One Hour One Life Forums

I played Minecraft quite a lot the first few years  it was out. It wasn't the most played game on my list during those years, but it took 12+ hours of a few days of my life. I still play it now and then, but, the experience has always been a solo one for me, not that that couldn't change, but, I just... I like going there when I want to get away from things. It's kinda like meditation for me, or at least, it's become that, thanks to C418 aka Daniel Rosenfeld 's music. It's why I've come back so much to One Life, that fucking piano... it's too addictive.
Well, guess what?
I don't need to play anymore to hear it.

And you know what, it really doesn't have the same power over me without the loss of my family, so, that's one spell countered.

Yeah, Minecraft is the same way. I've never enjoyed listening to the music of Minecraft without it being there in the game.

They are ingredients, in recipes. I want them to remain unique to those recipes.

Anyway, the amount of time I've played Minecraft each year has steadily dropped. And after watching Vargskelethor play for the 10th Anniversary, I felt it was time to revisit the game. Well, I did, a few weeks ago, and that satiated my desire at the time. I made a farm, found a few diamonds, fought off A LOT of those friggin demons that come down from the sky! WTF! Minecraft has changed. But it was fun. Man it was fun... but I haven't gone back since those two days a few weeks ago.

I assume you have a server or something? A town, you want people to help you maintain? If that's the case, I've never really played multiplayer. I won't say no. But at the same time I'm enjoying a lot of other works by other devs at the moment. I'm trying to find things that are special, that are unique and that remind me of the beautiful things about life, humanity and well, that sort of stuff.

That said I've played a lot of games that probably wouldn't make people think about beautiful things, but they all have their charm, don't they? Everyone is doing their part to make humanity experience a little more interesting. Everyone's telling their story and justifying their views on why they think things should be this way or that way...

trying to guide the kids, into their holes.

Good times in another life, not what I want here.

That said, I'd still get lulz if I saw someone doing this in OHOL.
Even if I was trying to play THE GAME.

Yes, I am guilty of calling you a lazy fuck.

I'm sorry for that.

Whether I said it before or after you called me a hoe, (which is a classic insult, very tasteful, contextually) is a little important, but, not really. I am sorry for what I said and I am sorry that I did not do enough that life, prior to this interaction, to make your life one you felt was worth experiencing.

But I would really like for you to find a way to share that video.

I will completely accept anything I am responsible for and I will explain my side of things with each interaction. And it'd just be interesting to watch a life through someone else's experience. I so wish I could do the same, I really do. Maybe there is a way?

I'll check.

Here is what I have in recorded games.

I don't recall what day it was, or what time, I am on Eastern Daylight Time, so, my dates and times are currently +5 UTC.

Just let me know when it was, I'll find a way to show you that whole life from my perspective. I don't know how, but I will, maybe someone else that does this sort of thing more often can give us some advice.

I know I insulted you for not trying to find the thing yourself. I shouldn't have done that.
I assumed you had a low IQ. I shouldn't have done that, that was stupid of me.
I told you to go play another game if you couldn't handle this one. I didn't mean that. I want to live more lives with you.

Obviously we were both hurt by that exchange. We both responded unkindly to one another. And for whatever fraction of that total unkindness I am personally responsible, I apologize for my lack of self control.

I understand how you feel about the fences. I do not appreciate them either. They are not worth the effort and they are not worth the sacrifices. The game begins with a world that we are free to traverse, resources are shared and people have learned not to be attached to objects. We work with what we have, when we have it, and we make the most of it. If we run low on food, water or iron, then that becomes our focus, or we know that what everyone has done before us, will be lost, and everything else we do that life, will be lost as well. Nothing should impede us from reaching out into the world to get what we need to keep ourselves and the other players alive.

There are important distinction to be made here; firstly, the distinction between players and the rest of the world and secondly distinction between items in use and those waiting to be used.

