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Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

I'm thinking about writing a Conway's Life MMO, where you can activate "lanterns" that illuminate rectangles in the grid with Conway Life squares. These lanterns are fueled with "living" Conway Life cells, which are harvested by the player. Sound interesting?

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Honestly no. Building an MMO that ran entirely on life would be amazing but probably impossible. Building something that used the trappings of life without having it mean much would just be infuriating. Unless I'm misunderstanding the proposal?

The first thing that comes to mind, is that players would build glider guns that would cause live cells to "fall into" collector cells to gather resources. So it would be a farming/RTS game, except all of the crops and weapons would be emergent from Conway's Life.

I think that's going to be unplayably difficult for anyone except serious programmers, and it will be very difficult to design life structures that have the behaviour you need to make the game fun, and even if you manage it you'll have trouble running them fast enough to perform well. I mean best of luck if you do do it, but it's going to be a real uphill struggle.

You're totally misunderstanding my proposal. (Either on purpose as a troll, or you're just having a particularly obtuse day.)

The life structures you need to start would just be glider guns. The glider guns would fire into walls of "collector cells" which are not Conway Life entities, but are implemented by the game directly.

Likewise, the character is not a Conway Life entity, but implemented directly by the game.

I think that's going to be unplayably difficult for anyone except serious programmers

What I've envisioned might well be appreciated by Life enthusiasts.

A glider gun is still incomprehensibly complex for non-programmers, I fear.

To the extent that resource collection involves stuff happening in Life you will struggle to balance it, and to the extent that it doesn't it's not really life-based at all.

to the extent that it doesn't it's not really life-based at all.

Obviously, because no MMOs have contrived mechanics, ever!

MMOs need two things: mechanics that make them fun as a game, and themeing that will attract players. As far as I can see including a life aspect doesn't help with either.

I like the idea!

Maybe a turn-based roguelike where the monsters are lifeforms that follow the rules of GoL. Could either be very interesting or exceedingly boring once it settled into a self-sustaining pattern.

People have been trying to write good games based on Conway's Life for decades, but it seems as if most game mechanisms end up having too steep a learning curve -- mostly because the system is too sensitive, so one bit out of place tends to cause huge, unpredictable, uncontrollable effects.

Seems to me Life has a lot of potential as abstract art, though. I'm almost curious enough about what they're doing in Second Life these days, to sign up and go have a look:

http://www.conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2068#p2...

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