Posts Tagged ‘continued’
Crowds in finite worlds, continued
I implemented a small simulation in which I positioned tiny circles, representing people in a crowd, into a finite square globe, and programmed each and every particular person to attempt to keep their distance from all the other individuals.
I made ten worlds in complete. In the 1st world I positioned a single particular person, in the second world two folks, and so on up to ten folks.
Each and every tiny square planet is a torus (just like the Asteroids game), so when a individual goes off to the appropriate, they come back on the left. Similarly, when a particular person goes up off the best, they come back on the bottom.
To make it less complicated to see patterns, I’m displaying a 4ࡪ arrangement of every single planet. So in each of the ten pictures beneath, there are truly 16 small worlds, in a fourࡪ tiling. I didn’t draw any edges in between tiles. Simply because every tile is really a small toroidal patch, it doesn’t matter where you draw the edges between neighboring tiles — individuals can wander continuously among tiles, and each particular person lives simultaneously on all 16 tiles.
As you can see from the pictures under, the globe containing nine individuals is the most visually fascinating. Whilst most of the other folks look very geometric and typical, the crowd of nine folks has a really all-natural high quality, like an actual milling crowd.
I find that extremely intriguing.
Games that generate stories, continued
In response to my post yesterday on games as generators of narratives, Sharon pointed out that she never thought of Monopoly as a story, and she noted the absence of characters. To clarify: When you play Monopoly (or chess, for that matter), you are the protagonist. The wonderful thing about narrative games is the opportunity for you to take responsibility for the adventure, rather than merely passively watching it from the outside.
If one were to create a romantic comedy game or a hero’s journey game, I would think that each player would take on a key role — perhaps hero or heroine, villain or mentor, best friend or hand of fate.
It would be interesting to personify aspects of a story that are essential but not usually personified. For example, in a hero’s journey game, a player could choose to play the journey itself. This would have the interesting benefit of illuminating the structure of such stories, so that players were aware of them.
After all, when Elizabeth Magie created The Landlord’s Game in 1903 (the game that evolved into Monopoly), her explicit ethical goal was to teach children how unfair rights for property owners lead to the impoverishment of tenants.
Alas, that’s not the lesson most children end up taking away from Monopoly. Instead, most players are happy to end up with everybody else’s money and property. Come to think of it, maybe it’s a good thing it wasn’t called The Genocide Game.