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[DrPoo]

We all know webcrawlers, webcrawlers pick up info on various sites and basically surfs the internet in attempt ot index it. So, people use it to gather info, make statistics and shit like feeding spambots with email harvests from theese virtual spiders. But what if we made a MMO game thing, where all the content comes from a webcrawler? At registration a person describes what they are, then the game sees if the webcrawler picked up info about that, for example a parrot, it read somewhere like wikipedia that it is a colourful bird that sings and talks, so you become one. Then it puts you  somewhere in the world, wich is itself generated from info from the web, so you might appear in london, new york or maybe a fictional place like hyrule or starship enterprise! The player then interacts with the procedural enviroment, maybe building a candy house while fending off a vile horde of bill cosbies, while trying to figure out what the hell that happened to the jazz fusion empire, or maybe making cheese from cheese cakes, because the webcrawler thinks there actually is cheese in cheesecakes or something else. Anything could be done, as long as the webcrawler has the information and the parser is able to understand it. Also crafting, it might know the correct make up for a toaster, some copper coil and a button and some springs and shit, but what would happen if you combined a bill cosby with kitty litter? It would first search for bill cosby's opinions about kitty litter, it might not find anything about what he thought, then it tries to figure what his kind thinks about kitty litter, if it cant figure it out, then it would try to find an attribute for kitty litter, for example disgusting or useful, so it would list the attributes then generate a number 0-n of attributes, in this case, either bill cosby would turn to a happy bill cosby with useful kitty litter, or maybe an angry disgusted bill cosby, the crawler would fetch a disgusted bill cosby face and the game spawn a disgusted bill cosby, possiby aggresive, dont ya ask me how you got a billcosby into your pockets though..

thought it would be fun to share, even though it might not be a possibiility, now im gonna go back to my Orbital glued together piece of wreckage.

[Poltifar]

Let me get this straight: You want an MMO where everything including the player character is generated from webcrawlers randomly crawling on the web? But... wouldn't that mean that, statistically speaking, 90% of the MMO world would be porn? O.o

[PsyberianHusky]

I love the possibility of this.
I had an idea kinda like this, where a spam-bot tries to blend into a forum community by compiling indexes of quotes, so for bay 12, at a low level the gibberish it would spout would be about magma and baby armor.
based on the amount a forum community uses a word in contrast to the rest of the web it has crawled and indexed.

*Edit* Said Bot should also realize to post links to things that generate profit in threads where links are being posted.

[counting]

Let me get this straight: You want an MMO where everything including the player character is generated from webcrawlers randomly crawling on the web? But... wouldn't that mean that, statistically speaking, 90% of the MMO world would be porn? O.o

It should turn the safe search option to high.

[IronyOwl]

Mildly amusing, except for two major problems.

First of all, there's no way to actually do any of that. You can't just have a game that "knows" what parrots are or that an article about them is describing them as colorful, and even if there was there's no way for the game to innately do anything useful with that. You could basically turn it into a random generator by counting vowels or something, but otherwise there's nothing even remotely feasible about this.

Secondly, if it did work it'd be boring, because most non-weird/double meaning things would have mostly the same results. Either it'd always go to wikipedia, find out that parrots are colorful and can talk, and completely bypass any purpose behind dynamically looking that up, or it'd grab an article at random or something, which would usually be pretty similar.


So, yeah. An automated dynamic chaos generator wouldn't work like that, trying to be both coherent and random.

[Soulwynd]

It doesn't have to -know- what they are. It only has to recognize words in a given page and assemble something out of them. Like the words are the seed for the area, objects, enemies, etc.

So the program has no idea what it's doing, but the player will recognize elements that have to do with parrots. You just have to create a huge dictionary for it with elements and what they will represent in the game. For example:

Characteristic features of parrots include a strong, curved bill, an upright stance, strong legs, and clawed zygodactyl feet. Many parrots are vividly coloured, and some are multi-coloured. The plumage of cockatoos ranges from mostly white to mostly black, with a mobile crest of feathers on the tops of their heads. Most parrots exhibit little or no sexual dimorphism. They form the most variably sized bird order in terms of length.

So in this paragraph example, the game can recognize parrots & cockatoos, strong legs, with claws. The enemies or the rooms will be vividly coloured with some rainbow patterns around. The enemies will be feathered, obviously and sometimes either the room or the enemies will be black. They will often be found humping each other.

Europe is the origin of the first presumed parrot fossils. The first is a wingbone of Mopsitta tanta, uncovered in Denmark and dated to 54 mya (million years ago).[12] The climate at this time was tropical, consistent with the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.

With this paragraph, the game can add an european and a tropical background, in which to place the enemies in.

The game really doesn't have to understand what it is doing. It just has to apply words and groups of works randomly for random things.



Btw, Just gonna drop this link here:
http://www.forumwarz.com/

[MonkeyHead]

Let me get this straight: You want an MMO where everything including the player character is generated from webcrawlers randomly crawling on the web? But... wouldn't that mean that, statistically speaking, 90% of the MMO world would be porn? O.o

And this is a bad thing how?

[counting]

I think the idea can be better describe and more attractive if it has a slogan like

"The real adventure in real hyperspace of the Internet"

The players are essentially becomes wanderers/warriors of the digital world.

[FunctionZero]

Reminds me of Wikipedia Quest (http://thesiteformerlyknownas.zachtronicsindustries.com/?p=624), made by the same guy who made Infiniminer.
It's a Nethack-style roguelike.

It works a bit like said here, getting random data.

[quinnr]

I like Soul's idea, reminds me of scribblenauts a bit. I think it could work.

[counting]

I think if they are just extract random keywords from random links, it will create some hilarious situations and themes. And many "words" are not written in English at all, but multi-language. You might need to consider that, and machine translation will ensure hilarity most of the time. Think of what will it be like to find info from a foreign university web pages, combined with a movie trailer web site for the monsters, and get a background from restaurant websites.

There has to be some sort of algorithm or even natural language process to combined meaningful words together.

[freeformschooler]

Reminds me of Wikipedia Quest (http://thesiteformerlyknownas.zachtronicsindustries.com/?p=624), made by the same guy who made Infiniminer.
It's a Nethack-style roguelike.

It works a bit like said here, getting random data.

This. I want more games like this, but more dynamic. One time I played a game online that simulated a bad game of D&D, except it pulled all of the names for everything from a livejournal account you input.

[Soulwynd]

I -could- make a MUD that webcrawled to create the environments, enemies, etc.

But it would be all textual, so I'm not sure if it would be as fun as wasting your time actually adding thousands of elements visually to the game.

[freeformschooler]

I -could- make a MUD that webcrawled to create the environments, enemies, etc.

But it would be all textual, so I'm not sure if it would be as fun as wasting your time actually adding thousands of elements visually to the game.

DO IT

DO IT DO IT DO IT

I think you'd be surprised how many of us here are interesting this kind of elaborate novelty.

In fact, I would pay donate $5 for the completed version of this depending on how well made it is.

[Soulwynd]

Oh boy, now I feel like a hooker!  :B

When you said DO it, do it... I had the most funny idea for it.

When you create a character, you don't get to pick a thing. The MUD picks a random page and creates your character out of it. So you could turn out to be a sperm whale with rainbow feathers.