One Hour One Life is a completely intriguing new indie game that's a thrilling twist on the second life/virtual world concept: Instead of creating an avatar that's typically a young adult, you come into the game as a helpless baby, dependent on other players who have grown up into adults to care for you. (Including, most especially, the player who gives birth to you.) And if you survive into late teen/adulthood, you can actually contribute to this virtual world by helping remake society from scratch and through the ages. And oh yeah, as the title suggests, each life (i.e. game session) only lasts an hour, during which time you either die from misfortune or finally, from old age. In other words, Second Life if it was more like Actual Life.
If this description is confusing, don't worry, just watch this fairly hilarious gameplay session from Draegast(above). If you're impressed by the game's scope, that's probably because the game is from acclaimed indie designer Jason Rohrer, whose ambition is nothing less than trying to model actual society. From his blog last year:
There's an analogy in there about civilizations being like flying contraptions, and it's easy to confuse falling with flying for a while, when we jump off the cliff with our flapping wing suit or whatever. The ground seems to be getting closer, so we flap the wings harder. We look down on the ground below and see an array of other crashed flying contraptions. Why did they crash? We'll never know. But we're not going to crash like them! We have it figured out. Like every time we find the ruins of an abandoned civilization, we scratch our heads. Why would they ever leave all of THIS? Well, we're never leaving ours, that's for sure.
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