Anders Sandberg wrote:
> I have always enjoyed Lal's hypocricy - sermonising about the
> sancticity of life and the individual, but hoping to clone his
> beloved.
They're all hypocrits. Or they find ways to phrase advances in terms of
their longer-term goals (reference Santiago's admiteddly not-too-shabby
defense of building child care centers in what are supposed to be
military bases). They all want the same thing in the end (only, each
for themselves). Morgan comes closest to flat-out acknowledging that
what they want trumps any ideology.
It may be worth noting that SMAC's makers host a Web site with
discussion forums for various aspects of the game. In the sections
given to role-playing and posting of alternate faction files around the
time of the game's first release, the more popular tended to be less
centered on static ideologies than on "we don't know exactly what we
want, but we'll adapt to what comes our way, so the only thing that
unites our faction is our shared history and government". All aspects
had their turn as each one supported the needs of the day, and the next
day; no meme lasted forever unless it was truly useful for that length
of time.
> I dream about making my own game in the same style, but deliberately
> focusing on transhumanism. After all, it is a bit odd that you still
> need farming and mines after you get nanotech, for example.
Probably wouldn't be that hard to do, given enough spare time. I mean,
the rules are more or less obvious, and thus easily boil down to
algorithms. There's various libraries available for graphics (one of
the easiest libraries is Java's, which also gets you Windows/Mac/Unix
without having to port code). If you can't do the music and/or graphics
yourself, you can probably find a friend to do it. The hardest part
would be the overall game design: how to fit in the elements you want,
while still leaving a good *game* from the viewpoint of a non-extropian.
(I say that since I'm doing kinda the same - only as a Zelda-style CRPG
rather than a strategy game. Programming it is not that hard, when I
know what I want: define it down to an algorithm, then phrase the
algorithm in code. I'm slowly learning how to do my own sprites and
backgrounds, and I found a music generator that, while not good
quality, does fit into the game's theme. But it is the plot that gives
me trouble...)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:14:53 MDT