Have any existing games particularly influenced the idea (that I could read up on)?
A little bit from a lot of sources, but I played a lot of the Day Z mod for Arma 2 a lot and it really give me a feeling for slow paced, realistic survival games. With zombies 😅 You need to keep yourself alive after "waking up" on a beach with almost no supplies and inappropriate clothes for the Russian (or Siberian?) landscape.
Minecraft is also an influence. A simple premise, simple graphics, simple crafting but which has huge possibilities, just like Lego (or how Lego used to be when the blocks were more generic).
Lastly, my influence is imagination based games. I played a lot of these as a child, I think most if not all of us did, and I'm intrigued to this day finding out about how the children around me collaborate on worlds. I was struck by a study I read once that claimed that kids spend roughly the same amount of time setting up and coming up with the rules for a game as actually playing it. I remember many upset debates over what was and wasn't allowed as a child. This is of course an undeveloped version of how we then navigate the world as adults and so I imagine the Nth Society game might be able to serve as a half way between this - doing and talking about serious grown up things, like how to do "society", while doing it using the tools of childhood, namely "play".
Aside from the crypto element, how might it be similar or different from Second Life for example?
It could be really similar to Second Life, with one massive exception - you can't buy land in the Nth Society game. The economy of Second Life is build on the foundation of magic land purchase. It commented on this more in another comment.
is contextually correct, but just to clearify; Land could certainly still be dealt and sold in the game itself. It just won't be prepackaged and sold by a deified software developer, who would in such a case have ben acting as a super natural arbitrator of the game.
That is, as we early contributors have so far imagined this particular open source version of the game being developed. A fork of the project (or the same project if we left or ended up being persuaded by better arguments) would still be free to try any implementation of their own choice. I don't see myself changing on this particular point however.
Nor I. Thanks for the clarification, I'll make sure to remember to make this distinction in discussion.
LOL at this. I remember discovering my son playing AOE II for hours - without ever actually playing the game. He'd create a scenario and have fun destroying it. I don't know if he actually ever played the campaign.
I watched once as he created vast armies and, one by one, just killed each of the heroes. XD
In his defense, he's not some kind of serial killer now =p
Anyway, it is very true that kids are often more intent on creating the rules and scenarios than actually playing a game.
It's pretty interesting right?
I've played and enjoyed DayZ, but the cheaters and lack of development ruined the game.
Games have to have a way to allow conflict and conflict resolution. As in the real world, people will have a very high incentive to be peaceful and cooperative too! That's one reason something like Second Life would never interest me. It's basically a social club.
Ok, thanks for that. I'm unavoidably familiar with Lego and Minecraft :)
I agree a lot of children seem to spend a long time making up and changing the rules of their games. Often I think they do so to promote inclusion and increase participation which makes a lot of games more fun, but they also do it to deliberately exclude others. It's intriguing to realise that our adult politics often isn't much more sophisticated than this.
This is a really insightful comment. It is worth taking note of and could be very useful when constructing the game.