
Chain World: a game that exists on a unique USB flash drive - fserb
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/07/mf_chainworld/all/1
======
zacharycohn
So... to add a little bit more to this story.

I have a copy of Chain World.

I was having lunch with a friend of mine in NYC a few weeks ago, and he was
telling me about all this. He said that he was talking with his friend who got
the USB drive from Rohrer (I assume this is Ji) and that before Ji sold it, he
bootlegged a copy of it. A copy that my friend emailed to me.

I have yet to play (I haven't played Minecraft before, I want a bit of
practice before I boot into the game world and die), but it's sitting on my
desktop right now.

I think the fact that there is now at least two bootlegged copies going around
adds to parallelism to religion. There is "the true path" (the original USB
drive), and then there have been two "sects" that have broken off, gone to
different parts of the world, and have begun to grow.

I plan on passing my copy from friend to friend on the West Coast. Maybe one
day someone will come across copies of two different strains and they'll be
able to see the differences that occur after 50 generations of evolution.

~~~
Scaevolus
One question: Do the world save files all end in .dat, or do some end in .mcr?

I ask because some of my code (optimized save file format) was first included
in Minecraft 1.3, but from the article it's not apparent which version Chain
World is based on.

~~~
MostAwesomeDude
Better, can you get it to be rebroadcast on a server? I'm sure that somebody,
somewhere, is gonna be sharing this as soon as they get the world folder off
that thing.

~~~
zacharycohn
I wouldn't want to share it like that. Forking the project continues the
experience - albeit slightly different than originally intended. If it was
uploaded somewhere for anyone to get, it would be no different than any other
downloadable Minecraft world.

The cool part isn't the world - it's the legacy of everyone who's played
before you.

------
ChuckFrank
What an absolutely fascinating story. Thank you so much for sharing it with
us. As a maker I am always thinking about the rules of what we make, and then
once released in the wild we sometimes want to pull our creations back in, and
sometimes we can, and other-times we can't. And when we can, those that
thought that we were sharing our creations with them, for them to explore and
change, feel alienated and rejected, and when we can't those that believed in
our original intentions feel betrayed by their trust in us. It's a beautiful
and terrifying relationship, and I am glad to be a part of it. Perhaps
someday, I'll get to be part of Chain World too.

------
ckolderup
It's interesting that Rohrer played around with the idea of taking Chain World
online-- when I heard about Chain World, the first bit of sacrilege that came
to my mind was "well, why should this be restricted to a USB stick? There's no
reason a multiplayer server couldn't be governed to do this."

I wrote Lonecraft as a way of replicating the Chain World idea, but using an
Amazon EC2 instance as a multiplayer server with a few custom Minecraft server
plugins and a Heroku instance as a web app to govern the rules of the game (to
make sure only one player plays at once and no one plays more than once).

The code is here: <http://www.github.com/ckolderup/lonecraft> It needs some
more work to flesh out the idea of resetting the world after a set number of
players and exposing the blog entries of each player after the world resets,
but the general game mechanic is there and functional.

My instance of it is technically up and running, too, but one thing my friends
and I quickly discovered while testing it is that people who have been playing
Minecraft for a while have a nasty habit of not... really... dying. Once
you've learned the ropes it's pretty easy to make armor, carry food, and fight
monsters. Death usually comes only occasionally and as the result of a
careless mistake.

I've toyed with the idea of imposing a time limit or a number of logins that
you're allowed before you're also kicked off, but that seemed to defeat the
whole purpose of giving meaning to the in-game death.

~~~
thret
Could you make it so that the longer someone plays, the harder it is to stay
alive? Armour provides progressively less protection, you require more food,
there are more monsters, monsters are more powerful, lightning more frequent
etc...

~~~
ckolderup
It was something I had discussed with some friends who were testing it, but
the combination of "would require more work" (although not necessarily too
much-- there are various mods based around "survival" concepts that I could
theoretically use) plus "gets away from the basic concept of out-of-the-box
Minecraft" left me unmotivated to continue.

