[MUD-Dev] neat game

[Adam Martin]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Matt Mihaly" <the_logos at achaea.com>
To: <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Sent: Wednesday, May 02, 2001 12:08 AM
Subject: [MUD-Dev] neat game


> Geoffrey MacDougall brought this to my attention. It's quite an
> interesting game/marketing technique.
>
>   http://writetheweb.com/read.php?item=110

Dan Hon is a friend of mine - we lived together last year - and I can
honestly say that the whole AI thing is about a thousand times bigger
than you would imagine. When he was first getting involved, and
showing me what they'd found, my first thought was "Will Majestic be
this good?".

The two main aspects are firstly that absolutely no information nor
hints have been given away. Just as part of setting up the huge trail
of anonymous, IC (in character) websites ISTR that dreamworks had
(indirectly - using 100 variants of an invented registrant name)
registered several hundred domains. You are expected to try cracking
the security on these websites, to phone the personal phone numbers on
the IC "personal webpages" you come across, without anyone ever
allowing you or telling you to. The only thing that made it obviously
(implied) legal was the fact that every website is fully contemporary
to the year 2049 or similar.

The second is the mind-boggling quality and diversity of the sites and
other resources you come across. Although I've only seen a very small
part of the whole, it really felt like the long-ago proposed "personal
movie", where you get to feel like you're the main character dropped
into the plot of a movie, and unlike a PC adventure game it isn't some
linear flow, where you can in the limit just try using everything with
everything else, but a real case of having to figure things out
because you don't have a "use" action, and success depends upon your
personal skills and ability, rather than that of your in-game
character.

Lastly, it has also completely overtaken Dan's life. Although we all
ought to be studying for finals, I know he's pulled some 30-hour days
thanks to addiction to this!

Adam M


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