Hey, if nothing else you just lost THE GAME, right?
The idea behind the game is straightforward enough. The player starts by creating an avatar. It's initially a really low level character and the player doesn't really have a lot of input. It's all going on beneath the surface. Sorta forms itself, along some built in programming paths with heuristic learning and inputs from higher level players but, pretty soon the player has an increasing or decreasing degree of control over the little fella. If the player chooses to.
Otherwise he'll just mosey about and do his own thing in the game world. The new guy always spawns in the company of other characters, they'll provide inputs, suggestions, admonitions, encouragement, discouragement and training in the rules of the game. Whatever they might have decided those rules might be.
The rules of the game, aside for some general mechanical stuff, physics and environmental rules (There's a resource-gathering element, of course) are largely dictated by the players. It's a true sandbox game, one hundred percent open ended, aside from the one rule of the game - players only get one life. No respawns. No bonus credits.
The game is total immersion. Like all futuristic and shit with totally retina-realistic graphics, surround sound and pixel perfect feedback of all
other sensory input. It's so real you'll feel as if you're there. If you take damage you'll feel pain. If you're driving a sports car with the top down, you'll feel the wind and the bugs smacking off your face.
Like I said, it's totally sandbox - no stated aim or objective. Pick something you want to do and go out and try to make it happen. The gameworld itself is largely designed by the players with organically evolving scenarios available to be engaged in, in a practically incalculable number of ways. But be warned - some of the other players take this game quite seriously.
They take it so seriously that some of them seem to actually forget they're playing a game at all. Worse still, some of them get hung up on the wider consequences of the one and only rule of the game. Players only get one life. No respawns. No bonus credits. And after their game is over? Well, to be quite honest nothing has ever been adequately proven, to this player at least. I wouldn't say I'm actually convinced there is a world outside of this game.
So given that that's the case, I figure I might as well pay the shit out of the game. Get my character advanced as many levels as possible. Gain skills and abilities, try to beat my highscore in as many sub-games as I think look interesting. Sooner or later I'll lose. Maybe I'll lose to a boss character or maybe I'll slip off a ledge and die but until then - IT'S PLAYTIME!!
