Game Neverending

An alpha release** of Game Neverending is nearly ready for your game play (sign up to get an alpha tester account). On its face, GNE is a “web-based massively multiplayer online game of social, political and economic interactions”, but once it gets going, it’ll be hard to tell where the game stops and where real life begins. People create new online personas for the purpose of “social, political, and economic interactions” all the time. When you talk to someone in the game about how your day is going, are you playing the game or just being a person? When I helped them chase down a bug the other day, it felt like part of the game.

You can get a sense of the game’s meaning by reading Ludicorp’s about page:

“‘The game and styles of playing the game are what matter because they produce identities people care about. Likewise, a business develops an identity by providing a product or a service to people. To do that it needs capital, and it needs to make a profit, but no more than it needs to have competent employees or customers or any other thing that enables production to take place. None of this is the goal of the activity.’ The goal is to kick ass.”

** Stewart tells me the game is only about 5% there right now…a prototype for the real game to come. Never has 5% seemed so whole. Viewing the source gives me a headache…Eric’s got some mad CSS & JavaScript kung-fu.