
Things We Lost in the Flood: A Massively Multiplayer Loneliness Simulator - Kroeler
https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2019/06/things-we-lost-in-the-flood-mmo-indie-game.html
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Dean_Awks
Thought I'd drop in since a shit load of traffic is coming from you guys.

Dev here - thanks for playing!

The game obviously has its issues, but hey - its a dumb, free, experimental
and ultimately temporary experience.

Thanks for checking it out!

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komali2
Just played it for about 30 minutes. Reading the messages is mildly fun. They
range from amateur attempts to contribute to the game story (on june 12th,
there were 5 of us...) to corny aphorisms ("i didn't I hurt her"), to
hilarious attempts to derail game understanding ("physics affects THE DRONES")
("don't trust your boat").

It may be intentional, but the actual game itself felt buggy and it was
difficult for me to interact with it. The screen would invert sometimes (I
guess to swap between night/day), if I was off-boat during a screen change,
buggy shit could happen, it's a bit awkward to paddle your boat.

I really like things that let you cast anonymous messages into the dark, so
that's fun. But the game itself bored me within the first arbitrary loss of my
boat. No idea why that happened, didn't feel like slowly paddling across
screens again to reupgrade for another 30 minutes, only to "die" without
knowing why.

~~~
antisemiotic
>Reading the messages is mildly fun. They range from amateur attempts to
contribute to the game story (on june 12th, there were 5 of us...) to corny
aphorisms ("i didn't I hurt her"), to hilarious attempts to derail game
understanding ("physics affects THE DRONES") ("don't trust your boat").

Reminds me of messages in Dark Souls - part helpful tips, part trolling, part
"try tongue but hole" style stuff.

~~~
nostalgk
Illusory wall ahead

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miohtama
Looks like the game terminates itself (for good?) after certain number of
players reach the "bad" ending.

Reminds a little bit William Gibson's Agrippa:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrippa_(A_Book_of_the_Dead)#P...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrippa_\(A_Book_of_the_Dead\)#Poem)

~~~
dragonshed
I came to comment on the same thing, only that it reminded me of an old
browser-based game called Archmage [1] which would allow players, with enough
resources, to research and cast Armageddon to end the world and cause a full
reset of the game.

[1] [https://www.the-reincarnation.com/](https://www.the-reincarnation.com/)
I'm amazed this is still around: I used to play this in the late 90s.

~~~
hnzix
There was also an Armageddon spell in Ultima7 which killed off the majority of
NPCs, leaving only a handful alive. The dialogue with the survivors was pretty
cool.

~~~
nostalgk
A great post-apocalyptic MUD that I can't remember the name of at the moment
sort of started like this. Every year or so the admins would reset the game,
and when people logged in, it would be pre-apocalyptic... and one lucky player
would have to cause the apocalypse to set the game in motion again.

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taurath
“Massively multiplayer loneliness simulator”... isn’t that just Seattle?

~~~
nautilus12
Or hacker news...

~~~
dillonmckay
This is not a simulation.

:)

~~~
mxuribe
"...You know, I know that this steak doesn't exist...After nine years, do you
know what I've realized? ...Ignorance is bliss."

~~~
mercer
I recently watched the film again, and it's fascinating how much times have
changed since it came out.

When it was first released, I remember having long conversations about the
'freakish' idea of living in a virtual reality, escaping it just like the
Matrix, etc. I personally sort of got Cypher's perspective on things, but it
was a minority view among my friends.

But upon rewatching it, and talking to others about it, much of that
fear/repulsion is just not there anymore. The idea of a 'fake' reality that
stands in stark contrast to a 'real' reality just isn't that novel anymore. To
have a similar long conversation, I have to pull out the 'matrix within the
matrix' card (which as far as I can tell is almost 'canon' at this point?).

The idea that the 'real world' is just another matrix, but for the rebellious,
to take the pressure off the whole system while still ultimately being fake,
is not only more fitting to the franchise as a whole (trilogy, animation,
etc.), but also a better fit for our contemporary culture.

Manufactured outrage, reddit bots that intentionally misrepresent themselves
as that which they oppose: "as a black woman", "as a white male Bernie voter",
"as a Hillary fan" all coming from the same account with the inevitable "I
came around to <x>" conclusion.

The idea that perhaps most of what appears to be genuine conversation around
us is really just various intentional forms of manipulation, whether for
political, monetary or other ends, seems to have permeated 'common' culture
around me, and it's both fascinating and depressing.

I often wish the second and third films weren't such wank-fests because the
themes they explore are very contemporary, much more so than when they first
came out.

