Linkages

Two videos:

1. eisenbud points us to Swarthmore Slump, a student film about romance at Swarthmore. It has some problems as a film, but that's not really the point; the point is it's a cute half-hour that was filmed on Swarthmore's campus, and alums will probably enjoy the nostalgic pain. We will also wonder, "Why does that guy have thirty-five salt and pepper shakers on his tray?" [Current or recent students, do you know anything about the filmmakers?]


2. rose_garden sent around a link to a 37-minute demo of what looks like the best video game ever, Spore, from the SimEverything guy. If you put SimLife, Civ, and Powers of 10 in a blender, with a dash of Clay-O-Rama, you might get a game that looks like this; for an evolution nut like myself it looks like sweet ambrosia. (No, wait, Ambrosia did Maelstrom.)
   
   By putting a lot of the content development in the hands of users (or, rather, users plus procedural algorithms), it addresses an issue that's been simmering in my mind: as processors get better and people come to expect ever sweeter graphics, the time required to develop those graphics gets longer and longer, but the game quality stays roughly the same. Compare any modern racing game to the simple graphics of Pole Position—in the time it takes a modern graphic artist to create a single bush or street sign, he might have crafted every sprite in an old-school game. From a practical standpoint, this means we're playing shorter, less complex games—four or five courses in a racing game, when once there were thirty—and all you get for this tradeoff is the pretty. I was noticing the disparity in content between Diablo and Avernum (which is a recent but distinctly old-school computer RPG)—Avernum offers hundreds of pages of text conversations with dozens of characters, while Diablo, by using voice actors and detailed animations, limits itself to a half-dozen speaking parts. Avernum's world is much bigger, the storyline less linear, the items and monsters more diverse—and yet it was developed by a tiny company, while Diablo was put out by the titanic Blizzard.
   
   Spore, when it comes out this fall (*fingers crossed*), is looking to get around this by handing much of the design task to the user base. Everyone's creatures and worlds will be available for everyone else to pilfer; there will, one hopes, be thousands or millions of lovingly crafted ecosystems and societies to look at and play with. We will get the pretty and the deep, or at least that's the plan. The tradeoff, of course, is that we won't have the quality filter that's inherent in the in-company development process; I'm sure there will be a lot of crap to wade through. But the idea of distributing content design amongst your user base is—well, not new, since it was happening with Bolo and MUDs in the 90s. But it's interesting, and this particular implementation makes it more inherent in the game itself—you're creating your world just by playing the game, as opposed to by the optional action of booting an editor. Since everything is driven by smart algorithms, the file sizes will be tiny, though what we see is very complex—sort of like saying, "Here's the equation for the Mandelbrot set, and here's a set of coordinates and a palette; now look at this amazingly complex world." Only you're crossing the Mandelbrot set with Conway's Life, or something. I've been waiting for something like this since I read Dewdney's Planiverse as a kid; I hope it is indeed awesome.