Game O' Life

(Yeah, John Conway's too). God games. I don't know where a developer decides to start with one of these. Peter Molyneux. Will Wright. Sid Meier. Great designers if you ask me. I especially like Wright's toys he creates. They aren't so much games as just kind of a set of tools that you can play with in regards to certain rules. That appeals to me.

Think of it: Animal Crossing combined with Diablo. You can live your life, tend your garden. Piss off bees in trees. Customize your wardrobe. When you get bored of that you can take it to the haunted cave on the hill behind the wise-mans house (but is he really wise if great evil lurks forever behind him). That set of padded butt-leather you just decorated with daisies and stars is going to protect your ass as you go toe-to-toe with whichever creatures from the pits of hell have decided to occupy the cave today. Didn't you just clear the cave out last month? And how about the ArachniQueen who won't agree to a treaty with the villagers. She's always menacing people in labyrinth found in the forest to the east of town.

This game, of course, is fictional. I came up with it off the top of my head just now. But there is a premise. Take the best of a few games and you have yourself an open-ended world where you can play to your hearts content. And providing the game is playable off a hard-drive then you have unlimited additions in the way of expansion packs and user-created items.

Like the beginning of Unix, perhaps they start small and it just kinda turns into something that takes on a life of its own. Create a space, call it your world. Drop in some entities. Populate it with creatures. Give those creatures the ability to interact with their surroundings.

I like to look at these worlds as a God myself. As a programmer/designer I call the shots when I sit down to design a game. I create what goes into my world. On the first day I can create the oceans. I can add land. On the second day I could create mountains and air. On the third day I could populate the world with asexual Richard Simmons if I felt like it. Then let's say I rest, but not before I spawn a player-character and drop him next to a tower fortified with a generous supply of artillery. Then we make fun of fat people and wait for the cavalcade of Simmons to come charging.

Richard Simmons has done very well for himself, and really doesn't deserve someone who doesn't know him picking on him. But you need to make fun of some people some times, don't you?

-Now you decide how you take care of the situation.