

Game designer designs a game for 2,000 years from now, hides it in desert - ColinWright
http://www.polygon.com/2013/3/28/4157884/game-designer-jason-rohrer-designs-a-game-meant-to-be-played-2000

======
mherdeg
The hard part of this challenge is not necessarily just the titanium but also
communicating the rules of the game. Even if the game board is intact, how
will a future civilization know what to do with it?

One of my favorite "designed to last thousands of years" document is the
alternately dry and scintillating 1980s/1990s Sandia Labs report on how to
communicate with future generations about nuclear waste after the collapse of
the U.S.

The well-known part is
[http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/wipp%20exhibit%...](http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/wipp%20exhibit%20message%20to%2012,000%20a_d.htm)
. The part that's gotten some recent press is this language, which was not an
actual written message anyone suggested be used at a nuclear waste site, but
was instead the panel's consensus on the message that the site should somehow
communicate::

""This place is a message...and part of a system of messages...pay attention
to it!

Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a
powerful culture.

This place is not a place of honor...no highly esteemed deed is commemorated
here...nothing valued is here.

What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about
danger.

The danger is in a particular location...it increases toward acenter...the
center of danger is here...of a particular size and shape, and below us.

The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.The danger is to
the body, and it can kill.

The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.

The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place
physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.""

But there's quite a lot more good stuff in there about how to communicate with
future people who might not speak English, or any language at all. Some cool,
detailed descriptions (with pictures!) of a "spike field" type landscape to
keep people from inadvertently using the nuclear waste site as a shelter.

And one panelist writes: "A marker system should be chosen that instills awe,
pride, and admiration, as it is these feelings that motivate people to
maintain ancient markers, monuments, and buildings."

It's very cool stuff to read — you get to watch a panel of very smart people
think very far into the future about how to talk to people they'll never meet.

~~~
nnq
About the Sandia Labs report... imagining myself as a future archaeologist,
such a place would only attract me! even if I were a bronze-age post-
apocalyptic culture "wise man", if I could somehow figure out that there is a
poison in there, I could only think "cool! we can use this poison against our
enemies in the next battle! maybe some of our slaves will die digging it up,
but boy, we'll sure make a killing with it!" ...and most other things they
assume seem wrongly optimistic about human nature: something that instills
pride and owe would only communicate that there is probably something of
_value_ in there, therefore something that is worth _getting or stealing!_
(most ancient tombs were robbed, you know!) ...imho the best bet for such a
place would be to make it inconspicuous and hard to open: _for example, after
properly cloaking everything, you could make the actual storage rooms for the
dangerous stuff be part of some "stone"/concrete "walls", with no entrance,
and have "dummy rooms" with "dummy content" (for whoever actually digs beyond
the cloaking and warning signs) surrounded by these "walls" - no modern
archaeologist would, for example, consider smashing what seems like a solid
granite wall to look for a hidden chamber inside it if there is no sign of
it._

~~~
supergauntlet
Assuming that this future civilization is sufficiently advanced, wouldn't they
have the ability to detect what's inside the ground without actually digging?
I know we can through (I believe) echolocation, why wouldn't they?

Then they would see a cavity that's been sealed on all sides by concrete.
However I suppose by this point they would have also discovered radiation and
nuclear reactions so it might be a moot point.

~~~
delinka
I believe the assumption is that a future civilization will be less advanced.
Should society collapse, you can expect knowledge to be lost and advancement
to cease. Sure, we hope that our civilization will continue to advance, but we
plan for the worst and leave the message in simple language in the hope that
the last remnants of mankind will survive by avoiding a serious threat left by
their ancestors.

------
shabble
_He estimates that if one person visits a GPS location each day with a metal
detector, the game will be unearthed sometime within the next million days — a
little over 2,700 years._

 _[T]he sheets of GPS coordinates were collected by GDC volunteers at the door
in an attempt to collate the data, hopefully leading to the game's earlier
discovery._

Gentlemen, start your Travelling Salesman algorithms. From a quick skim of the
wikipedia page, 1M nodes is probably too many to solve exactly, but (might?)
be within 1% via heuristic methods.

Then again, depending on the area the entire set of coordinates covers,
dividing it into zones and computing TSP over each would be much more
practical, and allow parallel searches by multiple groups.

I wonder if the creator wouldn't have been better off with a Geohashing[1]
type location clue, but I'm struggling to think of a useful time-specific seed
that is both resistant to precomputation, and likely to survive 2k+ years
hence. The XKCD one uses the value of the Dow Jones average for industrial
stocks, but I doubt it could be relied on for more than a few decades, or a
century or three in a best case.

[1] <http://wiki.xkcd.com/geohashing/Algorithm>

~~~
ghshephard
TSP is relevant to graph traversal. "Something buried in the desert" has no
(or at least, very little) restriction on how you move from node to node.

------
jere
Damn, Rohrer is really good at these GDC game design challenges. Here's a
great write up on Chain World (his previous win):
<http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/07/mf_chainworld/>

Besides Will Wright, he is the only person to have won twice:
[http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/53704/where-
can-i...](http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/53704/where-can-i-find-
the-full-game-list-of-game-design-challenge-on-gdc)

~~~
gamblor956
Nobody has ever actually _seen_ the gameplay from his games. (The video of the
most recent game does not disclose the gameplay.) It's entirely possible that
his games are utter crap, with a great coat of marketing.

~~~
rubinelli
You can judge his ability from his other games:
<http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/>

EDIT: fixed the link, thanks

~~~
tedks
I can't believe you had to link to his easily-locatable webpage to show he had
a large amount of free games to speak for his game-making ability.

Hacker News is depressing.

------
patothon
This is a MMO RPG IRL actually =) Nobody cares about the "board". He won
because the real game is to find the board.

------
otoburb
He used titanium for the game pieces because they would be more likely to last
a couple thousand years. I wonder whether amber would have been an easier
material to work with? Amber seems to preserve quite well over the ages.

~~~
maaku
Not necessarily. We have examples of amber that have survived millions of
years, but that does not mean every sample of amber has survived.

------
Jare
The idea that Jason Rohrer didn't allow anyone, not even himself, to
play(test) the game is mind boggling.

------
diminoten
_Rohrer hasn't played it himself, he says_

No playtesting? Probably isn't going to be very good, then.

~~~
rje
5th paragraph of the article.

"To accomplish that, Rohrer first built the game in computer form, designing a
set of rules that would be playtested not by a human, but by an artificial
intelligence. He said he plugged the game's rules into a "black box," letting
the AI find imbalances, iterating new rules and repeating. Rohrer showed the
video game version of his board game onscreen, but obscured key portions of
the board game's layout, so no one in attendance could reverse engineer its
mechanics."

~~~
diminoten
That's just testing, not playtesting, in my opinion.

------
gonzo
NV has an area of approximately 286,367 km2. Only the lower (Southern) third
of NV can be described as 'desert'. From this one may safely subtract the area
of the Nellis Test Range and the City of Las Vegas.

The result is a density of about 12 GPS co-ordinates per km^2

At a single square km per day, it takes 288 years to clear them all. (And
order of magnitude reduction.)

At a square mile per day, it takes 88 years and 2 months.

------
winter_blue
Assuming there is no obliteration of information, perhaps people a lone time
from now, will simply be aware that this game exists -- due to the fact that
there's um... a newspaper article discussing it.

A curious digger aeons from now would probably find it. Or maybe just some kid
a few decades down the line.

------
burkeen
Now that's thinking ahead.

