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Comment by varelse | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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