Here I will tell you a tale of murder done by my hands, which will exemplify the second distinction. A girl was born just before me one life and was given not only all the items from a recent elder death, but who drew the attention of many people who showered her affection. Even the blacksmith took it upon himself to let her know he could and would make anything for her she wanted. She was their focus in that moment, and I, being born seconds later, a girl as well, missed out on a lot of that. I was not jealous though. I was happy for her, but more than that, I was happy for the town; for the people. They had her now, and, they had me and odds were I would not die, as long as I kept to myself and carried on working. I would explore the land, as I have always done, I would take into account all the locations of wild berry bushes and cacti. I would make omelettes from spare plates and keep the soil flowing into the farms. All the easy stuff, but all the stuff that's really important. But on top of that, I would build the roads that make the town a place that people are a little happier to be in.

So after taking in the landscape at a very early age, I found a person who had passed away with a few items of clothing, out in the woods, and I found some snares and began trapping rabbits for the remainder of items I needed, as well as a backpack. Well, on my third or fourth rabbit the girl comes along, says nothing, but takes the snares. I decided not to chase her down and ask for the snares back, instead, I decide that since she is fully clothed, she would save more food and accomplish more in the prairie and wold then return with the rabbits and I could make my clothes and pack from those. So I went back home with the rabbits I had and began to make a bowl of food for the sheep, to get a ball of thread. I did. I made a new hat and a new pair of pants and there was a few extra pieces of fur around, so I figured I'd wait till she got back and in the meantime I'd work on cutting some wood for the fire and roads around the farms. Maybe cut a few extra boards for a new building, we'd see. I scout the paths to the nearest springs and decide which trees I will remove and where I will make paths. Then I make an extra axe and shovel for the job and I set out into the swamp to clear the path. I cut some trees, remove some stumps, cut some more trees and begin to remove stumps, not even 20 trees into the job and now the girl shows up. She says nothing and takes the axe at my feet and runs off with it. I take a deep breath. I'll take this opportunity to go check on the rabbits, she must have brought some back. There are no new rabbits near the furs. I look around the camp, no new rabbits anywhere. Well, she probably made something out in the prairie and left them there. I find the snares not far from where we had met near a few abandoned rabbit holes.

I carry on for a few minutes trapping rabbits in families, hauling baskets of rabbits to the edge of the prairie closest to town but the thread is gone. I make another bowl of lamb food, shear the old sheep, and finish my pack. I pass by the oven and the nursery to see the girl, eating pies, running around the fire, backpack with thread. Two axes near the fire. I take a pie and an axe and I go back to the woods to carry on cutting the path for the flat rock road to the next spring. The girl shows up on a horse and cart, briefly, takes the shovel and rides off. The other shovel probably broke and she needed that one for compost. That's fine, I'll make a new one. Turned out she broke it on the dead bodies around the nursery, rather than move them. The broken tool left near the last body. Someone else is trying to tell her not to bury bodies near the nursery, but she doesn't reply. I tell her it's rude to take things that people are using, but she doesn't reply. She just runs off. I sigh, but I also notice she has had two kids now, a boy and a girl and her mom is clothing them from the remains of the dead men.

What to do?

At that time, in hindsight, I probably should have stopped working  and stood near the fire and fed the kids, but I didn't. Instead I went to work ensuring the farms were still producing food and turned a few logs into boards because I wanted these kids to have a nice looking farm to work on. Cart after cart, I am alternating between bringing in logs and bringing in baskets of soil, and I noticed the horse cart several times as I passed the fence. No one was using it, so I should be. I take the horse out, but with this new speed I figure I'll take in a little more of the land. I see many flat rocks and before heading home, I find a fully clothed body with a back pack. In the pack was a knife, a pie and a few bananas. I put the pack and other items of clothing in the horse cart, I put the knife and pie in my own and bring the clothing and pack to the nursery where new children can benefit from them. On the way home I pass through the desert, get some cactus fruit to mix with the bananas for someones yum bonus and I grab a flat rock to place on the road to the spring. The girl has had a third kid, the other two are working at the smithy and on the farm, I recognize they know what they are doing and so I go back to work gathering flat rocks for the road, with the horse cart. Four more flat rocks on the road, I repeat this several times. The road is halfway done to the new spring. I gather stones for the well after making baskets from wheat and reeds. Still a few stumps on the path of the road, I drop the baskets off at the pen and take the shovel. I dig a few stumps, dig the well, return the shovel to the pen, kill a few sheep, load the baskets with mutton and drop them off at the bakery.

