Quote: The vision is clear, if a game is totally open and without end it will have the potential to live on ad infinitum. The challenge is such a game is adding mechanisms that control the game content, but even this might not be very hard, mainly because players would be able to handle a lot by their interactions and contributions alone. The real issue is to make the “ultimate” finite state machine that can handle the reactions on all the player actions. When the complexity reach a critical point the world should take on a life of its own. This phenomenon is well known among programmers and people working with life simulations. When the simplified game theory models can be applied to a game environment the rest should be only maintenance. Maybe I am dreaming, and have moved to far into the future on the latter statements, but I actually suspect much of this is already out there, but in shards that just need to be collected and glued together.
My User Contributions master list - my initial post links are down but scroll down page to find list to active links
