Ok, so, about this game thing…

If you look up into the night sky, just to the right of the bit that looks like a giant shopping cart, you’ll see a small blue star, called Sulis. Around it floats a stormy orange gas giant, and around that in turn swims a small moon, called Selene (until I come up with a nicer name).

Selene is gravitationally challenged by all that whirling mass and hence is warm, comparatively wet and volcanic. It’s a craggy, canyon-filled landscape, by sheer coincidence remarkably similar to northern Arizona. The thin atmosphere contains oxygen, but sadly also much SO2 and H2S, making it hostile to earthly life without a spacesuit. But life it does contain! Spectroscopic analysis and photography from two orbiters have confirmed this (never mind how the orbiters got there – work with me, guys!)

There are hints of many species, some sessile, some motile. And just a little circumstantial evidence that one of these species may be moderately intelligent and perhaps even has a social structure. Your mission, should you wish to pay me a few dollars for the privilege, is to mount an expedition to Selene and study its biology and ecosystems. If at all possible I’d also like you to attempt contact with this shadowy sentient life-form.

Nothing is known (well, ok, I know it because I’m God, but I’m not telling you) about Selene’s ecosystems, geology, climate or, in particular, its biology. What is the food web? How do these creatures behave? What’s their anatomy? What niches do they occupy? How does their biochemistry work? How do they reproduce? Do they have something similar to DNA or does a different principle hold sway? What’s the likely evolutionary history? For the more intelligent creatures, what can be learned of their psychology, neurology and social behavior? Do they have language? Can we communicate with them? Are they dangerous? How smart are they? Do they have a culture? Do they have myths; religion? What does it all tell us?

You need to work together to build an encyclopedia – like Wikipedia – containing the results of your experiments, your observations and conclusions, stories, tips for exploration and research, maps, drawings, photos and all the rest. It will be a massive (I hope!), collaborative, Open Science experiment in exobiology…

So that’s the gist of what I’m working on. I was going to open a pet store and sell imported aliens but I decided it would be much more fun to build a virtual world you can actually step into, instead of watching through the bars of a cage. I’ll try to develop a whole new, self-consistent but non-earthlike biology, building on some of the things I learned from Creatures and my Lucy robot. I’ll discuss some of the technical issues on this blog but I’ll try not to give the game away – the point of the exercise is to challenge people to do real science on these creatures and deduce/infer this stuff for themselves. They/you did it admirably for Creatures but in those days I couldn’t give you anything as complex and comprehensive as I can now, and this time I don’t have marketing people breathing down my neck telling me that nobody’s interested in science.

I have no idea what the actual features will be, or to what extent it’ll be networked, etc. I’m just starting work on the terrain system and I have an awful long way to go. Because I’m working unfunded and have only a limited amount of money to live on, I’m going to work the other way round to most people, so instead of working to a spec I’ll squeeze in as many features as I can before the cash runs out. I know it’s absurd to hope to do all this in the space of a year to 18 months – after all, how many programmers and artists worked on Spore? Something like a hundred? But I think I’m as well equipped for the job as anyone, I work far more efficiently on my own, and it’s worth the attempt.

Whaddaya think?

Of astronauts and aliens

This is the first weekend since I got here where I had nothing that needed doing, so I looked in the local paper to see if there might just possibly be an event going on in Flagstaff that I could attend. I was lucky. There was. It turned out I had 72 choices. So in the end I jammed a trilby on my head and went to the folk festival.

It was fun. At the entrance someone asked if I’d be so kind as to make a $3 voluntary donation for the privilege of parking and attending the festival, and she seemed genuinely pleased when I coughed up the money – Glastonbury-goers eat your hearts out!

To me, folk music means someone with an apparently serious earache singing about something miserable in an unintelligible Geordie accent. But I forgot – this is the Wild West. It was all mandolins and steel guitars, and sad songs about simple folk and their dysfunctional relationships. And there was no bluster or machismo either – everyone was just terribly, terribly nice. I do like this place.

Strange things happen here. At the folk festival a woman came up to me and said “Excuse me, but are you Steve Grand?” In my usual masterful way I managed to splutter “Er, um. Probably. Do I know you?” She said, “No, but I know you very well. I spent all morning editing videotape of you.” That’s a story for another time, but it’s that kind of a place.

Then this evening I headed for a lecture (free this time, none of that exorbitant $3 nonsense for a mere day’s entertainment) about how the Apollo 11 astronauts trained for their moonwalk around here. That’s what people do in Flagstaff: they train for things. Astronauts trained for the Moon; Olympic athletes train to run at high altitude and beat the crap out of me; Geologists train on the volcanoes; astronomers train in the observatory; national park rangers train to range parks… There’s a kind of earnestness about the place that I find very endearing.

The lecture was on the same road I live on, so I figured it wouldn’t take long to get there. Yet again I massively underestimated the scale of this country. And there was a delay due to a herd of elk. So I didn’t make it in time and if you were anxiously waiting to be enlightened on the subject of astronaut training you’ll have to wait a bit longer, sorry. But the sunset over the lake was stunning, so I didn’t mind.

Having Grace to dinner

Just in case you get the wrong impression from this giddy social whirl, here’s proof that I’m really just a lonely, sad geek. I’ve rebuilt Grace the Robot and she keeps me company at dinner.

“Male, 51, good listener, no sense of scale, seeks buxom robot for artificially intelligent conversation.”

Anyway, all this is irrelevant gibberish. What I really wanted to talk to you about is my new game. But oh dear, I seem to have run out of space. I was going to tell you about my plans to open a pet shop and sell aliens. Maybe next time…