SimPolis is an in-development videogame about making and breaking systems.
The game itself is a sandbox, a “Miniature Village” with a community of players who can create and publish essentially anything: characters, worlds and items, but also the behavioural patterns of characters and even mechanics themselves.
All behaviours are pulled from the web and integrated into the game at runtime such that no two playthroughs are the same and where behaviours, characters and challenges emerge seemingly spontaneously; a game which evolves over time with a community that builds it by playing it. A character may interrupt their cooking to go to the doorway of the house and start shouting, before returning to cooking. The player may successfully break the parasitic system of a vampire, only to find that the vampire hunters’ guild that they created has evolved into a fascist militia. The status quo of this world is there to be constantly re-adapted and re-shaped, re-wound and fast-forwarded to be exported to friends and to the web, for the discovery of new stories and new worlds.
The game content itself will be managed in common by its’ players democratically; the game data, published with open technology standards, will be a Games Commons.
The mission of this project is to explore a novel approach to game design and one which parallels the art of sociality in the real world; the art of building and rebuilding, of hacking systems and adapting to new problems and unexpected realities… ultimately one in which we must “do-it-together”.
More will follow on this website very soon.