Game Development Plan

Sim Empowerment is a new kind of activism gaming experience. This is a planning document for the development of the Sim Empowerment computer game. It details how the game will be developed and what direction the development will take. 

Game Goals Empower Players To create a game that promotes empowering ideas as a positive force for change around the world. Reach Everyone To make a difference, Sim Empowerment must reach the widest possible audience with the best possible game. Revolutionize Gaming To revolutionize the gaming industry with a new genre of game and to encourage the industry to explore more meaningful storytelling. Platform To provide a platform for other game developers to innovate with. Freedom of Choice the player is so free to choose their course that they can choose their own ends and the means to achieve them. Immersion The environment is so realistic that it suspends disbelief. Sustainability The game sustains itself by making money for its developers because of open source freedom, not in spite of it.

From Games To Reality

The Sim will introduce gamers to The Net. A gamer pretending to be an activist championing a real-world issue is presented the opportunity to get involved with that issue for real. They can add the issue to their agenda and get involved with joining groups and initiating actions. The critical link between interest and involvement will be explicitly offered to gamers. Gaming the Sim will provide an introduction to using the real Net. In effect, the experience will be almost the same, prompting gamers to wonder why they should waste their time Siming when they could be doing real activism.

Sim Empowerment is just one of the many tools that Net Empowerment will produce, distribute and facilitate. The whole package will constitute a distro, a disc for mass-distribution. Some distros will fit onto memory chips, others on CDs and DVDs, others will require install. Quality settings of low-importance textures and models are compromisable, for example.

Realistic Methods Simulator Training Software

All the tools of Net Empowerment will integrate into the experience of Sim Empowerment in such a way that you will actually have a virtual computer within the sim that you learn to operate effectively. The computer will come up to the full screen as it does in Doom 3 or be operated from looking at the screens, with mouse control or pointer control automatically established by the hand reaching out while you do this.

The Net Empowerment system you use is actually running on a special local instance of the Server system and the Firefox browser you use is piped into the 3D OpenGL environment.

This way, there is no difference between the two. Some automation and limitation of options may take place to confine interaction to AI-understood channels unless you are dealing strictly with human players.

If someone else already establishes pointer control you have to wait your turn, ask them to move or push them aside first.

Roleplaying Is The Elite Education Method

If roleplaying works as a training method for presedential candidates, trial lawyers, US military forces, CIA agents, and UN diplomats, it can work for activists. The DOD puts its soldiers through intensive real-world wargames and computer simulations. They even developed a free game called Americas’ Army to attract new recruits. Civilian elite professionals like diplomats and lawyers also use roleplaying games like Model UN and Mock Trial to confront students with the challenging dynamics of simulated governments and courtrooms. No candidate steps into the political ring without first role-playing debates with aides. Roleplaying works because it puts players through experiences instead of just cramming their head with untested facts. Roleplaying is the next best thing to actual experience at doing something. It’s 31337 ¹ .

Sim Empowerment Training

Sim Empowerment is a virtual training ground to learn real-world skills. There are several modes of skill training you can play with.

Simulation can help train you to remember important techniques and information necessary to perform a skill correctly. Sometimes the learning takes the form of question and answer. Sometimes this is multiple choice. Answering questions correctly helps you succeed with the skill.

Skill Learning Mode

In learning mode, wrong answers are explained correctly to help you learn. Hints can be requested to help you get things right if you forget or want assistance.

For example:

You try to create a podcast. Each step of the podcasting process is explained to you, allowing to make a podcast without knowing how. Next time, you could figure out most of the steps yourself and ask for hints when you forget. Eventually, you will know the process well enough to test your podcasting skills. When you try podcasting for real, you will have the essential method memorized.

SkilL Testing Mode

In testing mode, wrong answers are punished by increasing risk of failure without giving you immediate feedback about exactly what mistakes you make. Later on you receive an after-action report with your “test scores” showing how well you did and what you could do better next time.

Games Are Instant Gratification Fun

Games are first and foremost fun because they make it easy to win meaningful victories immediately. It might be realistic for change to be gradual and hard-fought, but it is hardly entertaining.

Role-playing great success is encouraging to activists who might face years of diligent work before achieving success in the real world. In the context of the game, winning is exciting and easily achieved unless you opt for high realism and increased difficulty. If you must wait for something gradual, you can compress time to skip ahead years into the future.

People understand the issues but feel hopeless. they have to find ways to act. Games give them a way to start doing that in an easy way until they work up the courage to do real work.

Games Reward Try-Before-You-Die Learning

Games are powerful learning tools because we can try many different things without fear of long-term consequences. You can afford to experiment with creative strategies every time you play until you discover what works, what fails, and what causes hilarity to ensue. Good games are designed such that you can have fun becoming more skilled by understanding the rules and discovering how to exploit them successfully.

