The best computer games are those without a victory condition. There is no such thing as “winning” a game of SimCity. Just as good are games that have victory conditions, but enjoyment of the game isn’t particularly tied to fulfilling them. In Grand Theft Auto: Vice City wandering around and doing your own thing was much more fun than following the game’s plot. Some weird convergence of thoughts on this style of gaming, Exalted and the butterfly effect resulted in the following game concept:

The setting for this game is region (or, perhaps, world) populated by human beings, but ruled by a superior form of life, perhaps humans genetically modified to be perfect and not require sleep, magical creatures (e.g. elves), an artificial intelligence, or even aliens. Maybe it’s a fantasy genre continent or a sci-fi genre planet. Whatever it is, the entire thing is run by the ruling class. Humans live decently; these rulers are not despots. The world runs fairly efficiently, but it is not a utopia by any means. Much of the system is designed to keep those in power on top, not least of which is their superior abilities. Much of the elite’s authority, however, stems from the fact that their abilities keep a large invading force at bay. Maybe they can work magic that keeps out a horde of demons, or they control ships that deter an invading alien force. Whatever the reason, the human population has a vested interest in having these elites remain in control.

An important aspect of this setting is that it has existed this way for a long time, a millennia-long stalemate between the elites and the impending doom. The economy runs like clockwork. Naturally, there are fads and trends and boom and bust cycles, but in general, everything is in a steady equilibrium.

Into this equilibrium, you, the player, is injected. You are stronger than even an elite individual, but not as strong as a group of them. You move through the world as the humans do, walking through a 3D rendered landscape and interacting directly with those around you. For some reason, you have incredible powers. Through play, you can acquire more abilities, allowing you to hold off larger and larger groups of elites. Your abilities are not only physical, but also mental and social, able to manipulate people and groups in increasingly effective ways.

Fairly early in the game’s progression, your powers make you largely immune to law enforcement, but you are never free of consequence. Your actions, even your mere presence, disturb the world’s equilibrium, you see, like The Mule. Even your smallest actions can have radical consequences down the line. Some players would seek to replace the old equilibrium with one closer to their liking. Others would foster complete chaos.

There would be several paths to playing this game. Those who focus on physical might start beating and killing people to achieve their goals, or perhaps destroy key shipments or installations. More social players would mentally dominate key figures, altering the policies of the organizations and assets they control.

In principle, the player could do anything. Want to use your powers of metal suggestion to overthrow a government? No problem. How about to sleep with a stripper you see in a club? Check. How about make yourself hideously wealthy? Have at it.

In response, the world would be simulating as much as possible. Will your seduction of a stripper effect the price of gold tomorrow? Probably not, but overthrowing the government certainly will. The idea is to have player actions generate consequences that are logical but difficult to predict. This feeds back into the player, causing even more action. Perhaps a religion springs up worshiping the player, or dedicated to his destruction.

Some of the more drastic consequences would be a concerted effort by the elites to destroy the player or the weakening of the elites to the point that the waiting invaders invade or both (perhaps at the same time). Perhaps the player can organize armies to the point that he can stave off these threats himself. Perhaps he allies with one force to destroy another. Maybe the forces ally to destroy him.

In essence, the game would be a god game, but without the controls of a god game. You can’t just hit a button to throw rocks from the heavens, mobilize armies or summon tornadoes. You have no “god view” with which to select people and change their mood; you actually have to find, get to and interact with them. There is no progress graph that shows you perfect information of the economy, attitudes or anything else. Your knowledge of the world is partial, only as good as the conduit by which it is delivered to you. While you may gain abilities that improve this, even getting information “supernaturally”, your information is never perfect.

Given the free form nature of this game, I think it would be a hit. Then, once everyone is addicted, you come out with a multi-player version, where dozens, even hundreds or thousands of Mules are let loose into the world.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Gaming guru Richard Garriott (a.k.a. Lord British) gave an interview about his new on-line game recently, and one quote leapt at me:

Even though we chow on lots of bandwidth…the cost of bandwidth has come down so low. Now the biggest expense to us is electricity. On one server set we pay more money on electricity than on bandwidth. Bandwidth is really no longer the dominant factor to push value to our customers.

Back while Wired was jumping the shark (a process unquestionably completed by issue 5.03 and started much earlier), it published an article by George Gilder predicting essentially this, that an era would come where people would “waste bandwidth and save watts.”

