Cantr II Discussion Forum

Where would you get that?

Introduction

This game is what I call a computer-operated society simulator. When you join the game, you can start several characters. Those characters get a name and they get - randomly - a starting location in the sim environment. This new character has no biography or personal background other then what you play in the sim. Nothing exists except what is explicitly in the game - no history, no other worlds, etc. When you log in you can access the pages of each of your characters and there you can make them travel, build something, talk to people, write notes, produce food, etc.

Capital rule

There is one rule in this game, which is crucial for the game to become a success, but which is easy to cheat with. That is: all your characters are completely individual characters - thus your characters do not form some kind of clan together. You do not use your characters to play some goals for you as a player, but you think about what goals your individual characters would have and you try to think from the perspective of your character when you think about how to achieve your goals.

For the player this has the disadvantage that it is more difficult to do any kind of collective action - if you need other people for your goals, you will have to find ways to find them and to convince them, instead of just starting many characters yourself and have them all cooperate. There is also an advantage, though, as it means you can play completely different characters. One of your characters might be a police officer, while the other one is a major criminal, for example. It also means that your characters do not have the same information. If one of your characters knows a lot about a specific location, you are not supposed to use this information when you play for another character.

The society

The computer program behind the game creates the physical environment in which the characters act. Locations are named, buildings located, materials burried into the ground, etc. The computer keeps track of your characters health, location, inventory, and a lot of other things. The society, however, is not programmed into the game. How trade works, whether there are political systems or not, whether there is a police force or not, or whatever else you can imagine, all those things are invented by the players. Therefore, I cannot tell you much about the form this society will take in this introduction, and moreover, there might be different forms as there are different starting locations and players are supposed to play their characters independently - thus what happens around one starting location, does not necessarily resemble what is happening at another location. My hope and intention is that a complex society, with economics, wars, politics, communities, etcetera, will form itself.

How to start?

To start is rather easy. You click on 'New user' at the top of this page and you fill in the form that appears. Please fill in your real life information - not the information about a character you have in mind. Most important are your name, your email and the password you want to use. The other information is purely for my curiosity about what kind of people join and will not be used for anything but to satisfy that curiosity for myself.

After you created a user account this way, you can login using the id assigned to you and the password you said you wanted to use. You will then reach the player page, on which you can click on 'New character' to create a new character for the sim. You will only have to fill in a name and whether it is a male or a female character. Characters are humans in a sort of realistic environment - there is no magic, no science fiction, etc. After creating a character you can click on the characters name and then you will end up on the characters page. There you can do all kinds of actions with your character and the layout of the page will be clear enough so that I do not have to explain all details here.

There is no limit to the amount of characters you can create (although I might create such a limit later on if I get the impression people abuse this idea and forget about the 'capital rule'). One character does not take much time: you can put him or her to travelling, and the character will be doing so for days in a row, so that you as a player do not have anything to do. Therefore, the game gets more interesting, when you have at least a few characters. Do not start hundreds of them though, as then I will introduce this limit. Otherwise one player will dominate the game too much and there will not be enough interaction between different players.

After you join, you will get one daily email with a short status report of your characters. In this email you can also see it when other characters talked to your one, so that you know you can login to the website, and respond.

Ok, so go on and join ...

Cdls wrote:LMAO at the old description:

... I'm still stupid....