As some folks might recall, Minecraft was a favourite at our house, and from time to time it comes back and there’s lots and lots of building and fun.  I think it still is one of the more amazing and enjoyable games you can find out there, and really lets you use your imagination.  So I started to follow the games’ creator on Twitter, because I’m a nerd and that’s just what you do.  Naturally I was pretty interested about his recent mention that he was launching a new game. 

It’s called 0x10c.com (who knows how to pronounce that, but whatever) and you can read the thirty words that are known about it at this point here.

The thing that is boggling my mind is the revelation that while it’s a space game where you fly around in a spaceship and do things, you will essentially be required to program your own computer before your spaceship will do anything.  He’s building a fully functional 16-bit computer INTO the game.  Everyone will have one.  You have to use the in-game computer to operate your in-game spaceship.  You might be able to hack into other people’s in-game computers, build in-game networks, develop an in-game Internet, start an in-game online music company selling in-game songs… anyway you get the idea.  This kind of recursive nerdery is really baking my noodle at the moment. While he promises that non-programmers will still be able to play and enjoy the game, I can’t help but think that folks like me would just be the helpless sheep waiting to be slaughtered by the elite 13 year old nerds with far greater skills than mine.  In fact, there are a host of nerds who right now CAN’T WAIT for the creator of this game to start developing it, so they can start developing thjngs for this in-game computer.  Does anyone else find this ridiculous?

This kind of nested matryoshka doll kind of thing is what will eventually end us all in an as-yet-unknown, but certainly fiery noisy and painful way.  The universe doesn’t like recursion that much.  Sitting there, using your comically oversized and underpowered brain (a computer) to use your actual computer that connects to many many computers (the Internet), in turn connecting to a computer running this game, in which you then use a game computer to connect to other game computers, at some point the universe says “Enough, ok I messed up, let’s start over.” and we are done for.

Or it could just be a lot of fun.  One or the other.