My instinct usually led me to distrust Gilder, a feeling that was confirmed by his later founding of the Discovery Institute; however, in spite of using the word “paradigm” far to often (i.e. more than zero times), at the time I thought this Wired article prediction was correct. I remember getting into an argument about it not long after the article was published with a gamer buddy of mine. I felt that companies who built technology assuming they had infinite bandwidth would eventually crush those who invested energies into technology that assumed bandwidth was scarce. My buddy disagreed. The argument petered out when we realized that we were thinking about very different time scales. My buddy was thinking about the next five years. I was thinking about the next 50. Looks like I only needed to wait 10.

Actually, I was probably wrong back then, because I ignored the other half of Gilder’s point: that electricity would become scarce. While most of the first world is worried about terrorism, immigration, global environmental problems and which celebrities are breeding, power generation is more likely than all of them combined to bring down the first world. Imagine that you knew that world electricity consumption (around 12.8 TW now) was going to more than double by 2050 (to 28-35 TW) and were given the task to figure out where this power would come from. To get this power, would you:

1. Burn every plant, even food, growing over the entire agricultural landmass of the planet.
2. Build one new nuclear fission (or, conceivably, fusion) reactor every three days, starting now, until 2050.
3. Saturate every spot of land traversed by winds strong enough to produce electricity with windmills.
4. Dam every remaining undammed river on earth.
5. Continue to suck every possible source of petroleum for all it’s worth, and find as much more as you can.
6. Improve efficiency in existing power generation
7. Somehow harness the power of the sun

It turns out that even if you did all of the first four, none of which are actually practical, you’d only barely be able to meet your target. Option 5 is the likely reality and, while opinions vary on exactly how much petroleum-based fuel remains, all agree that whatever the quantity is, it is both finite and non-renewable. It’s also fairly certain that the geopolitics surrounding oil that have been such a source of joy over the last few decades will only get more ugly. Eventually, this will probably get bad enough that option six will become economical. Chances are, this will improve things; however, it is most likely that any efficiencies will be in the area of petroleum-based power and, since this is non-renewable, such a solution ultimately becomes useless.

One thing we have a lot of, however, is sunlight and water. We can build fuel cells that combine hydrogen with air to produce water and energy. If sunlight could be harnessed to convert water to hydrogen, very large quantities of power could be generated in a renewable way. Barring something like antimatter reactors, only the sun contains the energy potential we’re likely to need. Unfortunately, we don’t actually know enough fundamental chemistry to solve this problem yet. One of my rules is to suggest solutions, and to this problem, I have none. I know of those who are working on one, though.

The Nocera Lab at MIT (the source I’ve used for the numbers and information above) is working on this exact problem. I’d trust their ability to hit on a solution over mine. An interesting prediction of the leader of this lab (mentioned in a lecture at a private company) is that every key advance in chemistry in the next few decades is likely to have something to do with power.

Another potential solution comes from the much less prestigious (bordering on flaky) Living Universe Foundation. While this group has grand plans for space colonization, the early stage of their plan is more grounded, involving building platform “cities” on the oceans. Whether of not these will be true cities, these platforms would be built around a large Stirling engine that would use the temperature differential between the surface and several dozen feet under water to generate electricity, which would then be used to extract hydrogen from water. Essentially, the power input into these systems is also the sun, as it is what heats the surface water.

Whatever occurs, if Gilder’s contention that “every economic era is based on a key abundance and a key scarcity” is true, the scarcity over my lifetime is likely to be electricity until someone ushers in the hydrogen age. Whether the “key abundance” will turn out to be bandwidth or not remains to be seen, but it’s as good a guess as any.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Will Wright has changed the face of computer gaming at least twice. He’s about to do it again in what may turn out to be the coolest video game ever. I’m not even going to try to explain it, but let Mr. Wright show you himself in this video. The video is quite long. After about the first two minutes, you are thinking to yourself “well, that looks like it might be kinda fun”. After about seven minutes, you really want to play it. But the video continues for another twenty minutes and just keeps getting better.

Seriously, if you like computer simulation games at all, spend the time to watch the whole thing. Keep an eye out for the way he uses the word “landmark”, which gives some interesting insight into the way his mind works.

Once you’ve seen the video, you might also read this article about it. I think it’s pretty clear that “Spore” will be a household word before the decade is out.

Popularity: 4% [?]