World builder

 

Saw this video and it reminded me not only of the wonderful things that are now possible in the virtual world, but of when I was thinking about making worlds up for role-playing games, painting pictures (or trying to) in my head about the layout of imaginary cities, etc. Somewhere in amongst all those boxes of old papers in my parents' attic, there are pages of imaginary cities with buildings delineating winding roads encaced within stone walls. There are layouts of some of those buildings, too, where adventures could start (or abruptly end).

Skip forward several years, and the first time I played the Sims, I was similarly enchanted with the ability to create a building that matched (some) of your desires. I was actually less enthralled with the pseudo-social aspect of the game, and ended up just having people work like drones to earn money to make a more interesting house possible. (I think that other people likely did this, too.)

For some reason, SimCity never appealed to me. Possibly because I wasn't "in control" of the development of the buildings or the city (the tools used to influence outcomes seemed to me too crude and contrived somehow). However, I did like seeing how building types thrived (or failed) with different types of urban development. Strangely, (or maybe not so strangely) I was more interested in the terraforming tools that one could use in SimCity 2000 to shape the landscape prior to beginning the game. If they had made only that part the whole game, I would have been quite satisfied to play around with that alone (which I did anyway).

Although I've never played in SecondLife, I imagine that many of the things portrayed in this video are analogous to what is possible there. However, the depition of being able to stand inside your own creation and build what your mind puts in front of you is ... wow. Not to mention that the graphics of this film are breathtakingly stunning, and the concepts of cyberintegration is quite ingeneous.