Then I set out for more flat rocks to finish the road. I am part way through taking the flat rocks out of cart to place on the road. Two flat rocks remain in the cart, and the girl, who now has grey hair runs down the road, gets on the horse, and rides it back to town. I just want to finish the road. My goodness, if nothing else she could have at least dumped out the flat rocks, but she didn't even do that. I don't mind using the hand cart if she wants to use the horse but I'd like to put those flat rocks in the road.

I follow her back into town and stand in the middle. I watch as she rides around town, doing nothing with the horse cart. I'm not happy with this person anymore. Somewhere in that moment, watching her ride around the town with those two flat rocks in the horse cart. I decided I'd had enough. She would not respond as I was trying to talk to her, she didn't do anything with the horse cart. She just rode around town, I don't know what she was looking for, if anything, maybe just another shovel to break on some dead bodies around the berry farm? I just don't know. But I kept her in my sight while standing between her and the berry farm, and eventually she came in, parked the horse near a bush and I pulled out the knife and stabbed her.

People thanked me. Someone asked why I did it, and I explained she just kept taking things I was using and I'd had enough. One of the other kids said it was okay and began complaining about her, but it didn't make me feel any better. I don't think I should have stabbed her. After I did, she said "What the fuck?" and then just started asking everyone to curse me before she died. The only people around were her kids and my dying mother. My mother said it was okay. One of her kids was standing next to me with a loaded bow. I don't remember if they cursed me as well. I have to look at the keyboard when I type. I was just trying to explain why I did it and was willing to accept the curses or even death at that point if it meant letting this person know I was unhappy with the way they were treating me in that life.

It was wrong of me to kill them and it was wrong of me to say what I did to you Barnaby.

I'm sorry.

Whenever I feel responsible for someones death I go into clean up mode. It's strange. I focus on the dead. I organize the bodies into a graveyard, and I look at them, and I think about all the lives simultaneously. Here in the town I live, one of the largest pieces of forest for kids to play in, is located near the cemetery. We rode our bikes there a lot, and I spent a lot of time there, day and night, thinking about all those people. About the lives they lived, about their parents and about their children. I went there are night several times, after watching Thriller and Dawn of the Dead and all those types of movies. Back when I used to wonder if there was any truth to the story of ghosts or souls or afterlives. Back when I was twelve and thirteen. My time spent at night in the graveyard made me realize there is no truth to any of that. What there is, is a deeper reflection on our own existence, and deeper respect to gain for the lives of those that came before us. The whole lives, each and every one of them. Every one of those people managed so much of the mundane that we take for granted, sometimes. Sometimes we take it for granted. Sometimes we reflect on our own lives and what we have to do and we can see that in others. We can imagine it, in everyone we've never met.

I don't mind being in graveyards. I don't even mind seeing the dead. But I care for the living. I care for life itself. And I recognize that most people are most alive when death is out of their minds. Removing bodies from living and working areas helps with that.

--

Life has a lot of respect for itself. Sometimes we don't notice it because we're in it, we're fighting with it; fighting with each other. It can seem like that's what life is all about. Unless you look at the vast majority of time life has existed on this planet and realize it wasn't about competition during the vast majority of that time, certainly not direct competition. The resources on this planet were not bound up in other cells or other life forms and they still aren't to this day. Life has just become about consuming other life, far into the latter half of it's existence. That self-consumptive trend peaked with the dinosaurs, but while great fish ruled the oceans and terrifying creatures walked the lands, we, mammals, we hid away and cared more for our families than any other class in the animal kingdom. We give more time to each others and in that time we've developed things like this; language.

