Second Life
It is not new that Second Life’s client has gone open source. I’ve been discussing this question with Tom Barbalet, from Noble Ape, since we both believe that an ALife component would be interesting in such a simulation.
I’ve always been interested in flexible and “massive” simulations: the WoW phenomenon is a different kind of thing - it is not as flexible as SL, and has a well defined environment. Second Life, in the other hand, seems very user-configurable, perhaps too much user-configurable for an actual “game”. So, it looks as a kind of sandbox for different approaches to virtual worlds.
A possible Gaia component in Second Life would provide the game with a natural environment that would make it evolve towards a more realistic “world” simulation. Have you ever imagined an evolution-based ALife simulation where the selective force would actually include real people, progress, technology… well it could work as a test lab in order to build a small-scale model of our past, present and future world. It would be a great step towards the perfect distributed simulation: a simulation where “actually intelligent” people shape an ecosystem, and animals evolve according to natural and “human” (which is natural, too) selection.
Let’s see how the Second Life community goes with Open Source, and see if the ALife community finds it worthy of some work…
January 13th, 2007 at 7:58 pm
There’s a name for what you talk about and it’s coming out in June:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spore_%28video_game%29
January 13th, 2007 at 11:39 pm
Will Wright’s “Spore” will be very cool, but it’s not the same concept. I was talking about having a “real human” population (or a set of characters controlled by that population) living in an ecosystem, together with other creatures. The human progress would act as a selective force, just as it works in the real world. In spore, everything will be simulated, and there will be many degrees of freedom associated with the simulated creatures. Second Life is a different thing. It is a massive multiplayer thing, and the addition of an ecosystem simulation would focus on the human influence on that same ecosystem.