World of the Moment: Wirepunk
I made the decision a while back to explore more of my world design imaginings here on my blog, particularly because it is preferable to losing them, and maybe I'll generate some support for them.
My latest world design came when my brother prodded me that a wireframe MMO might be a reasonably "cheap" thing to produce. Theoretically, after all, it might be considerably cheaper to find decent wireframe artists than good artists of any other sort. This was prompted partly from several hours of playing Rez HD.
Contents
Background
I'm still something of a fan of the goofy 80s films WarGames and Tron. The other day in a debate on the sci-fi worthiness of Tron I gave the opinion that I felt that part of my enjoyment of Tron was from the fact that I considered more historical fiction than sci-fi.
I started to posit a world in which the events of WarGames and Tron had actually taken place... and started to come up with probably one of my more compelling world designs in a while for a "wirepunk" epic that really could only be told in MMO form. I don't have a very good name for it, so right now I'm just going to call it Cloud. (The only name coming out of a very short brainstorm session was the amusingly alliterative but overlong SpiderWire, which might be a good project code name.)
The Basic Premise
The basic premise is pretty simple, but lovingly possible: In the 80s the US government put considerable work into a user-friendly protocol for the then-nascent ARPAnet/Internet, entirely classified ...
