Who's Interested in Seed, an MMO Where Players Try to Rebuild Society?

Seed, an MMO set to launch next year, is using Improbable's SpatialOS backbone to scale a truly large virtual world in which players must rebuild society from scratch. Emily Gera (last seen here writing about the Jane Austen MMO), has a good write-up of Seed on Eurogamer:

Studio co-founder Ivar Emilsson describes Seed to me as a colonialist story set on one vast planet with limited resources. In the game, a so-far ambiguous event has led to the downfall of your home planet and you are now tasked with colonising an exo-planet in a nearby solar system to re-form society from scratch. "Each community starts off with the condition of anarchy, with no leader or head of the colony," says Emilsson. The colony grows over time, and eventually it becomes big enough and unlocks the ability to propose a constitution - what is essentially a customizable political framework where the player can decide on different societal laws, from taxation limits to the rights of characters. As progression happens organically, characters will grow, breed, and develop their social construct. Likewise, as the community eventually comes under threat, so does the physical and mental health of the individuals who make up the community.

Pioneering law professor Lawrence Lessig is helping develop the political framework of Seed, which seems to be the first MMO he's consulted on since advising Linden Lab on Second Life's IP rights policy. I'm overwhelmingly impressed by the ambition of this game, while also wondering how much of a market for society building-MMOs there actually is:

By description it reminds me a bit of A Tale in the Desert from last decade, also an ambitious MMO that emphasized society-building over warfare -- widely admired by game designers and journalists, it failed to gain much of a userbase. Still, maybe that game launched before its time, and now the technology is finally ready to make world-building on a grand scale feasible, and appealing. And if Seed winds up becoming a brutal battle royale among competing social groups, that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.

Comments

[Rin]

It would be interesting to know how much freedom such a game offers in order to shape the society. Like ... is it possible to make the direct democracy of an actual anarchy based society or have it turn towards a different, maybe even extreme, political setting? Monarchy maybe, or a theocracy or some sort of science-meritocracy?

Such a game would be very interesting if done well.

[Willow Dion]

Yes, the idea is very interesting. I'm so tired of games that are kill kill kill.

[irihapeti]

A thing about these kinds of games and why they rarely go anywhere in terms of user uptake.

These types of games are made to be about us. How might we exploit our environment for our own benefit, while remaining on mutually good terms with our fellow exploiters who are also in it for their own benefit.

Personally I think that a far richer game would be one where there are also indigenous animals and people (bots) who live in the world. And we, the colonists, have to learn how to survive within this, and have to make hard decisions about what we do in terms of exploiting the planet's resources, which could be detrimental to the indigenous should we be greedy or uncaring.

This gives a colonist something to think about other than just themselves, when working with the other colonists to form a society and the governance of