Role-playing Is Here: Computers Will Come Later

Computer games are the perfect system for simulating Empowerment. Face-to-face roleplaying is still the most liberating and imaginative game technology around, but computer simulations are the future. They’re also infinitely more complex to create than face-to-face role-playing games. The game industry has development teams and budgets rivaling the movie industry and already surpassing movies in profitability.

It simply doesn’t make sense to wait around for a computer game when we can start role-playing today. Why wait for next-generation technology developments when we already have incredibly powerful brains capable of running the games in our imaginations? Sim Empowerment RPG is the first incarnation of Sim Empowerment. Role-playing emphasizes the use of human imagination and focuses on vivid story-telling in the absence of any graphics or sound.

The most crucial advantage of human role-playing over computer games is the AI: Even the most sophisticated computer AI characters behave like jerky marionettes compared to the acting abilities of an experienced roleplayer, and no pre-scripted computer game can respond to the players’ actions with the originality and wits of a crafty Gamemaster.

Go nuts and Get It Out Of Your System

You can improve your activist skills with lessons learned from role-playing and simulation games, but are responsible for the real risks you take. Life is not a game. There is no saving and restoring in reality. Many things that are funny in games are deadly wrong if acted out. So remember to keep your mayhem virtual. Act out hair-brained schemes where no one is hurt.

The Sims, Best-Selling Wish Fulfillment Of All Time

People thought that nobody would want to play The Sims. It’s the best selling game of all time because people find real life fascinating, especially if they can live out fantasy scenarios. For example, a swimming pool is something most people lust after and can make in The Sims. Simple thing really, but it sells games to be able to live out fantasy lives in dream houses.

“What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?”

—Henry David Thoreau

Many people long for a worthy government and world in which to live. With Sim Empowerment, we can finally engage in wish fulfillment of the highest order and fantasize about changing what really matters.

 

Organizer Functions

Complex games like MMRPGs all include simple organizers to help you keep track of quests, inventory, and other important details of playing the game. These HUDs are usually not a believably integrated part of the game world, instead they hover in the player’s plane of view without any existence within the game.

Sim Empowerment is different. In Sim Empowerment, you can enable or fall back on such a HUD when you don’t have time or patience to deal with a physical computer within the game world. The default, however, is to rely on a computer inside and the Net Empowerment software running on it. Thus Net Empowerment’s organizing and other functionality provides players a realistic training experience that translates directly into the real world. Each computer running within Sim Empowerment will be a virtual machine running the actual software and piping its screen VNC-like to your game environment for interactivity with you and other players. You could conceivably link up real live data to the simulated environment for such things as world news and other real-world relavent data sources.

 

IMAGINE ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE

Sim empowerment is a role-playing game you can play today and an open-source computer game to revolutionize gaming. help wanted. enquire within.

Sim Empowerment is a new kind of game where you learn how to change the real world. Play as a larger-than-life version of yourself, a fictional alter-ego of your own creation or a powerful historical figure you admire, Face realistic scenarios challenging harmful ideas in corrupt institutions and thwart the world leaders that run them. Gather in global worlds run by experts with millions of other people, put together a team of your friends or strike out on your own initiative. It’s your world now, we just live in it.

Reality Is A Winnable Game We’re Not Even Playing

How do you approach life as a high-stakes game and win? This is what Sim Empowerment is all about. The problem is that most of us don’t know the game or the rules by which the real world operates.

“Future wars are won today in practice.”

Gamers Graduate Into Real Empowerment Without Trying To

“Now what do you do?” It’s a question that will get easier to answer every time you practice using life-applicable skills and resources. Unlike pure fantasy games, Empowerment experiences may inspire you to actually do something to make yourself a stronger person and make the world a better place. It’s like a school where every day is an adventure field trip.

Why Games Rule The World

The achievements and horizons of games are astonishing. Gamers are served up annual waves of innovation from the gaming industry as each generation of games seeks to redefine the cutting edge. To see the latest game is to be amazed by the diversity of worlds can now be experienced by millions.

What’s wrong with games today?

Violence, predictability, formulaic genres, poor storytelling, divertingly entertaining poitnlessness; Games suffer from many of the same problems as the film industry. The industry is an endlessly escalating competition to excel at ‘amusing people to death’, to borrow a phrase from Neil Postman.

A gamer returning to the real world from a marathon play session often feels a sense of lost time, a futile isolation: nothing is learned, nothing is gained, all the achievements are imaginary and neglected reality remains unimproved by the accomplishment of virtual quests.

"Reviewing a game like this is a waste of time. It's like assessing the nutritive value of a King Size Snickers. It's basically raw, unfettered escapism and there's no person who expects nourishment from it. I'm not sure every game warrants the gaze of the game criticism apparatus."

—Tycho on Penny Arcade

Net Empowerment

Development Plans

There are several possible scenarios for a synergistic combination of commercial game development with open technology.

