One Man Dares to Dream of “Love”

Eskil Steenberg, programmer and artist, has a fantastic mission: the single-handed creation of an entire “first person not so massively multiplayer online procedural adventure game” with a “fully editable” environment, titled Love, or For the Love of Game Development.”

I wonder if he has any idea how many people are going to write off the whole thing because it “sounds gay,” as my manlier friends are already telling me.  Couldn’t he have misspelled the word in Elven or used its Latin counterpart or something?

“So, when the prophecy says that I’ll have ‘power the Dark Lord knows not’, it just means - love?” asked Harry, feeling a little let down.
“Yes - just love,” said Dumbledore.

But don’t judge the game by the name, or the simple, shimmering watercolor look; Love may wield powers that current graphically-insane MMOs know not.  Although public understanding of specific mechanics is, at the moment, about as cloudy as the “wondrous, gaseous visuals” Steenberg has scattered throughout his game, one aspect stands out: “Environment fully editable from within game.”  The world with which you and all other players interact will be “destructible” and “deformable.”  Shelters, tunnels, fortresses, vegetation, machinery: whatever your community needs to survive and thrive—all buildable.

We’ve seen some of the effects of giving the internet population free rein over creature creation.  Spore dongs and bat-winged IMVU furries, to name a few.  So what happens when we give the populace even a modicum of control over the persistent makeup of a game world’s landscape?  Are we ready for dong-topias?

Other games have tapped into the power that is communal responsibility; the corporations and alliances of EVE Online make up one of the most un-contrived virtual economies of all time.  There’s something ‘American dream’-like about letting gamers build their world on their own from the ground up, from Veldspar mining to the juggernaut Titans of empires.  Before our eyes, the weak ones are forgotten and replaced by the hardcore.

Well, Steenberg envisions a world of landscapes ruled by this principle.  “My focus is very much on procedural story generation,” he tells Rock, Paper, Shotgun.  Gamers will be the gods of not only their creatures and their communities, but the very matter of their universe.  And like the traditional gods, their lives will inevitably grate against each other.

Mind-bogglingly ambitious?  It is, despite Steenberg’s exemplary programming background.  His head isn’t merely in the clouds; he’s probably past the stratosphere by now.  Even money has no place in his calculations; he says he can make do with just “200-or-so” subscribers.

Still, the concept is enchanting.  If Love can’t do it, hopefully another game will.