Games That Play Themselves

A few days ago a new iOS app called Dreeps landed in my news feed, heralded with headlines like Maybe The Laziest RPG You Could Ever Play and A Video Game That Plays Itself. Dreeps is an app where a little robot boy goes on an adventure, Japanese RPG style.  You set an alarm to tell him to rest, and that’s it.  When the alarm goes off, he gets up and gets on with his adventure, fighting monsters and meeting NPCs.  There’s pixel art and chiptune audio.  Dialog is word balloons with squiggly lines for text.  It’s all very atmospheric.  You just don’t do anything, really, but watch when you want and suggest he get up when he’s resting after a fight.

Dreeps is a lot like Godville, a game I talked about in a post about Pocket Worlds back in 2012.  They’re games that (appear, depending on the implementation) to be running and progressing even when you’re not around.  While Godville does its magic with text, Dreeps has neat graphics and sound.  They’re essentially the same game, though.  A singular hero you have slight control over goes on a quest.  In Godville it’s for your glory (since you’re their god), in Dreeps it’s to destroy evil (I think).

Both Dreeps and Godville are passive entertainment experiences, they’re worlds that are all about you, but not really games you play.  They’re games you experience, or perhaps we need a new word for this kind of thing.  While books and TV shows and music (although not playlists, as we’ve seen with Pandora) are hard to create for just one person’s unique enjoyment, games are great at that.  They can take feedback and craft an experience just for you, and as we built more complex technology and can access more external datasets, they can get even more unique.

Imagine a game like Dreeps where the other characters (or maybe even the enemies) are modeled algorithmically after your Facebook friends (or LinkedIn contacts).  Take their names, mash them through a fantasy-name-izer, do face detection and hue detection to pick hair color and eye color, maybe figure out where they’re from (geolocated photos, profile hometowns or checkins) for region-appropriate clothing.  Weather from where they are, or where your friends live, maybe playing on an appropriate map.  You could even use street view and fancy algorithms to identify key regional architectural elements and generate game levels that ‘feel’ like the places they live.  That starts to get pretty interestingly personalized, though much less predictable.

Mike Diver over at Vice posted an article about Dreeps titled I Am Quite OK With Video Games That Play Themselves, where his main point was that he’s figured out that he’s actually bad at games, and it’s nice to have something where you can enjoy the progression without working about your joystick skills.  Maybe Mike should spent more time with Animal Crossing, a game series I think Dreeps shares a lot of DNA with.  In Animal Crossing your character inhabits a town that progresses in real-time.  You can go fishing and dig up treasure and pick fruit and talk to the other inhabitants in your little village, but the world keeps going when you’re not playing, so if you leave it alone for a long time, you come back to a game that’s progressed without you (with the game characters wondering where you’ve been).  Dreeps is like that, but without the active user participation.  It’s like a zen Farmville.  Take out the gamification, add in some serenity.

It feels like Dreeps could be a really fantastic lock-screen-game, if that’s a thing.  You nudge your phone awake, and see your guy trudging along.  He’s always there, in a comforting, reassuring, living way.  Maybe Samsung or someone with some great cross-vertical reach could implement lock-screen or sleep-screen as a platform across TVs, phones, tablets, fridges, etc.  That’d be something.

I was talking to a friend of mine about these kind of games yesterday, pondering where this is headed, and I mentioned that the experience almost feels like an Ecosphere.  Ecospheres are those totally enclosed ecosystems, where aside from providing a reasonable temperature and sunlight, you’re a completely passive observer. There’s something nice about walking by and peeking in on it every once in a while.  Something comforting about knowing that even when you’re not watching it’s going on about its fantastically complex business without you.  But there’s also a spiritual weight to it, because it’s a thing that could cease to exist.  I could cover the Ecosphere with a sheet or leave it out in the cold, I could delete Godville or Dreeps from my phone, or have my phone stolen, unable to retrieve my little robotic adventurer.

It isn’t a huge weight now that we carry with these sorts of things.  In fact, I stopped checking in on my Godville character a few months ago, after over a year of nearly daily care.  Sometimes you just lose the thread.  But these systems are going to become more complex, more compelling.  They’re going to have more pieces of ourselves in them.  How would I feel if a friend of mine was a major character in Dreeps, always showing up to help me out, and then he died in real life?  What if Dreeps decides to shutter their app, or not release an upgrade for the new phone I get after that?  Would I leave my device plugged in, forever stuck at iOS whatever, just so the experiences could keep going?  The Weavrs I created for myself back in 2012 are gone, victims to this onward march of technology and unportability of complex cloud-based systems.  I’m fortunate that I never got too attached.  Droops is an app, but there’s still a lot there outside of my control.

I’m particularly interested in where this stuff intersects with physical objects.  Tamagotchis are still out there, and we’re building hardware with enough smarts to be able to create interesting installations.  There’s an Austin Interactive Installation meetup I keep meaning to go to that’s probably full of folks who would have great ideas about this.  Imagine a pico-projector or LCD screen and a RaspberryPi running a game like Dreeps, but with the deep complexity and procedural generation systems of Dwarf Fortress.  Maybe a god game like Populous, with limited interaction.  You’d be like Bender in Godfellas, watching a civilization grow.  Could that sit in your home, on your desk or by the bookshelf, running a little world with little adventurers for years and years?  Text notifications on your phone when interesting things happened.  A weekly email of news from their perspective?  As it sat on your desk for longer, would it be harder and harder to let go of?  When your kids grew up, would they want to fork a copy and take it with them?

4 years ago there were no low-power GPU sporting Raspberry Pis or globally interconnected Nest thermostats or dirt-cheap tablet-sized LCD screens or PROCJAM.  Minecraft was still in alpha, the indie game scene hadn’t exploded, the App Store was still young, procedural content generation was a niche thing.  Now all those pieces are there, just waiting to be plugged together.  So who’s going to be the first one to do it?