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Comment by jere | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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

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.

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."

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