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| Thursday |
the Sixth of May, 2004 |
Entertaining Breedster hive-thinking, which my bug has actually been
standing right on the edge of, unwittingly grazing on the lush blue
pigment; a heart drawn from insect faecal matter.
I'm barely touching the game, but the meta-level is amusing me. That the
game's two viruses - one that stops players from producing offspring, and
another that slows their metabolisms - must be system
restrictions disguised within a game context, rather than random ideas.
The infertility STD slows breeding psychologically as much as
physically, and the gut-affecting poison decreases the amount of moves
an insect can make per day - both are effective in cutting site usage, and the
"too many users connected" problems seem to have stopped now.
They've been clever to implement these restrictions as an
expansion of the game, rather than blandly announcing site-wide
changes for bandwidth reasons. If players are annoyed, it's within the
context of the game, and they may actually blame themselves for
it. (There's some good, related reading in The
Lessons of Habitat.)
The genuine emergence is quite fascinating, as well. That with an
apparent lack of visible disease markings (I've been idly playing
Zendo
with infected and uninfected bugs, to no avail), insects are
using their on-screen tagline to warn or threaten of infection.
Which does, of course, suggest a tried-and-tested evolutionary
countermeasure...
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