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

In all honesty, many people don't know what Chain World is (I didn't before reading the article). The sad truth of scrolling through new submissions is that the headlines are the only pieces of information we can rely on. A carefully worded headline can go a long way. Your title (and Wired's title) almost assumes we know what they're talking about -- Wired can get away with that since they're a magazine and this is a featured article that will receive readers regardless (a mysterious title can be beneficial). On HN, it's almost the exact opposite. If people can't tell what you're talking about (in general), it's a lot harder. I guess headlines that are easier to skim are easier to vote for, but I'm waiting for the day that we won't even need to curate content by hand.

Could you make it so that the longer someone plays, the harder it is to stay alive? Armour provides progressively less protection, you require more food, there are more monsters, monsters are more powerful, lightning more frequent etc...

So... to add a little bit more to this story.

I have a copy of Chain World.

I was having lunch with a friend of mine in NYC a few weeks ago, and he was telling me about all this. He said that he was talking with his friend who got the USB drive from Rohrer (I assume this is Ji) and that before Ji sold it, he bootlegged a copy of it. A copy that my friend emailed to me.

I have yet to play (I haven't played Minecraft before, I want a bit of practice before I boot into the game world and die), but it's sitting on my desktop right now.

I think the fact that there is now at least two bootlegged copies going around adds to parallelism to religion. There is "the true path" (the original USB drive), and then there have been two "sects" that have broken off, gone to different parts of the world, and have begun to grow.

I plan on passing my copy from friend to friend on the West Coast. Maybe one day someone will come across copies of two different strains and they'll be able to see the differences that occur after 50 generations of evolution.

I don't see the good in slighting any artist or craftsperson for taking a road less travelled, or in suggesting that an entire medium for creative exploration should constrained by need of easy acceptance.

Art needs to command attention, to force people to think carefully about the ideas that are its payload. It can do this with beauty, or it can do it with ugliness.

To continue the food metaphor: Sea Urchin. Hákarl. Bitter melon. All of which are awful-tasting to most, but delicious to those who have fostered an appreciation for their peculiarities. Anyone who can stomach such foods are offered absolutely unique flavours that defy description or comparison.

It's a powerful tool in the chest of artists, to force their audiences to confront something they may find uncomfortable or unsettling. In every case where the work is truly great, the confrontation is simply an effective mechanism through which something deeply meaningful about the human condition may be revealed. Exemplar are the works of Damien Hurst, Odd Nerdrum, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Alvin Lucier, David Lynch, and so many others — all exhaustively-praised once the dust of their highly-confrontational works has settled.

Rohrer's games all exist in this domain, defying casual pursuit, but offering something immensely powerful for anyone willing to overcome their own reservations.

For a game to be bigger than religion, it must take on a life of it's own that transcends the "lives" of the players.

Chain World sounds very cool, but it's lacking one crucial element, replication. An online version sounds intriguing, but would most likely need substantial tweaks to create the right incentive structure.