Let me try and explain this simply: As you eat, sleep, work, socialise with your friends, etc., your actions are captured by sensors and converted into a representation of yourself in some kind of simulated reality, similar to the game "The Sims".

However, this is not just about watching a simulated version of yourself. Instead, you watch, on your computer, a simulated games-player (e.g. a lank-haired teenage boy) 'playing' a simulation game which stars you, doing all the things you've been doing that day.

The clever bit is this: You actually control the simulated games-player through the actions you take and the choices you make in your daily life because the game-player's life needs to contain the motivation to 'make' you do these things. For example, if you decide to skip work and go skateboarding instead, in order to have the motivation to 'make' his Sim (i.e. you) do this, the games-player might have to have had a visit from his drop-out skateboarding friend. Do this a few times and the simulated games-player will himself drop out of school because of the need to have had enough visits from his skateboarding friend to 'make' you go skateboarding. Likewise if you enrol in a Spanish class, this might be 'because' the games-player is late with his Spanish homework.
-- hippo, Jan 20 2008

Similar game-within-a-game idea Third Life
Though without the indirect influence aspect. [theleopard, Jan 21 2008]

Not sure how it could be implemented - but I think the concept is interesting enough to ignore that for now. It makes me think of the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer from The Diamond Age.

Back to implementation for a moment, perhaps the game could have a hidden 'Director' mode where the story arc is tweakable by an interested parent.
-- zen_tom, Jan 20 2008


I don't understand the causal relationship (if there is one) between the game and real life.

Is the game purely a retelling of the life, or is there some way that you'd end up doing something in real life for the purposes of doing something else in the game?

If you want to skip work and go skateboarding, but you do it without motivation, just because you feel like it, what happens in the game while you're skateboarding in real life?
-- jutta, Jan 20 2008


The game *is* a retelling of your life, with the added level of there being a simulated games-player who appears to control your life. The things you do in real life affect the things the simulated games-player has to do or has to have happen to him to make it 'make sense'. In the simulation, the games-player appears to control you and thus must have some reason to make you go skateboarding.

So, you decide, on a whim, to go skateboarding (in real life). This activity also gets acted out by your representation in the simulation. The simulated games-player, in order to make it look like it was his idea, has to have a visit from his drop-out skateboarder buddy.

The interesting bit is not what happens to you in the game (which you already know), it's what the games-player has to do/have happen to him to make you do what you do.

Maybe I'm not explaining it very well, or maybe it's a bit convoluted...
-- hippo, Jan 20 2008


... or maybe the rest of us need a few drags on whatever it is you're smoking.........
-- 8th of 7, Jan 20 2008


Ah, I think I get it now. What's simulated is not my life (or that of a character like me), it's the life of someone who'd make me a character in the game they're playing.

In other words, if there were a god who had thought up you, and took direct interest in your life and caused stuff to happen in it, what would that god's life and interests be like? That's what you're getting to watch.

Works a lot better as a gedankenexperiment or as fiction than as a true simulation, but it's an interesting question.
-- jutta, Jan 20 2008


a controller reverse compiler
-- beanangel, Jan 20 2008


[jutta] & [UB] - yup, you've got it now. Another way of explaining is that it's a reversal of the traditional simulation game in which you 'play God' with some Sims or a Theme Park or something. In this game you play yourself and a rational god is simulated.
-- hippo, Jan 21 2008



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