A little OT, but I find the Ludum Dare challenge to be just...awesome. I first heard about it when viewing Lucas Pope's homepage (the creator of Papers, Please), and seeing the astonishing work he made in 48 hours (here: <a href="http://dukope.com/play.php?g=six" rel="nofollow">http://dukope.com/play.php?g=six</a> as well as this game, which he did for practice but which I think is the best game ever made about newspapers: <a href="http://dukope.com/play.php?g=trt" rel="nofollow">http://dukope.com/play.php?g=trt</a>). During some idle time today I started reading the Haxe docs...I got into programming because I wanted to make video games and haven't done any game code since college because the games industry didn't seem fun to work in. But seeing the kind of inspired one-offs at Ludum (as well as Pope's Papers, Please) has really sparked an interest in me to create something memorable that is not a web app.
My mind went immediately to "what if it was real life", recoiled in horror at the dystopian-ness of it and then returned in fascination:<p>There are people all over the world dying right now for lack of some small amount of food or medicine. What if you could click a button and send them a nickel to keep them alive a few more minutes? Like World Vision, but in a Philip K. Dick novel.
Hey everyone, I'm Dom, the guy who came up with Impetus and wrote that thing. Just saw this post blow up and figured I could chime in, so feel free to ask more specific questions I could answer!
An idea like this seems risky because it relies on the game getting some considerable attention from the get-go or it's literally all over within seconds. Also, doing this means basically foregoing the normal voting process which is taking place over the next 3 weeks.<p>I don't think most LD devs could've pulled this off, PR-wise.<p>There are over 2000 entries on LD27, and Spiegel calls the next morning? Either I'm way too cynical right now or this is the luckiest entry ever. It's hard getting noticed on Ludum Dare and there are a lot of neat concepts floating around.
It's unfortunate that it ended so soon due to a hosting company being garbage.<p>I would have loved to see this really blow up and get billions of visitors and see it running a year from now because it's an interesting concept for a game.
Reminds me of another game "4 Minutes and 33 Seconds of Uniqueness", which could be the antipole for this.<p><a href="http://www.kloonigames.com/blog/games/4mins33secs" rel="nofollow">http://www.kloonigames.com/blog/games/4mins33secs</a>
I have nothing technical or special insight to offer; I'd just like to say I teared up a little reading that. I don't know why. I hadn't heard of the game until I saw this article. Never played the game either. The game character is just a made up character with no background story and is nothing more than simple ajax and timers.
Any psychologist care to offer some opinion?
I really appreciate that he didn't bend the rules to relaunch the game after the server issue. He probably could have justified it but it wouldn't have been true to the essence of the game.
Very cool idea! One comment in defense of the host. Hosting a game that depends on users hitting the page every 10 seconds at the least on a shared server was not a great idea. Shared servers are notoriously (and understandably) unstable -- mainly because of sites that overuse their resources. If a single site is taking down an entire server worth of clients, the best course of action is to always disable that client first, and then work with them on a solution after. It's not fair for all the others on that same server to have their sites down or slow because of one site.<p>Which is why I pretty much always recommend against shared hosting, unless it's some static site that doesn't need constant uptime.
It would be interesting to try this again, but instead a simple button to click to extend the timer, which a script can fake, require a brief reverse Turing Test, like a captcha or something. Would people continue keeping her alive at the cost of more effort?
Amazing stuff, I think this was more of an art than anything else, for me art is also always social experiment, you can observe how people react to things. That is why internet is great you can engage people in ways you did not thought about before.
Given the recent hoohah over strong accents, this author clearly has English as a second language, but writes powerfully and well, structures a story effectively and did not let me stop till the end.<p>A great game and a great write up. Let us know about LD28 :-)
In a way it was lucky the plug got pulled. The inevitable death is a big part of the game, this way it occurred while there were still many of people involved!
If you find this fascinating and haven't seen the TV show LOST (does such an intersection existing?) - there is a similar mechanism introduced near the end of the first season that has a big impact on the plot. I wonder if ABC ever made an ARG of this, would have been pretty fitting I imagine.
What a beautiful concept. It's sad that it met such an unnatural end. I think it's more than possible that this game could have lasted much, much longer (perhaps even years).<p>Stupid webhosts. Why doesn't everybody use AWS? ;)
I wonder how different would it be if the main character was male instead of female. There is a certain frailness that you can't get with male characters