We're not in the game right now. If you have time to play the game, you have time to not play it and instead choose to spend that time communicating with others. I like playing this game for a lot of reasons, but I think the most important ones is not so much to deal with communication at all. At least, not external communication. It's that feeling I suspect every parent knows, far better than I ever will. That satisfaction you get seeing a child and knowing in some way, that no matter what, life will carry on.

I know that some people are not in this mindset, or at least don't value it as much as I do. Odds are half of you value it more than I do. But for the last few patches, it would seem that Jason is catering to the other half. The cannibals of life; the cannibals of time. Both sides will always hide in the niches of the other and the organism, the town and the game, as whole will learn to adapt through the experiences of successive generations.

If you understand why the fences and gates are a burden, don't repair them, let the towns choked by them continue to die.

There are no monoliths, no 'nosaj's, in real life and no curses.

If these things can be implemented into a game, than so can others; better things.

Jason is not beholden to history to repeat all the processes of it that lead to the unhappiness people have had to experience due to our mistakes. He does not have to recreate the suffering for the sake of story. Fuck stories. Fuck Tynan Sylvester and fuck Tarn Adams. I love their games but we don't need to recreate suffering to learn from it and get passed it.

This is the mistake of game designers who try to come off as being altruistic. Who think that by making games about people who kill themselves off by blowing up the planet or wiping out humanity, or even just about killing a bad guy, think that they are making the world a better place for everyone who experiences their works, or for humanity as a whole, as the players then go on to ripple that message through the people around them.

We don't have to kill killers to prevent people from killing each other. We don't have public executions anymore and the crime rates are lower than ever, despite the definition of crime being so much broader and crimes getting so much more attention in the media. We are at the stage where we have more things figured out than ever before and we pass on that knowledge via education, which is also better than it's ever been. But we don't have to simulate the struggle to climb this slope. We're already here, and we know it. Even if we are also taught to tolerate violence or even to see killers as heroes. We have to learn to recognize that the people who want us to think like that, are ultimately the ones who are evil. They are the ones profiting from struggle. Where as we all profit from growth; the addition of material into the biomass of the whole planet, by the actions of primary producers who are not fighting each other but developing slowly and steadily to transform water, sunlight and raw minerals, into life.

--

I'm sorry, this is why I don't post on the forums very often. It's hard for me to stop typing once I start, unless I felt I've said everything I feel the need to say about everything, and that's just impossible given the number of billiard balls racked into the break that is every event in history.

I just have to stop typing.

Barnaby, I am sorry.

Buy one of those $5 amazon mice, Jeff Bezos needs the money to buy the moon.

Yeah, swords are dumb.
They really don't belong in this game.

It was one thing for us to realize that we could accidentally kill people with a bow and arrow, it was another to make the knife able to kill people, but reintroducing the butter knife in the form of the sword is just stupid.

What's next, armor? Guns? Cannons?

Atomic powered robots who's sole purpose is to defend our town?

Is that where all this is going? You want us to make terminators and drones to fight wars?

When there are 30 people playing, how do you think that's going to turn out?

You sold the game as a parenting simulator; people want to care for each other, and you're going to let the ones that kill people turn them away. Then you'll be left with another dead game, like all the other garbage you've made.

--

I'm sorry but the property fences and the weapons are the wrong direction for this project.

You should have stuck to making food, clothing and the technology for people to keep each other alive. That way new people would have felt welcome and needed and the game could have grown with the growth of the player base. Now you're just going to turn people who want to care and work with each other, a goal we all already wanted, away from one another.

You can't run a simulation meant for thousands, or even millions of people, with ten. What happened to humanity over the last ten thousand years just cannot be reproduced this way. Even if 1 in 10 people decides they are going to murder people, the ratio of murderers to mothers is already orders of magnitude too high, compared to that which gave rise to mankind.

Forget your lesson, make a good game for people who want to do good things.

That is what has kept me playing for over 2000 hours now, and that is what the vast majority of players wants to do.

That is what the vast majority of people throughout time, have wanted to do.

None of any of this needs to be any way.

