Hey, Here's an Idea...

I had come across this idea in another article (read "industry flame") called A Gamer's Manifesto.

Where's the game where we're a castaway on a deserted island and the object of the game is to find food and clean water and build a shelter, a game where we can play for one month or six months, because whether or not we get rescued is randomized? Where every time we restart we get a different island with different wildlife and vegetation and water sources?

Well, I think it's a rather good idea. It's nothing terrible sophisticated, at least on the surface. Here are the complicated bits:

• Animal behavior
• Weather
• Time passage
• Physical wear and tear on the user's "body

Not to say this is an easy to do thing for me. I've no experience with computer games. This seems like a really good place to start. I'd need to up my C++ skills, maybe work on some artistic skills, learn some new tools, that sort of thing. I would really like to script things in lisp, though. Not sure why, but it just seems like a really good language to script AI (for the animal behaviors).

So far in the mentions of the idea that I've had, there's been a few positive responses. I think the appeal of a game like that is the tomogochi-type game addictiveness. The game would involve the survival of an avatar, but from a first-person perspective. I think that adds a bit more to the addictiveness, in that it is about virtual survival of self.

It might be pretty interesting.

Decline and Fall (Wait, no, It's Summer)

There's been a noticeable decline in the blogging space. It's seems as if the fad has begun to run it's course. There was a Doonesbury comic this morning that high-lighted this fact, which says to me that the whole situations, well, reached comic proportions.

Even the bloggers are starting to realize this fact.

I'd give this decline several reasons. First, and foremost, it's a fad. In the way that social network sites had a spike in membership, so have blogs. Everyone needed to have one, and realized that writing about their lives really wasn't all that interesting to them. Millions of people tried it out and found that it just wasn't for them.

Now the internet is full of blog sites that are never updated, nor cared for, nor visited. It's a bit like the clutter that built up after the internet's first fad stage: the personal website. Blogs have made it remarkably easy for a person to have a professional looking website. The only thing needed is content (like a bare-bones computer needs a CPU or a Chia pet needs water).

There will probably be some sort of great Blog Rapture, where the gods of the blog servers while choose those blogs that will stay and those that will be damned to the hell of the Way Back Machine. Until that time there will be a huge number of orphaned blogs out there.

I think the second reason for the decline in blogs has been that the mainstream media has co-opted it for their own uses. I know that statement has a conspiratorial tone to it, but I merely trying to think like the vast number of dedicated bloggers out there. They feel that there job is to bring the real news and really happenings to light. Now with the mainstream media grabbing hold, it's no longer seen as a tool of counter-culture. In other words, it's now a tool of the Man.

Lastly, and this really is only a personal opinion/belief/hope-for-the-survival-of-all-man-kind, is that it's summer. People have more interesting things to do, than sit on the computers and write about what they did today, which amounts to writing about there day. This may only be the case in the part of the world where I live where there is only about four months of good weather.

So get outside, enjoy that strange scent called Fresh Air.