7 ms·

Things We Lost in the Flood: A Massively Multiplayer Loneliness Simulator

202 points by Kroeler 7y ago

miohtama 7y ago
Looks like the game terminates itself (for good?) after certain number of players reach the "bad" ending. Reminds a little bit William Gibson's Agrippa: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrippa_(A_Book_of_the_Dead)#Poem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrippa_(A_Book_of_the_Dead)#P...
- Kroeler 7y ago
  Oooh good catch
- dragonshed 7y ago
  I came to comment on the same thing, only that it reminded me of an old browser-based game called Archmage [1] which would allow players, with enough resources, to research and cast Armageddon to end the world and cause a full reset of the game. [1] https://www.the-reincarnation.com/ https://www.the-reincarnation.com/ I'm amazed this is still around: I used to play this in the late 90s.
  - hnzix 7y ago
    There was also an Armageddon spell in Ultima7 which killed off the majority of NPCs, leaving only a handful alive. The dialogue with the survivors was pretty cool.
    - ajxs 7y ago
      This makes me want to reinstall it just to see this again. It's been too long since I've played it at any rate!
    - _0ffh 7y ago
      I see you have been talking to the wisp!
    - nostalgk 7y ago
      A great post-apocalyptic MUD that I can't remember the name of at the moment sort of started like this. Every year or so the admins would reset the game, and when people logged in, it would be pre-apocalyptic... and one lucky player would have to cause the apocalypse to set the game in motion again.
mikejulietbravo 7y ago
Random observation: It seems like games/platforms/etc. that introduce some novel type of user-generated content become successful. I would bet that some web 2.0 version of the game "telephone" would wind up being super popular.
- Lowkeyloki 7y ago
  Something like that has been done a few times. I think the most popular one was called Broken Picture Telephone.
- bemmu 7y ago
  Having a unique aspect to a game makes it more interesting for blogs to write about it. Although human interaction is much more interesting to play as well. I recall a single-player game, except you could make just one decision for the next player you'll never meet — whether to forgive them for a crime or not at the end — and just this single bit made it at least twice as interesting.
  - AgentME 7y ago
    EDIT: I found the game you're talking about: https://www.pcgamer.com/a-brief-history-of-moirai-one-of-pcs-most-disturbing-games/ https://www.pcgamer.com/a-brief-history-of-moirai-one-of-pcs.... The article has a great description of it and a video. --- Argh I remember the game you're talking about. I read an article about it and have been trying to find that article again since the last few weeks and it's been driving me crazy that I can't remember its name. The game had a 2.5d engine. A character in a village told you to find someone in a cave. You bring a knife with you for defense. In the cave, you find someone else who is bloody with a knife, your character accuses them of killing the person you're looking for, and they say a message in response. You can either kill the person or let them pass, though you get blood on you if you do either. When you go to leave the cave, another character finds you, stops you, threatens you with a knife as you look suspicious, and accuses you of killing the person you were looking for. You're prompted to type a message in response to defend yourself. The game immediately cuts to black and ends after you type your message. The message that the bloodied character you meet earlier says to you is the message a previous player typed at the end. Your message gets seen by a future player in the same way. The developer took down the server for the game at some point because people filled the game with inappropriate messages and then used bots to keep doing so. If anyone remembers the name of the game, please mention it to me because I've been dying to remember it.
slartibardfast0 7y ago
That's a devastatingly beautiful idea, I'm profoundly grateful for art amoungst these (soon perhaps to be?) ruins.
Stevvo 7y ago
Amazed the New World Notes blog is still going, haven't read it in 10 years, and there are many insightful articles for me to catch up on!
caiocaiocaio 7y ago
I'll always remember Wagner James Au from Old Man Murray.
komali2 7y ago
Just played it for about 30 minutes. Reading the messages is mildly fun. They range from amateur attempts to contribute to the game story (on june 12th, there were 5 of us...) to corny aphorisms ("i didn't I hurt her"), to hilarious attempts to derail game understanding ("physics affects THE DRONES") ("don't trust your boat"). It may be intentional, but the actual game itself felt buggy and it was difficult for me to interact with it. The screen would invert sometimes (I guess to swap between night/day), if I was off-boat during a screen change, buggy shit could happen, it's a bit awkward to paddle your boat. I really like things that let you cast anonymous messages into the dark, so that's fun. But the game itself bored me within the first arbitrary loss of my boat. No idea why that happened, didn't feel like slowly paddling across screens again to reupgrade for another 30 minutes, only to "die" without knowing why.
- antisemiotic 7y ago
  >Reading the messages is mildly fun. They range from amateur attempts to contribute to the game story (on june 12th, there were 5 of us...) to corny aphorisms ("i didn't I hurt her"), to hilarious attempts to derail game understanding ("physics affects THE DRONES") ("don't trust your boat"). Reminds me of messages in Dark Souls - part helpful tips, part trolling, part "try tongue but hole" style stuff.
  - nostalgk 7y ago
    Illusory wall ahead
WalterSear 7y ago
And I thought cooking and office sims were too close to real life to make a game about.
kgwxd 7y ago
Played for hours, made it to the "next" stage. Seem to be missing a key hint. All the prompts to wax poetic seem pointless. Maybe just send out hints as you figure stuff out instead of getting in touch with your inner emo?
pks016 7y ago
