Game designer designs a game for 2,000 years from now, hides it in desert | Hacker News Reader

Game designer designs a game for 2,000 years from now, hides it in desert

polygon.com

100 pointsColinWright36 comments

The hard part of this challenge is not necessarily just the titanium but also communicating the rules of the game. Even if the game board is intact, how will a future civilization know what to do with it?

One of my favorite "designed to last thousands of years" document is the alternately dry and scintillating 1980s/1990s Sandia Labs report on how to communicate with future generations about nuclear waste after the collapse of the U.S.

The well-known part is http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/wipp%20exhibit%... . The part that's gotten some recent press is this language, which was not an actual written message anyone suggested be used at a nuclear waste site, but was instead the panel's consensus on the message that the site should somehow communicate::

""This place is a message...and part of a system of messages...pay attention to it!

Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.

This place is not a place of honor...no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here...nothing valued is here.

What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.

The danger is in a particular location...it increases toward acenter...the center of danger is here...of a particular size and shape, and below us.

The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.The danger is to the body, and it can kill.

The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.

The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.""

But there's quite a lot more good stuff in there about how to communicate with future people who might not speak English, or any language at all. Some cool, detailed descriptions (with pictures!) of a "spike field" type landscape to keep people from inadvertently using the nuclear waste site as a shelter.

And one panelist writes: "A marker system should be chosen that instills awe, pride, and admiration, as it is these feelings that motivate people to maintain ancient markers, monuments, and buildings."

It's very cool stuff to read — you get to watch a panel of very smart people think very far into the future about how to talk to people they'll never meet.

About the Sandia Labs report... imagining myself as a future archaeologist, such a place would only attract me! even if I were a bronze-age post-apocalyptic culture "wise man", if I could somehow figure out that there is a poison in there, I could only think "cool! we can use this poison against our enemies in the next battle! maybe some of our slaves will die digging it up, but boy, we'll sure make a killing with it!" ...and most other things they assume seem wrongly optimistic about human nature: something that instills pride and owe would only communicate that there is probably something of value in there, therefore something that is worth getting or stealing! (most ancient tombs were robbed, you know!) ...imho the best bet for such a place would be to make it inconspicuous and hard to open: for example, after properly cloaking everything, you could make the actual storage rooms for the dangerous stuff be part of some "stone"/concrete "walls", with no entrance, and have "dummy rooms" with "dummy content" (for whoever actually digs beyond the cloaking and warning signs) surrounded by these "walls" - no modern archaeologist would, for example, consider smashing what seems like a solid granite wall to look for a hidden chamber inside it if there is no sign of it.

Assuming that this future civilization is sufficiently advanced, wouldn't they have the ability to detect what's inside the ground without actually digging? I know we can through (I believe) echolocation, why wouldn't they?

Then they would see a cavity that's been sealed on all sides by concrete. However I suppose by this point they would have also discovered radiation and nuclear reactions so it might be a moot point.

I believe the assumption is that a future civilization will be less advanced. Should society collapse, you can expect knowledge to be lost and advancement to cease. Sure, we hope that our civilization will continue to advance, but we plan for the worst and leave the message in simple language in the hope that the last remnants of mankind will survive by avoiding a serious threat left by their ancestors.

If the future civilization is advanced then the warnings are unnecessary. They already have the technology to deal with radiation, in fact it is possible that a future civilization would want to mine one of these sites for fuel. This is actually why I feel the whole exercise is pointless.

There is a really nice documentary about finland future-proof attempt to store nuclear waste: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmWadizC8AQ - Into eternity. that deals with the same topic.

It shows how they are building it and how they thought about how to prevent future generations to go there.

Regarding communicating the rules: One way is to write them in basic English, and then bury one of these with it:

http://rosettaproject.org/

It's a disc, meant to last thousands of years, that contains parallel texts for thousands of languages. The theory is that if they speak something descended from any language today, they can use the parallel texts to decode the rules.

Surely, just leaving a French-English dictionary should do the job. People will likely speak either French or English in the future, surely!

I think you mean English or Mandarin, since nobody (probabilistically speaking) speaks French.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_numb...

He estimates that if one person visits a GPS location each day with a metal detector, the game will be unearthed sometime within the next million days — a little over 2,700 years.

[T]he sheets of GPS coordinates were collected by GDC volunteers at the door in an attempt to collate the data, hopefully leading to the game's earlier discovery.

Gentlemen, start your Travelling Salesman algorithms. From a quick skim of the wikipedia page, 1M nodes is probably too many to solve exactly, but (might?) be within 1% via heuristic methods.

Then again, depending on the area the entire set of coordinates covers, dividing it into zones and computing TSP over each would be much more practical, and allow parallel searches by multiple groups.

I wonder if the creator wouldn't have been better off with a Geohashing[1] type location clue, but I'm struggling to think of a useful time-specific seed that is both resistant to precomputation, and likely to survive 2k+ years hence. The XKCD one uses the value of the Dow Jones average for industrial stocks, but I doubt it could be relied on for more than a few decades, or a century or three in a best case.