~~~
MostAwesomeDude
The basic concepts of OOTB Minecraft include bugginess and poor performance.
Don't be afraid to make something new.

------
extension
Games are usually not profound and thought provoking for the same reason food
is usually not profound and thought provoking. That's just not the path to
enjoyment that the medium is naturally inclined toward.

Food, above all else, must be _tasty_. Likewise, games, above all else, must
be _fun_ to play -- or more precisely, must provide unusually fulfilling
analogs of the plights and labours of real life.

If you manage to make food that is both tasty _and_ cerebrally stimulating,
that's pretty awesome. But food that is strictly cerebral is always going to
have marginal appeal at best. And you can't accuse chefs of being lazy and
unimaginative just because their food isn't cerebral.

(For the nitpickers: yes, food is an extreme analogy. There is more room for
expressiveness in games than in food, and it's probably underexploited. But
you see the point I am making?)

~~~
r0s
> Food, above all else, must be tasty. Likewise, games, above all else, must
> be fun to play

For broad appeal this is true, but says nothing of real value or artistic
merit. Expression in every medium is mostly banal schlock, with a few shining
examples of quality.

~~~
spiralganglion
I don't see the good in slighting any artist or craftsperson for taking a road
less travelled, or in suggesting that an entire medium for creative
exploration should constrained by need of easy acceptance.

Art needs to command attention, to force people to think carefully about the
ideas that are its payload. It can do this with beauty, or it can do it with
ugliness.

To continue the food metaphor: Sea Urchin. Hákarl. Bitter melon. All of which
are awful-tasting to most, but delicious to those who have fostered an
appreciation for their peculiarities. Anyone who can stomach such foods are
offered absolutely unique flavours that defy description or comparison.

It's a powerful tool in the chest of artists, to force their audiences to
confront something they may find uncomfortable or unsettling. In every case
where the work is truly great, the confrontation is simply an effective
mechanism through which something deeply meaningful about the human condition
may be revealed. Exemplar are the works of Damien Hurst, Odd Nerdrum, Marcel
Duchamp, John Cage, Alvin Lucier, David Lynch, and so many others — all
exhaustively-praised once the dust of their highly-confrontational works has
settled.

Rohrer's games all exist in this domain, defying casual pursuit, but offering
something immensely powerful for anyone willing to overcome their own
reservations.

------
TerraHertz
If someone wanted to extend this concept a bit further, how about a one-play-
only game that could only be passed on as a bequest. That is, no one else gets
to play it until you are dead, for real. Bit of a technical challenge, to
ensure the game data structures and code could always be run, no matter how
much time passed. Also, to use a storage medium with a reliable lifetime of
centuries - which Flash isn't.

Some people built an everlasting clock inside a mountain.
<http://longnow.org/clock/> It would be interesting to try building a 'game
seat' like that - can only be reached by a hazardous journey, will be there
and playable for a thousand years, you only get one go at it.

~~~
a3_nm
> you only get one go at it

Sadly, I don't see how you could hope to enforce this constraint... The idea
of a game seat is nice, though -- a collaborative time capsule of sorts.

~~~
TerraHertz
Easy. Any biometric sensor. Fingerprints for instance. If the machine detects
the same person trying to play again, it just refuses to run. Or... (if I was
designing this) kills them where they sit. Next person that reaches the game's
remote location gets to remove the skeleton from the chair. Good incentive to
not cheat. (I'm assuming some kind of real-world post-apocalyptic scenario, in
which 'legal ramifications' don't exist.)

Actually, if there was some decently functional strong AI in the game, this
could get very mythological. Quest to visit the Oracle - you have to get to
the site then play the game in order to reach the Oracle in the gameworld. If
you die in-game before then - well tough.