Somewhat similar concept http://bottledapp.com/ http://bottledapp.com/ I had played that for some days. It was quite fun.
dsl 7y ago
The developer mentioned on a Reddit thread that the words the board tells you to write on notes affect other players, not yourself. So far a really cool game, just wish I could save...
nixarian 7y ago
Too real
taurath 7y ago
“Massively multiplayer loneliness simulator”... isn’t that just Seattle?
- GeorgeRichard 7y ago
  I fear Seattle may be real. Pace Bostrom.
- nautilus12 7y ago
  Or hacker news...
  - dillonmckay 7y ago
    This is not a simulation. :)
    - LifeLiverTransp 7y ago
      If it was a simulation, could you build a recursive-interacting-thing that maxes out your local cpu core and makes your reference frame moves slower compared to the rest of the universe?
    - y4mi 7y ago
      statistically speaking, we're almost guaranteed to be a simulation though in case we've got a lucky 10k person around: this guarantee comes from the believe that technology will at one time be able to simulate one human to a degree that it thinks to be real and thinks that it experiences reality. This technology would inevitably be used to simulate billions of lives for scientific research. you're thus statistically one of these simulations, as there had been ~10 billion "real" humans to the unlimited amount of simulated ones (this is just a fun thought experiment. don't treat your fellow humans like simulations please)
      - C4stor 7y ago
        > statistically speaking, we're almost guaranteed > this guarantee comes from the believe So it's not statistically speaking, it's not a guarantee, it's a belief. I'm ok with that, but please don't try to present it otherwise. I personally don't believe there'll ever be a technology able to simulate a human to the point you describe, which I think is ok to believe too and not less scientifically correct or incorrect.
jaggirs 7y ago
This video from adult swim has a bit of a similar theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWsYaOM6pRg&list=LLyI69iuZYoZE9uEI2_sJxXA&index=5&t=0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWsYaOM6pRg&list=LLyI69iuZYo...
Dean_Awks 7y ago
Thought I'd drop in since a shit load of traffic is coming from you guys. Dev here - thanks for playing! The game obviously has its issues, but hey - its a dumb, free, experimental and ultimately temporary experience. Thanks for checking it out!
zigzag448 7y ago
Why is there still an irritating loudspeaker in this flooded world?
beaconstudios 7y ago
this reminds a bit of the player communication in One Hour One Life, in that it's a more novel approach than simple text/voice chat and integrated directly into the gameplay. If you're interested in indie games with innovative and creative mechanics, that's another one to look into. I have no affiliation with it, I just think it's cool.
ZoomZoomZoom 7y ago
The only relevant questions I see are: How secure are my messages? Why didn't you implement e2e cryptography? Did you really need a central server (ocean?) for message delivery? Have you considered the possibility of mitm attacks? How many messages do I need to write for a guaranteed delivery to a given recipient in a day, in an hour? /s
scandinavegan 7y ago
Dark Souls (I've only played DS3 and Demon's Souls) and Bloodborne has a message passing system. You can leave notes on the ground for other players to find in their game. They use a fixed format for the sentence structure and the list of available words, which means they can prevent messages from using forbidden words. See the following article for the message format: https://bloodborne.fandom.com/wiki/Notes https://bloodborne.fandom.com/wiki/Notes That said, some people get creative trying to bend the system into new uses, for example "amazing chest ahead" in front of an NPC rather than a storage location. Or "try tongue, but hole". The message system also gave rise to a tradition of calling people "skeleton" when encouraging them on Reddit and elsewhere. In Dark Souls 2, a bunch of skeletons were placed in the world by the designers, and players started attaching creative messages to them: https://66.media.tumblr.com/27bb20783b49cf5e63522c3f51092e4a/tumblr_n4t0e2WCT11qi4a2go6_1280.jpg https://66.media.tumblr.com/27bb20783b49cf5e63522c3f51092e4a... https://i.imgur.com/0ewexGV.jpg https://i.imgur.com/0ewexGV.jpg https://i.imgur.com/ZpENzv8.jpg https://i.imgur.com/ZpENzv8.jpg https://66.media.tumblr.com/01d2e6acf80247332b937db84c45d2fc/tumblr_n4t0e2WCT11qi4a2go2_1280.jpg https://66.media.tumblr.com/01d2e6acf80247332b937db84c45d2fc... An interesting feature is that you can rate messages, and if your message is rated (good or bad) you get back full health. There are many threads from players that managed to beat a boss because of this, but you can't abuse it because you can't reliable expect it to happen at the right time. Not all messages from players can be trusted. There are many "illusory wall ahead" messages in front of places that look like they should have a secret door, but don't. Then you'll spend some time hacking at a regular wall. There are also messages that say "try jumping" in front of cliffs where you die if you jump off. This creates an extra level of connection to the players who left the message, because you have to consider if you trust a random person you never met or not, and if they trick you, you get that human element in a situation that was supposed to just be a regular cliff. Someone spent time setting up that joke for you. Sometimes jumping does work, and you hit a hidden platform and find some loot, so you never know.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
thorin 7y ago
This reminds me of a youtube video and game that were linked to on here about a depressed game designer building a game to cope with his loneliness and despair and talking over it. Can anyone remember that or send a link? It was a 3d doom type thing.
- bblough 7y ago
  This doesn't quite fit that description, but the only thing that comes to mind is The Beginner's Guide - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beginner's_Guide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beginner's_Guide

