The one time I played Salem I ran into a guy who told me about what I'm confident was a literal protection racket being run by players in the game. I did some research and came across a forum post describing how this person paid them their silver, were attacked by a wild and violent individual, and then they sent a Brave who dealt with the problem individual. But this was basically a testimonial. Not knowing the nature of the community around Salem, could this not have been a fake story, or possibly a situation engineered by the Braves themselves in order to promote their "service". Who knows, really?

It was suspicious, and inspiring, and the story's stuck with me to this day. It's not like I want to make a game that spawns protection rackets but it feels like such a real thing I looked into, a true frontier to explore rather than a plainly fictional experience. That's what I want to make.

1st Dragon reminded me a bit of this blog post I read a while ago, and I looked up some more information about it and found the Micras wiki. I'm not sure Micras is really a 'game', but it seems Micras and 1st Dragon have similar elements such as being about creativity and having success being based on support from other players. It sounds like Micras is much more competitive than 1st Dragon, and I wonder how much of this difference is due to mechanical differences and how how much is due to the "setting" being different (exploring an area vs. roleplaying nation states).

While the blog post isn't specifically about game design, I think there are some interesting thoughts in it about how creative and social dynamics interact in a setting like this. I like how he describes the game as being about "manipulating consensus reality," and I think that term could also probably be used to describe something like 1st Dragon.

Very interesting game that creates pretty unique social interactions.

I also like how the game sort of bleeds into the website with the family tree browser and the completed monuments list. It reminds me of Minecraft servers I used to play on that maps of the world online, but instead of a physical map, the One Hour One Life site has more of a 'social map' I guess. It's an interesting dynamic where the actual experiences you have in the game are very ephemeral (< 1 hour), but a little bit of information about what you did is saved on the web forever.

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I notice players get hung up on some weird stuff like butt bots or pooping everywhere, but there's room for a lot of cool stuff to happen.

My first time playing I got knocked out while the ship was on alert and all the lights were out, a friendly person dragged me to the medbay (while I was fading in + out of consciousness, it was confusing and pretty scary), and I got better even tho the medbay was really overcrowded.