[1] http://wiki.xkcd.com/geohashing/Algorithm

TSP is relevant to graph traversal. "Something buried in the desert" has no (or at least, very little) restriction on how you move from node to node.

Damn, Rohrer is really good at these GDC game design challenges. Here's a great write up on Chain World (his previous win): http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/07/mf_chainworld/

Besides Will Wright, he is the only person to have won twice: http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/53704/where-can-i...

Nobody has ever actually seen the gameplay from his games. (The video of the most recent game does not disclose the gameplay.) It's entirely possible that his games are utter crap, with a great coat of marketing.

Perhaps he's gaming the system?

You can judge his ability from his other games: http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/

EDIT: fixed the link, thanks

I can't believe you had to link to his easily-locatable webpage to show he had a large amount of free games to speak for his game-making ability.

Hacker News is depressing.

That's still a plus versus Will Wright's designs, which were just concepts for possible games. Most Game Design Challenge entries were more theoretical than actual. Rohrer's games are some of the exceptions, in that they actually exist. And the Chain World experience can be approximated--his design inspired other Chain World games.

There's also the argument that the actual game is not the physical board or software but the legend that surrounds the game.

Perhaps you're right and the board game is crap. From the presentations I have watched, I think the challenge is more about ideas than it is about building a complete game. And presenting those ideas carefully.... that is marketing.

However, Chain World is a simple extrapolation of Minecraft. You can evaluate whether that is "utter crap" pretty easily. Plus he's made at least 10 other games, many of which are publicly available for free.

Personally, I found his latest game, The Castle Doctrine, to be amazing: http://jere.in/1

What's to stop someone from forking Chain World onto another USB stick? In fact, adding that ability plus some sort of unpredictable way to reconcile the subsequent divergent timelines when two USB sticks met in the wild would make a far more interesting design IMO.

Nothing more than what might stop a German scholar from nailing 95 theses to a church door.

I would imagine any tech-savvy player would, after getting the USB stick, immediately copy it somewhere else. It would be almost like a "branch" of religion that spawns at certain points; the USB stick would be Catholicism, the main branch, warped to the point of being indistinguishable to the original, but the copies could be like smaller sects or nondenominational churches.

But the point is to see what other people have done? Once you've explored it it's just another minecraft world.

It's tempting to see if HN can recreate the experience. There are minecraft players here. Someone could set up some version control or somesuch for a minecraft world download.

There's public minecraft servers. People share maps. That's nothing new and I think it's beside the original intent.

The theme of the challenge was "religion" and Chain World was designed to have the characteristics of one: laws, tradition, secrecy, solitude, ancestor worship, etc. Most of that flies out the window when it's just a bunch of people browsing maps other people have created.

Of course, none of the original intent was really fulfilled because there was no adherence to the "laws."

Re: the article on Chain World...

> He doesn’t...believe in vaccination.

I tried Googling to find evidence of this, but couldn't find any. He's a very bright guy, I'd be interested to hear his opinion on this. Vaccination seems like a no-brainer to me...

Yea, I was curious about this too. I tried and failed to find anything on it.

This is a MMO RPG IRL actually =) Nobody cares about the "board". He won because the real game is to find the board.

He used titanium for the game pieces because they would be more likely to last a couple thousand years. I wonder whether amber would have been an easier material to work with? Amber seems to preserve quite well over the ages.

Amber is amorphous, isn't it?

Not necessarily. We have examples of amber that have survived millions of years, but that does not mean every sample of amber has survived.

The idea that Jason Rohrer didn't allow anyone, not even himself, to play(test) the game is mind boggling.

Rohrer hasn't played it himself, he says

No playtesting? Probably isn't going to be very good, then.

5th paragraph of the article.

"To accomplish that, Rohrer first built the game in computer form, designing a set of rules that would be playtested not by a human, but by an artificial intelligence. He said he plugged the game's rules into a "black box," letting the AI find imbalances, iterating new rules and repeating. Rohrer showed the video game version of his board game onscreen, but obscured key portions of the board game's layout, so no one in attendance could reverse engineer its mechanics."

That's just testing, not playtesting, in my opinion.

NV has an area of approximately 286,367 km2. Only the lower (Southern) third of NV can be described as 'desert'. From this one may safely subtract the area of the Nellis Test Range and the City of Las Vegas.

The result is a density of about 12 GPS co-ordinates per km^2

At a single square km per day, it takes 288 years to clear them all. (And order of magnitude reduction.)

At a square mile per day, it takes 88 years and 2 months.

Assuming there is no obliteration of information, perhaps people a lone time from now, will simply be aware that this game exists -- due to the fact that there's um... a newspaper article discussing it.

A curious digger aeons from now would probably find it. Or maybe just some kid a few decades down the line.

Now that's thinking ahead.

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