Game Design Ideas

I finally had some time to play some of the “weirder” games out there-and I must say I found a favorite: Dwarf Fortress!  It is hard to believe that an ASCII-based simulation can offer so much depth in gameplay. If I was to pick only one factor that distinguishes DF from other games (besides the obvious “geek appeal” its MS-DOS style interface creates) it would have to be the emergent, very complex interactions that the dwarves have with each other and their  environment. In this article I will discuss the concepts of complexity and emergence citing DF and other games as examples…

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Sooooo…What does “Avatar” have to do with what I would like to call “the perfect game” and what is “Limbo”?

Well,…just as the avatar machine technology allows Jake Sully to delve into an alternate reality, where he is stronger and faster, and able to walk, and experience a “new” world, to the point where it changes him, the perfect video game could, and should change how you see the world by allowing you to experience the results (long- and short-term) of your actions, and by enabling you to show, and share your emotions with other inhabitants of the “game world”, which I will call “Limbo”. In this article, I have tried to describe how such an alternate world should look and feel like, and how it can be realized without “avatar-level” technologies!

(There is of course another reason for using this image from the movie on this article: I just recently saw the movie, and it blew me away – there is just so much of what I’d love to see in persistent worlds in the “actual world” of the avatars!)

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