~~~
TuringTest
Good analysis. I suppose Enlightenment philosophers were going through a
similar experience when they reflected about the traps of the devil, and how
could you be certain about anything at all.*

This was shortly after the invention of the printing press, but before society
learned to adapt to the flood of thoughts (most of them, ramblings) from any
lunatic, now easily reproduced _en masse_. They invented newspapers and the
scientific method, so maybe it was worth it.

* (Their answer was to begin from first principles, and double-check everything with reality, a novel way of thinking that brought the scientific revolution; before that, arguments from authority carried a lot more weight).

Maybe we're just facing a similar dynamic from the arrival of the 'net, which
brought us instant mind-to-mind connection. I'm betting on the blockchain
being used for radical accountability. Even if we won't be sure of what
information is true and what is a deepfake, at least we'll be able to
consistently assess what bits of information are coming from the same source
and thus are built to support the same worldview (and also that it isn't being
changed behind our backs, 1984-style).

~~~
mercer
If anything I'd say it's the post-enlightenment (postmodern) philosophy
chickens coming to roost, so to speak, more than anything.

The idea of 'double-checking everything with reality' being novel, useful, but
ultimately just another convenient fiction because perhaps there is no
reality, or perhaps knowing it is impossible, that idea seems to finally have
become part of the 'common' vernacular.

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Stevvo
Amazed the New World Notes blog is still going, haven't read it in 10 years,
and there are many insightful articles for me to catch up on!

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slartibardfast0
That's a devastatingly beautiful idea, I'm profoundly grateful for art
amoungst these (soon perhaps to be?) ruins.

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mikejulietbravo
Random observation:

It seems like games/platforms/etc. that introduce some novel type of user-
generated content become successful. I would bet that some web 2.0 version of
the game "telephone" would wind up being super popular.

~~~
bemmu
Having a unique aspect to a game makes it more interesting for blogs to write
about it.

Although human interaction is much more interesting to play as well. I recall
a single-player game, except you could make just one decision for the next
player you'll never meet — whether to forgive them for a crime or not at the
end — and just this single bit made it at least twice as interesting.

~~~
AgentME
EDIT: I found the game you're talking about: [https://www.pcgamer.com/a-brief-
history-of-moirai-one-of-pcs...](https://www.pcgamer.com/a-brief-history-of-
moirai-one-of-pcs-most-disturbing-games/). The article has a great description
of it and a video.

\---

Argh I remember the game you're talking about. I read an article about it and
have been trying to find that article again since the last few weeks and it's
been driving me crazy that I can't remember its name.

The game had a 2.5d engine. A character in a village told you to find someone
in a cave. You bring a knife with you for defense. In the cave, you find
someone else who is bloody with a knife, your character accuses them of
killing the person you're looking for, and they say a message in response. You
can either kill the person or let them pass, though you get blood on you if
you do either. When you go to leave the cave, another character finds you,
stops you, threatens you with a knife as you look suspicious, and accuses you
of killing the person you were looking for. You're prompted to type a message
in response to defend yourself. The game immediately cuts to black and ends
after you type your message.

The message that the bloodied character you meet earlier says to you is the
message a previous player typed at the end. Your message gets seen by a future
player in the same way.

The developer took down the server for the game at some point because people
filled the game with inappropriate messages and then used bots to keep doing
so.

If anyone remembers the name of the game, please mention it to me because I've
been dying to remember it.

~~~
scandinavegan
I knew I've read about the game as well, and before your edit I spent a couple
of minutes to find this article:

[https://www.cnet.com/news/moirai-expand-hackers-
lulz/](https://www.cnet.com/news/moirai-expand-hackers-lulz/)

It goes into some different details and can be a nice companion article to the
one you posted.

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WalterSear
And I thought cooking and office sims were too close to real life to make a
game about.