202 points by Kroeler 7y ago

Looks like the game terminates itself (for good?) after certain number of players reach the "bad" ending. Reminds a little bit William Gibson's Agrippa: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrippa_(A_Book_of_the_Dead)#Poem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrippa_(A_Book_of_the_Dead)#P...

Kroeler 7y ago
Oooh good catch
dragonshed 7y ago
I came to comment on the same thing, only that it reminded me of an old browser-based game called Archmage [1] which would allow players, with enough resources, to research and cast Armageddon to end the world and cause a full reset of the game. [1] https://www.the-reincarnation.com/ https://www.the-reincarnation.com/ I'm amazed this is still around: I used to play this in the late 90s.
- hnzix 7y ago
  There was also an Armageddon spell in Ultima7 which killed off the majority of NPCs, leaving only a handful alive. The dialogue with the survivors was pretty cool.
  - ajxs 7y ago
    This makes me want to reinstall it just to see this again. It's been too long since I've played it at any rate!
  - _0ffh 7y ago
    I see you have been talking to the wisp!
  - nostalgk 7y ago
    A great post-apocalyptic MUD that I can't remember the name of at the moment sort of started like this. Every year or so the admins would reset the game, and when people logged in, it would be pre-apocalyptic... and one lucky player would have to cause the apocalypse to set the game in motion again.

mikejulietbravo 7y ago

Random observation: It seems like games/platforms/etc. that introduce some novel type of user-generated content become successful. I would bet that some web 2.0 version of the game "telephone" would wind up being super popular.

