would most likely need substantial tweaks to create the right incentive structure.
I posted the same link two days ago but with the original title "Chain World Videogame Was Supposed to be a Religion—Not a Holy War" but it passed completely unnoticed.
Hobbits really are amazing creatures
So... to add a little bit more to this story.
I have a copy of Chain World.
I was having lunch with a friend of mine in NYC a few weeks ago, and he was telling me about all this. He said that he was talking with his friend who got the USB drive from Rohrer (I assume this is Ji) and that before Ji sold it, he bootlegged a copy of it. A copy that my friend emailed to me.
I have yet to play (I haven't played Minecraft before, I want a bit of practice before I boot into the game world and die), but it's sitting on my desktop right now.
I think the fact that there is now at least two bootlegged copies going around adds to parallelism to religion. There is "the true path" (the original USB drive), and then there have been two "sects" that have broken off, gone to different parts of the world, and have begun to grow.
I plan on passing my copy from friend to friend on the West Coast. Maybe one day someone will come across copies of two different strains and they'll be able to see the differences that occur after 50 generations of evolution.