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ZoomZoomZoom
The only relevant questions I see are:

How secure are my messages? Why didn't you implement e2e cryptography? Did you
_really_ need a central server (ocean?) for message delivery? Have you
considered the possibility of mitm attacks? How many messages do I need to
write for a guaranteed delivery to a given recipient in a day, in an hour? /s

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dsl
The developer mentioned on a Reddit thread that the words the board tells you
to write on notes affect other players, not yourself. So far a really cool
game, just wish I could save...

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caiocaiocaio
I'll always remember Wagner James Au from Old Man Murray.

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pks016
Somewhat similar concept

[http://bottledapp.com/](http://bottledapp.com/)

I had played that for some days. It was quite fun.

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beaconstudios
this reminds a bit of the player communication in One Hour One Life, in that
it's a more novel approach than simple text/voice chat and integrated directly
into the gameplay. If you're interested in indie games with innovative and
creative mechanics, that's another one to look into.

I have no affiliation with it, I just think it's cool.

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jaggirs
This video from adult swim has a bit of a similar theme:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWsYaOM6pRg&list=LLyI69iuZYo...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWsYaOM6pRg&list=LLyI69iuZYoZE9uEI2_sJxXA&index=5&t=0s)

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thorin
This reminds me of a youtube video and game that were linked to on here about
a depressed game designer building a game to cope with his loneliness and
despair and talking over it. Can anyone remember that or send a link? It was a
3d doom type thing.

~~~
bblough
This doesn't _quite_ fit that description, but the only thing that comes to
mind is The Beginner's Guide -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beginner's_Guide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beginner's_Guide)

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kgwxd
Played for hours, made it to the "next" stage. Seem to be missing a key hint.
All the prompts to wax poetic seem pointless. Maybe just send out hints as you
figure stuff out instead of getting in touch with your inner emo?

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scandinavegan
Dark Souls (I've only played DS3 and Demon's Souls) and Bloodborne has a
message passing system. You can leave notes on the ground for other players to
find in their game. They use a fixed format for the sentence structure and the
list of available words, which means they can prevent messages from using
forbidden words. See the following article for the message format:

[https://bloodborne.fandom.com/wiki/Notes](https://bloodborne.fandom.com/wiki/Notes)

That said, some people get creative trying to bend the system into new uses,
for example "amazing chest ahead" in front of an NPC rather than a storage
location. Or "try tongue, but hole".

The message system also gave rise to a tradition of calling people "skeleton"
when encouraging them on Reddit and elsewhere. In Dark Souls 2, a bunch of
skeletons were placed in the world by the designers, and players started
attaching creative messages to them:

[https://66.media.tumblr.com/27bb20783b49cf5e63522c3f51092e4a...](https://66.media.tumblr.com/27bb20783b49cf5e63522c3f51092e4a/tumblr_n4t0e2WCT11qi4a2go6_1280.jpg)

[https://i.imgur.com/0ewexGV.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/0ewexGV.jpg)

[https://i.imgur.com/ZpENzv8.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/ZpENzv8.jpg)

[https://66.media.tumblr.com/01d2e6acf80247332b937db84c45d2fc...](https://66.media.tumblr.com/01d2e6acf80247332b937db84c45d2fc/tumblr_n4t0e2WCT11qi4a2go2_1280.jpg)

An interesting feature is that you can rate messages, and if your message is
rated (good or bad) you get back full health. There are many threads from
players that managed to beat a boss because of this, but you can't abuse it
because you can't reliable expect it to happen at the right time.

Not all messages from players can be trusted. There are many "illusory wall
ahead" messages in front of places that _look_ like they should have a secret
door, but don't. Then you'll spend some time hacking at a regular wall. There
are also messages that say "try jumping" in front of cliffs where you die if
you jump off. This creates an extra level of connection to the players who
left the message, because you have to consider if you trust a random person
you never met or not, and if they trick you, you get that human element in a
situation that was supposed to just be a regular cliff. Someone spent time
setting up that joke for you. _Sometimes_ jumping does work, and you hit a
hidden platform and find some loot, so you never know.

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zigzag448
Why is there still an irritating loudspeaker in this flooded world?

