Bleeding Fiction

Intriguing idea. However, isn't a video game, or any game, a discreet metaphor for human life from which we can derive the large from the small. Life has so many variables and intertwining challenges that make it difficult to appreciate and find pleasure in the layered competition between the individual and his environment. Games create a discreet challenge with near-term, realizable goals and a promise of completion and fulfillment. Games are getting more complex than soccer or chess, and people still enjoy appreciate the advances. Still, there must be some threshold short of your uber game in which the game play becomes as tedious as walking down a real street, driving a real car, and going to a real job. What's the point of having an uber game if you're not going to use all its options. If you're going compell yourself to use all its options, well, that's just a chore with no end.

Interesting comments, Vitaly. Certainly I would agree with your idea of the "discrete metaphor" of games, and even the most open-ended game has near-term goals, but the evidence might well be against you on the "threshold." For an example witness The Sims or Real Lives, both of which I linked to above. Both of these games have, as their very premise, a whollistic immersion in the mundanities of real life. Obviously there's a degree of distance - the games don't take place in real-time for example and, until recently, the Sims was limited to your character's home and block and judging from all of the expansion packs and the online membership and so on, I'd say the game has a good level of popularity.

Your second point is maybe more valid - more of a reason to keep the uber-game at bay. Not all types of games will appeal to all gamers, and the die-hard sports fan won't want to sink his money into a game that gives him the option to do all of those other things if he just wants to play his sports game (Substitute genre as appropriate). While there's a certain type of gamer who loves all types of games (Ogre comes to mind here), there's surely just as many or more who are specific. Good call.

I totally recall that the uber game has already been invented (at least in imagination), although it wasn't presented as a game. In Total Recall (bad pun earlier), the game was mapped onto reality except the player could choose several variables to make reality more interesting. The player interacts with an AI environment, except the AI engine was probably the real intelligence of the gamer's dream-like state.

Admittedly I found Sim-Life (and cleaning up virtual trash) kind of dull, but I really enjoyed Sim Earth, which was less realistic and more thought provoking. I'm probably out of touch with the threshold I spoke about. Just to offer the other side on the "too many options" argument, I could see it working as a family entertainment appliance. You can have different users playing whichever part of the virtual world they enjoy. Perhaps Jane's spy thriller game character can go visit the arena where Dick is playing his hockey game. Suddenly, Dad's fighter plane is shot down and falls from the sky and crashes into the ice, killing Dick's goalie. Mom, who has just put together a city budget that could pay down the recession debt when all of a sudden she has to scramble to find funding to cover the clean up from the hockey arena fire. Grandpa is planning war with Canada for shooting down one of our jets. Grandma can't be distracted because she's about to win her bridge tournament in Virtual Vegas. No one has time to see Spot run anymore.