The Egg Of Worlds
Jan. 31st, 2003 08:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mik3capI recently purchased Animal Crossing for my Gamecube, and an e-Reader that came with a number of cards for my GBA. Animal Crossing is fun so far; the equivalent of virtual Sea Monkeys that you can write letters to. There are a lot of cute little activities you can perform as an avatar wandering around the world you create - digging up fossils, catching fish, performing deliveries for other avatars, and writing letters to them (of course). The game has a lot of depth - I'm hoping I can get one or two other folks to set up shop in my town who will play regularly, or to find another person or two who have towns I can visit.
You see, the coolest thing about this game is that it's extensible. With the e-Reader attached to my GBA, and my GBA attached to the Gamecube, I can actually add more data to the game. Additional characters, music, items, patterns for clothing... all you do is scan these cards that you purchase separately through the e-Reader and they get uploaded to your memory card. The cards have this micro-dot code written onto them that runs through the e-Reader and gets interpreted by the GBA for uploading into your world. Other towns that get created by other people sprout different kinds of characters, different kinds of fish and insects, and different fruit trees - and you can actually cross-pollinate all of these things between worlds. There's even another miniature tropical island world that resides on the GBA when it's hooked up to the game ("Animal Island").
I'm sure that we're only a decade or two away from incomprehensibly complex virtual worlds. How long before we attain such a level of complexity that sentience arises naturally in such evolutionary systems? Will my Gamecube rise up against me, a la the machines in the Matrix?
You see, the coolest thing about this game is that it's extensible. With the e-Reader attached to my GBA, and my GBA attached to the Gamecube, I can actually add more data to the game. Additional characters, music, items, patterns for clothing... all you do is scan these cards that you purchase separately through the e-Reader and they get uploaded to your memory card. The cards have this micro-dot code written onto them that runs through the e-Reader and gets interpreted by the GBA for uploading into your world. Other towns that get created by other people sprout different kinds of characters, different kinds of fish and insects, and different fruit trees - and you can actually cross-pollinate all of these things between worlds. There's even another miniature tropical island world that resides on the GBA when it's hooked up to the game ("Animal Island").
I'm sure that we're only a decade or two away from incomprehensibly complex virtual worlds. How long before we attain such a level of complexity that sentience arises naturally in such evolutionary systems? Will my Gamecube rise up against me, a la the machines in the Matrix?