------
twidlit
Rohrer is one of the few game-artist around. I'd encourage everyone to check
out his life, career or works of art.

~~~
spiralganglion
There are actually quite a few "game-artists", especially now that the
independent gaming scene is thriving. But Rohrer is likely the most
interesting for the casual observer. _Passage_ has the startling capacity to
reduce people to tears in five minutes flat. His works are absolutely without
equal for their inventiveness and resistance to conform to conventional
wisdom.

This is my favourite article about him, and one of the most memorable articles
I've ever read: [http://www.esquire.com/print-this/future-of-video-game-
desig...](http://www.esquire.com/print-this/future-of-video-game-
design-1208?page=all)

It's a great starting point for people who are unfamiliar with his story.

------
seagaia
It kind of sucks that people can't just treat it as is - a game, and go with
it, but whatever...a cool idea, nonetheless.

~~~
jbri
The fact it's _not_ "just another game" is part of the point, really.

~~~
woodall
How so?

~~~
mrcharles
Did you read the article?

~~~
woodall
I did, however, I am not the one making claims that it is "not just another
game". I'm pretty sure you have never laid eyes nor hands on it, so I would
like to know what you are basing your opinions on.

------
a3_nm
Something along those lines that I'd really like to see (or maybe create
someday) would be a decentralized virtual universe. Minecraft and such games
are usually run on a server which is under someone's control; it would be
funny to have a consensus-based distributed world (drawing inspiration from
Freenet and possibly Bitcoin for the technical implementation) which would
exist in the network of the players, be the same for everyone, and survive as
long as people are playing it.

~~~
mentat
Wow, this is a pretty interesting idea. Have you given any thought on how
you'd establish consensus on an ongoing basis? It seems like a hard but very
interesting problem.

------
vessenes
If this were just art, an artist couldn't hope for a better annoying foil than
Jia Ji (as described in the article at least).

As it is, I'm just barely skeptical of the whole story -- could just be one of
those weird stories. If Rohrer takes the fine art approach to monetizing his
games, then his next one will be high concept, and even harder to get,
somehow.

------
fuzzythinker
Not so sure about rule #9. Maybe never play the game in a long time like 9
years may be better. It's like visiting a new country, if the experience is
good, I would definitely like to go back and experience the old and the new
variations of it.

~~~
spiralganglion
Isn't it obvious? The game is supposed to be a simulation of life. You only
live once, and when you die you leave the world forever, with all of your
contributions to it remaining for others to build upon.

Without that absolute rule, the game wouldn't have nearly the same
symbolic/religious significance, notwithstanding all the meta-game that
unfolded hence. Rohrer's son was upset by his father's death specifically
because of the significance imparted by this rule.

It makes your time playing the game paramount. You will never play the game
again. You will never have another shot at life, so you'd better enjoy it
while it lasts.

EDIT: He's an atheist, I'm an atheist. There's an argument to be made for
reincarnation, I suppose, but that's hewing close to _respawning_ and it makes
me uncomfortable.

------
flipside
For a game to be bigger than religion, it must take on a life of it's own that
transcends the "lives" of the players.

Chain World sounds very cool, but it's lacking one crucial element,
replication. An online version sounds intriguing, but would most likely need
substantial tweaks to create the right incentive structure.

------
gsivil
I posted the same link two days ago but with the original title "Chain World
Videogame Was Supposed to be a Religion—Not a Holy War" but it passed
completely unnoticed.

Hobbits really are amazing creatures

~~~
shantanubala
In all honesty, many people don't know what Chain World is (I didn't before
reading the article). The sad truth of scrolling through new submissions is
that the headlines are the only pieces of information we can rely on. A
carefully worded headline can go a long way. Your title (and Wired's title)
almost assumes we know what they're talking about -- Wired can get away with
that since they're a magazine and this is a featured article that will receive
readers regardless (a mysterious title can be beneficial). On HN, it's almost
the exact opposite. If people can't tell what you're talking about (in
general), it's a lot harder. I guess headlines that are easier to skim are
easier to vote for, but I'm waiting for the day that we won't even need to
curate content by hand.

~~~
gsivil
I completely agree with you. In fact I found the article title from WIRED
unsuccessful, but I opted to leave it intact so as to be also easily
searchable. It is nice to see that the article receives the attention that it
deserves.

