quote:

---

Originally posted by Dave W.

First-person shooters are a relatively new phenomenon, starting with (I think) Castle Wolfenstein 3D back in the early 1990s.

Both before then and afterwards, there have been tons of non-shooters (and non-first-person) games that have been popular, including Incunabula, Theme Park (or Roller Coaster Tycoon), Sim City (especially), and even Tetris.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Ricky

...

What do you mean? There are plenty of non FPS games out there, and many games where killing is not the goal. And its not even first person. So I'm not quite sure what you're trying to say.

---

quote:

---

Yes, availability isn't the problem. It's the popularity of the first person shooter games among some people. What I am hoping for is a game that lures them into another genre.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Ricky
Many times I like puzzle and RPG games. But others I enjoy just shooting up a who bunch of terrorists playing Counter Strike (an FPS).

---

quote:

---

"He was asked to do it, because the designers wanted sound that is just as procedural as the game itself. He went on to demonstrate a simple software called 'The Shuffler', which even with a simple combination of samples possibly would never create the same composition twice within a lifetime."

---

quote:

---

The core of it is, we want the players to create their own worlds, all the way from the microscopic scale up to the galactic. At every level of the game there is a simulation of life, society, civilization, exploration, the player's kind of pushing back against, but as they create each level of this world it's automatically shared with other players, so that the players playing are also creating the game worlds for everybody else.

How much is the game based on established scientific theory, Darwinian evolution or what have you, and how much of it is more seat-of-your-pants?

I think the rough arc of life in the game is a pretty accurate though caricatured representation of reality, in the way life evolved from single cell to multicell to intelligence. Specifically on every level that kind of depends on what you're looking at. The evolution part of the game, the player is actually designing the creature, so in fact it's almost like intelligent design rather than pure evolution for your creature. The creatures around you are in fact kind of evolving more naturally, but in fact behind them of course are intelligent designers making the specific versions. Once we get up to the civilization level it's kind of an abstraction of human history. What are the different ways in which humans have built larger and larger groupings of people? We've done it militarily, economically, culturally, those are represented in fairly abstract terms. Once we get to space the scope of the size of the galaxy is an interesting little model of the real galaxy in terms of the distance between stars, the type of other objects you have up there, planetary nebula, black holes, stuff like that are fairly accurately represented in terms of their distribution in the galaxy, the number of stars we're dealing with is actually a very small fraction. Even though we have millions of stars in our galaxy, it's a very small fraction of what a real galaxy has. But still from the player's point of view they're both still huge numbers – almost inconceivable. Unless there's a compelling reason to break reality we've tried to follow reality, but again, in a caricatured format.

---

quote:

---

Not to mention Rollercoaster Tycoon's spinoffs - Zoo Tycon, School Tycoon, Airport Tycoon, Lemonade Stand Tycoon (I did not make this up).

---