Lowkeyloki 7y ago
Something like that has been done a few times. I think the most popular one was called Broken Picture Telephone.
bemmu 7y ago
Having a unique aspect to a game makes it more interesting for blogs to write about it. Although human interaction is much more interesting to play as well. I recall a single-player game, except you could make just one decision for the next player you'll never meet — whether to forgive them for a crime or not at the end — and just this single bit made it at least twice as interesting.
- AgentME 7y ago
  EDIT: I found the game you're talking about: https://www.pcgamer.com/a-brief-history-of-moirai-one-of-pcs-most-disturbing-games/ https://www.pcgamer.com/a-brief-history-of-moirai-one-of-pcs.... The article has a great description of it and a video. --- Argh I remember the game you're talking about. I read an article about it and have been trying to find that article again since the last few weeks and it's been driving me crazy that I can't remember its name. The game had a 2.5d engine. A character in a village told you to find someone in a cave. You bring a knife with you for defense. In the cave, you find someone else who is bloody with a knife, your character accuses them of killing the person you're looking for, and they say a message in response. You can either kill the person or let them pass, though you get blood on you if you do either. When you go to leave the cave, another character finds you, stops you, threatens you with a knife as you look suspicious, and accuses you of killing the person you were looking for. You're prompted to type a message in response to defend yourself. The game immediately cuts to black and ends after you type your message. The message that the bloodied character you meet earlier says to you is the message a previous player typed at the end. Your message gets seen by a future player in the same way. The developer took down the server for the game at some point because people filled the game with inappropriate messages and then used bots to keep doing so. If anyone remembers the name of the game, please mention it to me because I've been dying to remember it.

slartibardfast0 7y ago

That's a devastatingly beautiful idea, I'm profoundly grateful for art amoungst these (soon perhaps to be?) ruins.

Stevvo 7y ago

Amazed the New World Notes blog is still going, haven't read it in 10 years, and there are many insightful articles for me to catch up on!

caiocaiocaio 7y ago

I'll always remember Wagner James Au from Old Man Murray.

komali2 7y ago

Just played it for about 30 minutes. Reading the messages is mildly fun. They range from amateur attempts to contribute to the game story (on june 12th, there were 5 of us...) to corny aphorisms ("i didn't I hurt her"), to hilarious attempts to derail game understanding ("physics affects THE DRONES") ("don't trust your boat"). It may be intentional, but the actual game itself felt buggy and it was difficult for me to interact with it. The screen would invert sometimes (I guess to swap between night/day), if I was off-boat during a screen change, buggy shit could happen, it's a bit awkward to paddle your boat. I really like things that let you cast anonymous messages into the dark, so that's fun. But the game itself bored me within the first arbitrary loss of my boat. No idea why that happened, didn't feel like slowly paddling across screens again to reupgrade for another 30 minutes, only to "die" without knowing why.

antisemiotic 7y ago
>Reading the messages is mildly fun. They range from amateur attempts to contribute to the game story (on june 12th, there were 5 of us...) to corny aphorisms ("i didn't I hurt her"), to hilarious attempts to derail game understanding ("physics affects THE DRONES") ("don't trust your boat"). Reminds me of messages in Dark Souls - part helpful tips, part trolling, part "try tongue but hole" style stuff.
- nostalgk 7y ago
  Illusory wall ahead

WalterSear 7y ago

And I thought cooking and office sims were too close to real life to make a game about.

kgwxd 7y ago

Played for hours, made it to the "next" stage. Seem to be missing a key hint. All the prompts to wax poetic seem pointless. Maybe just send out hints as you figure stuff out instead of getting in touch with your inner emo?

pks016 7y ago

Somewhat similar concept http://bottledapp.com/ http://bottledapp.com/ I had played that for some days. It was quite fun.

dsl 7y ago

The developer mentioned on a Reddit thread that the words the board tells you to write on notes affect other players, not yourself. So far a really cool game, just wish I could save...

nixarian 7y ago

Too real

taurath 7y ago

“Massively multiplayer loneliness simulator”... isn’t that just Seattle?

GeorgeRichard 7y ago
I fear Seattle may be real. Pace Bostrom.
nautilus12 7y ago
Or hacker news...
- dillonmckay 7y ago
  This is not a simulation. :)
  - LifeLiverTransp 7y ago
    If it was a simulation, could you build a recursive-interacting-thing that maxes out your local cpu core and makes your reference frame moves slower compared to the rest of the universe?
  - y4mi 7y ago
    statistically speaking, we're almost guaranteed to be a simulation though in case we've got a lucky 10k person around: this guarantee comes from the believe that technology will at one time be able to simulate one human to a degree that it thinks to be real and thinks that it experiences reality. This technology would inevitably be used to simulate billions of lives for scientific research. you're thus statistically one of these simulations, as there had been ~10 billion "real" humans to the unlimited amount of simulated ones (this is just a fun thought experiment. don't treat your fellow humans like simulations please)
    - C4stor 7y ago
      > statistically speaking, we're almost guaranteed > this guarantee comes from the believe So it's not statistically speaking, it's not a guarantee, it's a belief. I'm ok with that, but please don't try to present it otherwise. I personally don't believe there'll ever be a technology able to simulate a human to the point you describe, which I think is ok to believe too and not less scientifically correct or incorrect.

