Gaming to save the world.

[DatOneGuy]

Haven't watched Extra Credits since the one on writing, Haven and Hearth fits the bill on pretty much all 3 things he talked about.


Only thing I wonder is, when the point comes where people get over WoW finally and realize it's a piece of crap... will a game like HnH be commercial enough to take up enough players that would be 'in it'?

I love HnH and everything about it in concept, but I don't know whether you want to or not, will it ever work with more than a few hundred people?


If there are 10,000 people on a world that's maybe twice the size as the current world, would it work? Knowing so many more people could be online at a time (let's say 300 online at a time usually -> 4,000 usually online), would it be playable with the current model? planned models? I believe a lot would change, I know that if the current number of players wasn't an average of 4 online per SG at a time (300/81), I'd carry my sword on me 100% of the time, things would change a lot from being able to risk being non-battle-ready at times (maximum size of room for trades and such as you'd need to cary sword and shield).

I'm honestly not sure where she's going completely with the whole gamers saving the world deal, in which case she shouldn't want more people to do it, she should want more people to be able to feel that level of success but it's something you feel exclusively in gaming, it's just more typical because the real world tends to limit your chances to do so and in a game it's typical to be purposefully made so that you can achieve an 'epic win'. I'm sure a lot of people would be better having at least known that once in their life against all odds, they won something... even if it's just a game.

I don't think the amount of hours played on games weekly will help that though, at all. That just means making those problems bigger actually as you quadruple the amount of energy used to power all those computers for all those people to play said games. While her message might have had good intent I don't think she though it through as much as a typical TED presentation is thought through.

[loftar]

I love HnH and everything about it in concept, but I don't know whether you want to or not, will it ever work with more than a few hundred people?

I, for one, certainly wouldn't mind. :)

As for whether it would "work", there are two sides of it. First, as you mention, things will obviously change with a larger population and/or population density. Population density is not a problem -- the world can, technically, be arbitrarily large, so if the population density ever can be said to be "too dense", we'll just make a larger world. The server as such could easily handle a world more than twenty times the size of the current (going by length, so 400 times the size of the current world by area), and there wouldn't even be reason to stop there. How people interact with each other in a more populated world would be very, very interesting to observe, of course. It would be very exciting to see villages of potentially hundreds of active players.

From a technical side, on the other hand, the matter is different. With the current server implementation, even on a 64-bit system (solving the virtual memory problem), I think the server would run into problems CPU-wise when about 500 or so players are logged in simultaneously. I have recently started to formulate a plan which might make it possible to parallelize the server code, however. If that works out as I hope, it may be possible to handle, rather, 500 players per CPU in the server, and given that 32-way SMP machines are readily available and even more amazing hardware does exist, things could turn out interesting. It would be quite interesting with a game that could handle that many simultaneous players in one, coherent world. It is unclear when I'll start and try to implement such parallelization, though.

(let's say 300 online at a time usually -> 4,000 usually online)

As an aside, you may find this graph interesting. The red line is the number of unique accounts that have been logged in over the course of 24 hours, and the green line is the number of unique accounts that have been logged in over the course of a week (the blue line, having been added more recently, is the number of accounts registered over the course of 24 hours).

[Tacheron]

Unique accounts being traced by IP or just by account name? Cause I know many people have more than 1 account for alts.

Also, as for the gaming saving the world if there were more of it. It just might help with the overpopulation problem. When she showed that photo of the geeky kid, I thought she'd start pointing out how he's never gonna get a girl pregnant, therefore the line will stop there. More gamers like that = less people in the future

On the other hand, if any of you have watched the movie "Idiocracy", that theory might be even more accurate, which is actually scary, lol

[DeadlyPencil]

Hay my boyfriend plays WoW, they are not all bad .

Computer games are not going to save the world, maybe make the world a more bearable place to live in but no amount of 'epic wins' are going to solve global warming or war.

games can solve war. you can either make games so realistic that when iam doing a bombing run in game, iam really controlling a remote control bomber in real life. Or if you got everyone in the world playing games, people might not be interested in doing a real life war that requires physical labour.

[DatOneGuy]

Hay my boyfriend plays WoW, they are not all bad .

Computer games are not going to save the world, maybe make the world a more bearable place to live in but no amount of 'epic wins' are going to solve global warming or war.

games can solve war. you can either make games so realistic that when iam doing a bombing run in game, iam really controlling a remote control bomber in real life. Or if you got everyone in the world playing games, people might not be interested in doing a real life war that requires physical labour.

Unless there was an actual effect on others it'd always boil down to real life wars really. :/

[loftar]

Unique accounts being traced by IP or just by account name? Cause I know many people have more than 1 account for alts.

Tracked by account name; I know many people use alt accounts, but tracking by IP would be much worse, since many people are have dynamic addresses.

[DatOneGuy]

4,000 a week, wow...

A lot more people play than I thought, even if assumed the average person has 2 accounts they use, that's 2,000 people. I didn't think it'd be that many, doesn't feel like it