Long Island

Chapter 23: The Interview

"Ah so your imagination became the starting point for everything? Especially Nancy's? Did something inspire you all or were you always this creative?" Noah asked.

"You could say that we were creative, like I play the guitar and Varun likes the drums. Nancy likes to paint, Jiang is basically the gamer. We were also inspired by creative media, you know manga, anime and stuff like that. Most of them feature unique worlds and it did inspire us in our new world design."

"So that is how the game started. You said something about memories? What is that?" Noah asked.

"Well this is an idea I had after playing a couple of the virtual reality games. The AI in those games used to make history. New history was constantly being uncovered as the players kept developing and moving ahead. If I have to say it simply, its like new stories were made so as to keep the gameplay going. I am sure a lot of you might have found yourself in a situation where you uncovered a quest containing previously unknown history. Before that no npc would know about it but suddenly they would all start talking about it. Now I am not saying that is a bad thing and it is designed in such a way that the information which was basically lost over time was discovered." Mr. Collins said and Mr. Mehta nodded.

"Now that you mention it, something like this did happen." Noah said.

"In our case that was not really needed. We had designed it to study evolution in the first place, so all we had to do was let things develop naturally over the years. The actual passage of time became history in this world. I had this idea where intelligent beings could store information about their life experiences and interactions in the form of memories. The more intelligent the life form, the more memory it could store, like humans."

"Hmm, the game AI does not make history because the characters in it have already lived through it right?" Noah asked.

"Yes, exactly. Every npc lives their own life and have their own memories of it."

"But didn't you have to build the various races? We can see atleast 3 races in the video including humans?" Noah asked.

"Actually we did nothing except make the world, put in the basics of life and add magic. Natural evolution did the rest. I think the main difference between the evolution in Long Island and the planet Earth is the introduction of magic. It remarkably influenced evolution of creatures and races, but that is what we wanted. If Earth would have had magic this might be happening in our world too, probably!" Mr. Mehta replied.

"In that case I would like to be an elf. (*more laughing) Ah but then evolution happens over millions of years. How did you achieve it in the game?"

"Its not that difficult really." Mr Collins started speaking. "Its like watching a video. You watch the video at a particular speed but the actual decoding of the video data by the computer takes place much much faster. The world and its inhabitants in the game are basically computer programs. If we are not interested in actually watching evolution take place or being part of it, the process can be sped up a lot. Millions of years of evolution can happen within human time. It still took us around 10 years of keeping the world running, including the time we were in college, to achieve this state of evolution where we can introduce players." Mr. Collins replied.

"And that is how folks this amazing game was made by the passionate people of Archesoft. Next I would like to ask about the features. People can only select the human race? Why is that?"

"That is something we decided to do to explain the world to the players. It is a bit different than the other games, having no classes. Being human would make it easier to adjust till more information about the game comes out, atleast that's what we thought. Funny thing is we might not have ended up with humans in the evolution in the first place. In that case, we would have needed to pick out some other race which could have looked like an alien." Mr. Collins replied.