jaggirs 7y ago

This video from adult swim has a bit of a similar theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWsYaOM6pRg&list=LLyI69iuZYoZE9uEI2_sJxXA&index=5&t=0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWsYaOM6pRg&list=LLyI69iuZYo...

Dean_Awks 7y ago

Thought I'd drop in since a shit load of traffic is coming from you guys. Dev here - thanks for playing! The game obviously has its issues, but hey - its a dumb, free, experimental and ultimately temporary experience. Thanks for checking it out!

zigzag448 7y ago

Why is there still an irritating loudspeaker in this flooded world?

beaconstudios 7y ago

this reminds a bit of the player communication in One Hour One Life, in that it's a more novel approach than simple text/voice chat and integrated directly into the gameplay. If you're interested in indie games with innovative and creative mechanics, that's another one to look into. I have no affiliation with it, I just think it's cool.

ZoomZoomZoom 7y ago

The only relevant questions I see are: How secure are my messages? Why didn't you implement e2e cryptography? Did you really need a central server (ocean?) for message delivery? Have you considered the possibility of mitm attacks? How many messages do I need to write for a guaranteed delivery to a given recipient in a day, in an hour? /s

scandinavegan 7y ago

Dark Souls (I've only played DS3 and Demon's Souls) and Bloodborne has a message passing system. You can leave notes on the ground for other players to find in their game. They use a fixed format for the sentence structure and the list of available words, which means they can prevent messages from using forbidden words. See the following article for the message format: https://bloodborne.fandom.com/wiki/Notes https://bloodborne.fandom.com/wiki/Notes That said, some people get creative trying to bend the system into new uses, for example "amazing chest ahead" in front of an NPC rather than a storage location. Or "try tongue, but hole". The message system also gave rise to a tradition of calling people "skeleton" when encouraging them on Reddit and elsewhere. In Dark Souls 2, a bunch of skeletons were placed in the world by the designers, and players started attaching creative messages to them: https://66.media.tumblr.com/27bb20783b49cf5e63522c3f51092e4a/tumblr_n4t0e2WCT11qi4a2go6_1280.jpg https://66.media.tumblr.com/27bb20783b49cf5e63522c3f51092e4a... https://i.imgur.com/0ewexGV.jpg https://i.imgur.com/0ewexGV.jpg https://i.imgur.com/ZpENzv8.jpg https://i.imgur.com/ZpENzv8.jpg https://66.media.tumblr.com/01d2e6acf80247332b937db84c45d2fc/tumblr_n4t0e2WCT11qi4a2go2_1280.jpg https://66.media.tumblr.com/01d2e6acf80247332b937db84c45d2fc... An interesting feature is that you can rate messages, and if your message is rated (good or bad) you get back full health. There are many threads from players that managed to beat a boss because of this, but you can't abuse it because you can't reliable expect it to happen at the right time. Not all messages from players can be trusted. There are many "illusory wall ahead" messages in front of places that look like they should have a secret door, but don't. Then you'll spend some time hacking at a regular wall. There are also messages that say "try jumping" in front of cliffs where you die if you jump off. This creates an extra level of connection to the players who left the message, because you have to consider if you trust a random person you never met or not, and if they trick you, you get that human element in a situation that was supposed to just be a regular cliff. Someone spent time setting up that joke for you. Sometimes jumping does work, and you hit a hidden platform and find some loot, so you never know.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

thorin 7y ago

This reminds me of a youtube video and game that were linked to on here about a depressed game designer building a game to cope with his loneliness and despair and talking over it. Can anyone remember that or send a link? It was a 3d doom type thing.

bblough 7y ago
This doesn't quite fit that description, but the only thing that comes to mind is The Beginner's Guide - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beginner's_Guide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beginner's_Guide