Fork the code after the first game between company’s freedom and open branch

Trading salary and ownership for long-term deal making

50 million dollars return for 3-4 million

90% of games lose money

EA releases 10 games, 9 flop and 1 makes money for all

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Sim Empowerment

The Empowerment Simulation is the teaching environment for activists. In playing the Sim, the player can practice changing the world by communicating ideas, taking direct actions and organizing with other people.

Simulation or Game?

Whereas a game entertains and sometimes teaches, a simulation teaches and sometimes entertains. Empowerment is a simulation first and foremost because its primary purpose is to provide a learning environment. It is also a game because its secondary priority is to appeal to a wide audience with its entertainment value.

Gamemastering Earth

Empowerment roleplaying game describes how to envision and explore future and present scenarios. It requires greater knowledge of the real world and how it operates, rather than specialized fantasy world knowledge to escape to. You need to learn about how governments work and about professions and cultures outside your own to be ready to gamemaster this.

What do you do?

“What should one do?” It is a question that preoccupies mankind. Ethics and philosophy largely concern what is good and right to do. Roleplayers are familiar with the question and clever at coming up with unexpected answers. Every time the game or GM puts them into a predicament, they think of a plan that puts their skills and resources to best use for the situation. In the real world, when most people hear about a serious problem, their first reaction is “What can I do about that? I’m nobody.” Empowerment puts players in real-world situations where they can take risks and say, “I’m going to do something about that somehow. I can think of a way.”

 

Simulation Development Plan

This plan of action lays guides the development of the Empowerment game.

Whose game is it?

Ultimately, Sim belongs to everyone. Initially, it is my responsibility. As a founder, I intend to dedicate myself to guiding its development until it becomes an autonomous leaderless movement of independent participants continuing the work without my supervision. Like a parent, my goal is for the child I bear to grow up and move out and have children of its own, not to keep it under my thumb long after it can take care of itself.

The Openly Profitable Business Model

Game development can be both profitable and free. There are business models that can be built around open-source development.

Selling Free Software

Large open-source projects like Linux distributions make money by selling packaged versions of their open-source products. People buy the retail copies instead of downloading disk images for a variety of reasons.

The holiday gift-giving season is a major financial force in the gaming industry, and not everyone has the time or sophistication to download and burn discs. The sheer size that Empowerment’s data files are likely to achieve will give many pause. It will quickly balloon to DVD-size proportions of multiple gigabytes, and few people have DVD-Rs or the patience to download something that large.

Selling Delayed Free Software

Software can start as commercially developed and be sold for a long and profitable business cycle until it undergoes a time-delayed open-source release.

Downloadability

Bandwidth is less of a factor now that BitTorrent can be used to place the file-serving load on the downloaders themselves. Counterstrike is an example of a free game that successfully sells retail copies.

License Distinctions Between Open and Free

There are different “open” and “free” software licenses that entail different arrangements. It is not yet decided which license Empowerment will use.

Commercial Game Development Synergy

The cutting-edge of gaming technology and development is in the commercial sector. There is not yet the millions of dollars of funding required to finance a paid but open development project. Such a model has not yet been attempted and has no proven record of success. It makes sense to develop Sim Empowerment through a combination of open and commercial game development models.

Multiple Clients Implement Technologies Differently

Many of the advanced graphics technologies for things like SpeedTree RT are not available in an open-source license. It makes sense to adopt these technologies for the commercial project because of the value they add, but it makes more sense for the open-source project to build something open from scratch. Both approaches can coexist. SpeedTree RT could be employed on the server to generate simpler geometry for the open clients to visualize without SpeedTree.

Paying Developers

Empowerment is developed as an open-source project and eventually also sold as a finished commercial product with profit shares going back to the contributors based on their share, contributors can vote to increase somebody’s share based on merit, voting means more for them and less for everyone else including you, vote strength is based on your share.

The Open Source Tech Lab Symbiosis

Much of Linux’s development is supported by Red Hat, IBM and the industry-supported think-tank the Open Source Technologies Lab where Linus Torvalds now works full-time. It would be a

The Open Development Process

Project Phases

The SimPower project will progress through several stages.

Research Planning

This document is the research planning process.

Feedback

Sharing the document with other people to solicit feedback.

Recruitment

Finding key developers to start the project

Development

Developers produce code, art and infrastructure to create the game.

Testing

The game is released in its first playable form for testers to hammer on and provide massive amounts of feedback to improve all aspects of the game.

Final Release

The game is declared gold master when all known bugs are fixed and important content is complete. It is released in a retail form in time for Christmas.

Updates

The game is continually updated to incorporate new materials developed by the community, each module of which would go through the same development cycle before it merits inclusion in the final game.

Game As Metaphor For Life: Playing To Win-Win

Think of users as players and the game as being for real-life stakes. The game is being played around us above our heads.

Footnotes

1: test