Sliders: Sole Survivor

I sometimes find myself getting frustrated at "gaming" and "gamers", usually following a visit to HotUKDeals or AVforums, but every now and again a light comes shining through, reminding me why I still love them. Chain World is such a beacon.

Ostensibly an experimental "game" by Jason Rohrer, an explorer of gaming concepts and paradigms, it's a one-off world of Minecraft in which there are a couple of key rules.

• Only one person at a time can play
• When that person dies they must pass on the game to another willing player

The Wired article above shows how within two "passes" things have already started to take a very weird turn purely because Jason has only created one, single, USBkey-stored version of the game. He did, however, hint at the possibility of creating an online version. He just as quickly dismissed the notion but I, for one, can't think of much I'd enjoy more.

It would exist as a Minecraft "multiverse" where for every player there would be a new world generated. Everyone would start off in their own fresh new world, exploring, creating, leaving their mark. When they died their world would move into a limbo state and the player would move into another random, previously-occupied world. Die again and you end up in another random world. Rinse and repeat, exploring to see what other people do, but only ever as a sole survivor. To provide freshness occasionally players could slide to a pervasive "limbo" world, one that's populated with hundreds of other players. This would be the only true collaborative environment and it would ensure that there were always a handful of empty worlds available for new players.

Minecraft fascinates me, scratching both the "love to explore" and the "love to build" itches simultaneously but the scope of collaborative building is, whilst inspiring, utterly downright frightening. If anyone moves forward with the "Chain Multiverse" idea, everything would be moved back down to the individual: explore, build, slide, explore, build, slide. There'd be some immense scope for griefing that would need to be addressed, of course, but for the most part the the idea of a game that's only multiplayer by virtue of the legacies you leave for others and discover is incredibly interesting to me.