Extrinisic Computing

I’ve always had a kind of morbid curiosity about the video game genre that includes hacking simulators such as Uplink, Bluesky, Digital Hazard, and others. I’m positive this stems from my love of cyberpunk fiction.

However, most of these are awful shareware games which go no deeper into “hacking” than clicking a fake looking interface that has a button which says “run password cracker”.

There is, of course, www.hackthissite.org if I want to experience real life hacking scenarios. I’m really more interested in hacking as a culture similar to how it’s experienced in the movies with more realism than today’s hacking simulators can provide.

I have only found one multiplayer hacking game, Domain Knights, and while I had a fun time playing for a while it is really just a well done web-based Real-Time Strategy games that involve turns and managing resources. It gets really boring after a while.

I have an idea for the ultimate cyberpunk/hacking game. Imagine sitting down and firing up your processing unit which gives the ultimate futuristic HUD. With your processing unit, you can reach out onto the ‘net and touch other computing nodes. Write your own programs or buy them through the martketplace. Attack or defend. Work for a mega-corporation or the cyber-rebels. Your choice.

The only difference is that instead of the computers you interact with being made up resources in some game engine loop or the success and failure of the programs you’re running be the result of a digital die being rolled, you will actually be reaching out and touching virtual machines being run by other players. Your life and death struggle with other players has real stakes: the death of your virtual machine. If you lose, reboot it and you’re ready for the next round.

The technology exists to put all of this together and create my vision of a realisitic (yet completely safe) cyberpunk/hacking RPG. I just need to start putting together a team of people who’d like to work on something like this with not only game design, graphic design, and 3D modeling experience, but knowledge of P2P technology, virtual machines, and extension languages like LUA.

I’d love to get this idea of the ground. Do you have an idea on what the first steps would be? Where do I go to find the people I need for a project like this? Craig’s List maybe?

Tags: hacking simultator, hacking game, uplink, bluesky, digital hazard, cyberpunk, hackthissite.org, domain knights, P2P, virtual machine, LUA, team, resources, wanted