GooGrid...The First MMOE?

[Akasha]

MindSurge Entertainment (the creators of Freeworld) announced today that they have partnered with developer Ray Pingree on a new MMOE project. MMOE? Well, that is a Massive Multiplayer Online Ecosystem apparently. Just when you thought you had seen the last MMO acronym!

One of the interesting things about this little "social experiment" is that it is mostly created by the players who basically provide graphics and data for virtual critters which in turn are "set free" to interact with the world and other players critters.

The game is in open beta right now and free to download and play. If you are interested just get it at this link.

[size=18px]Warcy's Write Up[/size]

It was just a matter of time before eco-fans demanded a game like this--and it just bugs the heck outta you to play it. But then, that’s what it’s all about...building bugs and other critters and seeing how they survive on this new massively multiplayer online game. Best of all, open beta for Ray Pingree's GooGrid just opened up and a brand new version trotted down the ramp!

Ray Pingree's GooGrid starts out with a map showing an ecosystem of terrain and bugs. You join in by creating your own bugs...and you don’t have to be a graphic designer to do it. The game has an inbuilt "critter wizard" that has preformatted bug designs and statistics. You can choose from harmless seed-eating bugs to ferocious bug-slaughtering bugs or sleepy one-of-a-kind bugs. You don’t even have to stick to bugs if you don’t want to. The advanced game wizard lets you design any kind of critter you want, including some I saw last night in the form of flame-boys and dragons. The idea is to find out which critter can first of all survive in your world, then if they can predominate, and finally which can proliferate fast enough to take over the world.

Barely out of alpha, the game appears to have surprisingly few bugs to work out (if you’ll pardon the expression), but the potential is vast. The creator of GooGrid, Ray Pingree, is a 28-year-old graduate student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, studying the effects of the media in politics. GooGrid is a pet project of Ray's that he has been working on for two years. Just for fun, he told us. He recently teamed up with MindSurge Entertainment to co-develop the game and to ultimately produce it.

I asked Ray, why bugs...why an eco-system? He went off into what I thought at first was a tangent. It turns out this was the whole idea behind Ray Pingree's GooGrid.

"The most important thing was to create a game where people can be creative," Ray said, "and be able to appreciate each other’s creativity, without competing."

I didn’t quite understand what Ray was getting at until he said, "I wasn’t doing this to model reality at all. Evolution is amazing but actually boring to watch...you can only piece together what happened in retrospect. So I built an ecology system that is based on fact but not evolution. You will notice the bugs don’t evolve."

And the light dawned on me. "So you mean this world is not based on the real world. It has a system of ecology rules all its own."

Ray nodded approvingly at me, like a teacher whose student FINALLY got it. "Instead of random selection and mutations, the players do all the evolving, so THEY are in the loop. They have to understand what's going on in the ecosystem and figure out a niche." He added with a grin, "This is BETTER than evolution."

Now it made perfect sense why my cute little Grub bug (as I fondly named it) died so often. It wasn't suited for the environment I put it in. I needed something a little more aggressive and a little more sturdy-–so back to the drawing board I went, came up with a beetle I imaginatively called "Scarab," and watched it clean up the ecosystem on my screen.

While this game is multiplayer-–and can even be massively multiplayer, there is limited interaction in the game between the players. You can chat with any other player in the game. You can see others’ screens and even take a shot of said others’ screens, but you can’t really play on their turf in real time. However, their bugs CAN and often do migrate onto your screen, and your bugs can go a-roaming in others’ territories. There are some controls in the Advanced Species Wizard but Clyde Bielss, CEO of MindSurge Entertainment, warned, "They have minds of their own. You can program them to a certain extent from the Advanced Wizard, but they will often do things when you least expect it." It's kind of like having your own ant farm, but far more unpredictable, at the same time with LOTS more control over it. Go figure!

The way you keep score in this game (and get to appreciate the finer points of other people’s bugs) is a rating system that tells you at any given time, which is the world’s NUMBER ONE bug, which is second, and so on. It’s all set out at the top and if your bugs are hardy and able to survive well in the particular ecosystem where you start out in, then they might be able to migrate and prosper in other adjacent screens as well.

Clyde Bielss, apart from being CEO of MindSurge Entertainment, is one of the new devs brought in by the MindSurge-Pingree partnership to work on the game. He is enthusiastic about the artistic side of the game. "You can be as creative as you like," Clyde said. "You get to create your own bugs or critters...they don’t have to be bugs...dragons, gizmos, whatever. It gives everyone a chance to be creative."

And if you are self-conscious about your artistry but still want to play this absolutely fascinating game, there is all kinds of good news for you. Firstly, you can select from a variety of pre-drawn bugs, add statistics to make them eat green seeds, or blue goo, or be predators, or give them bonuses such as more efficiency, better teeth, some armor...oh, the list is endless. Then you can test your bug before actually releasing it into the world. Once you think your bug can survive, you can move it on up to the west side (oh, I mean move it into the ecosystem proper) and see how well it does in the big bad world.

The rating system is visible at all times and I have to tell you the thrill I had when I logged onto the game in the wee hours yesterday morning, taking a break from writing the Great American Novel™ (yes, me too) and played for about 10 minutes. Apparently the bugs don't sleep and mine had been busy. There it was in living color-–my yellow scarab with purple polka dots was 15th in the world. Now, that’s a real rush and pretty top seed if you ask me.

The second piece of news is that MindSurge Entertainment and Ray Pingree have thrown open the GooGrid doors to open beta. And Ray stayed up all last night working on a new version so that it would be available when the news of open beta hit the super highway. The team is in no hurry to go live with this product. However, for more good news, they have announced that open beta will be available until the game does go live. By the way, if you want even more entertainment with this enchanting game, move your cursor around the login screen. Or click anywhere and watch. I spent 10 minutes yesterday just being fascinated by that screen. And no, I'm not that easily entertained. I just bet you’ll like the screen too. Beats the snot out of the blue screen of death, I’ll tell ya.

To download the latest open beta version, click here. For news, hints, and forums, click here. As for me, pardon me if I don’t write any more on this piece. I've got to go see how my new pink little bug Pinky (I gotta find better names) is doing. He is the fastest little critter I ever saw on 6 legs. And he has obviously never heard of birth control. I have high hopes for Pinky!

Article Source : Warcry
News Source : MMORPG.com

[boscolio]

huh. that sounds like quite the experiment in online gaming. it seems to be like a SIMS game with a few differences, obviously. it's officially on my radar now so i'll be curious to see where this goes.

oh, and when i first read the title of this thread i made up what it was really about. you get an interesting idea of what kind of a game could be considered a Massively Multiplayer Online Epilepsy game. ;)

[Akasha]

Originally Posted by boscolio

you get an interesting idea of what kind of a game could be considered a Massively Multiplayer Online Epilepsy game. ;)

HAHA you don't even want to KNOW the first thing that came into my head for the E part.... :oops: