Chain World: a game that exists on a unique USB flash drive

Rohrer is one of the few game-artist around. I'd encourage everyone to check out his life, career or works of art.

It kind of sucks that people can't just treat it as is - a game, and go with it, but whatever...a cool idea, nonetheless.

What an absolutely fascinating story. Thank you so much for sharing it with us. As a maker I am always thinking about the rules of what we make, and then once released in the wild we sometimes want to pull our creations back in, and sometimes we can, and other-times we can't. And when we can, those that thought that we were sharing our creations with them, for them to explore and change, feel alienated and rejected, and when we can't those that believed in our original intentions feel betrayed by their trust in us. It's a beautiful and terrifying relationship, and I am glad to be a part of it. Perhaps someday, I'll get to be part of Chain World too.

It's interesting that Rohrer played around with the idea of taking Chain World online-- when I heard about Chain World, the first bit of sacrilege that came to my mind was "well, why should this be restricted to a USB stick? There's no reason a multiplayer server couldn't be governed to do this."

I wrote Lonecraft as a way of replicating the Chain World idea, but using an Amazon EC2 instance as a multiplayer server with a few custom Minecraft server plugins and a Heroku instance as a web app to govern the rules of the game (to make sure only one player plays at once and no one plays more than once).

The code is here: http://www.github.com/ckolderup/lonecraft It needs some more work to flesh out the idea of resetting the world after a set number of players and exposing the blog entries of each player after the world resets, but the general game mechanic is there and functional.

My instance of it is technically up and running, too, but one thing my friends and I quickly discovered while testing it is that people who have been playing Minecraft for a while have a nasty habit of not... really... dying. Once you've learned the ropes it's pretty easy to make armor, carry food, and fight monsters. Death usually comes only occasionally and as the result of a careless mistake.

I've toyed with the idea of imposing a time limit or a number of logins that you're allowed before you're also kicked off, but that seemed to defeat the whole purpose of giving meaning to the in-game death.

As long as they keep playing and don't cheat, those careless mistakes will happen. It may take months but the game is great at dealing random misfortunes. I've been struck by lightning.

And future versions will likely have more dangers and more things to tempt you into danger.