If Jason wants to make a great game, he should be willing to spend 30 years on it if that's what it takes, and make it right.

It's not like he has to be making a new game after 3 years of working on this one.

Come to think of it, this is an entirely new type of game, in terms of the raising the family while surviving and building a village/town/city/culture/civilization.

This raising of other players while time is passing, and the players dying of old age, is something that should be done well and done right the first time, to set a precedence for games to come.

Could you imagine a game like World of Warcraft, where you are born to a family in Stormwind or Orgrimmar, or anywhere for that matter? The person who can choose to raise you or not, is directly responsible for the life you can potentially go on to live, whether that is a life of murdering the other faction, healing your own, raising your fallen faction members little orc children, fighting demons or making linen bags for other players.

Imagine if every day that passed in real life, was a year in WoW time, and you had to play for a week as a child, learning the ropes of the situation you were born into, while you struggled to survive until you were strong enough that you could kill small animals with a light weapon.

Different races, with different longevities, some living to 60 years old, 120, or hundreds of years. Different comparable mechanics for beings like the undead, where the magic responsible for their state, fades away, as health does for the races that age for more conventional reasons.

--

Imagine a game like Sid Meier's Civilization, where once the game starts, all players are born into the world as NPC's and have to work their way up the ranks of their civs before being able to make decisions like moving armies or giving orders to do simple things like building wells, houses or wonders to the NPCs of their nation. Now imagine other players can join into such games, born into the same nation, and can be raised by other players to continue the fight against the other tribes, nations or planets even.

--

This mechanic of being born into a world, raised and dying of old age if nothing else kills you, is a game mechanic that can change so many genres and impact so many people, it's use should not be tarnished or shadowed by other mechanics.

Maybe in a decade it will catch on, and in a decade after that it will be a fad, but I highly doubt it, as it is so fundamental to life in general. This is the absolute opposite of all the killing we see in far, far too many games.

This is not what life is about; killing. It has become this, as cells began to cannibalize each other as a way to save time, before turning on other dying, weak and even healthy cells, before they started working together, in clusters and became multicellular organisms. It was all amazing, but the story of life's beginning, whether being born a helpless child, aging and dying at any stage along the way, or, the story of life's beginning billions of years ago, as a primary producer, which is still what the vast majority of living organisms on this planet are to this day, is a story; a mechanic, which people are yearning for, I guarantee it.

We should stop letting murderers dictate the mindset of the gaming industry. This aspect of life; being born and raised by others, who help us on our way to filling the role in society we are drawn to, by their influence, is an aspect that could easily change the world, through games. The real world, where people are still murdering each other, right this minute, where life is continuing to slaughter life, because that is all it knows to do to survive.

We've come so far, but a greater distance remains ahead. How that future unfolds will seem to be dictated by the mind of the present, and the choices they make, whether to love, and to care, for life itself, in as many forms as we can feasibly manage, or to remain selfish, to fight each other for survival and to kill off more than we are responsible for birthing and fostering, into the world.

I don't know where the best place to initiate such a radical shift in the mindset of humanity is, but games seem like a pretty good medium for reaching people's minds.

Now, I know Jason is not going to be capable of shifting the entire population of the planet's mindset in our lifetime, with one mechanic, or even, his entire life's work on all his games combined, but this game is a very good step in the right direction. It is a very good way to remind people of their beginning, and what it has taken, what it has taken for each of us to be, such that life may carry on. And not the murdering each other part, that's the part we have to realize is detrimental to our existence at this, and every age of technology yet to come.

I wish the other lessons that Jason wants to share via the game, didn't get in the way of the one regarding caring for each other. To me, it's not only the most important lesson that could be taught via this game, it's the most important lesson for life itself.
It is unfortunate the hundreds of millions of years of our ancestry has had to endure death by it's own hands, teeth and tools, but it wasn't like this, for billions of years, and if we can do the right thing and provide life with more than enough than it needs through our technology, than maybe in a billion years, and for all time after that, it will never have to be like this again.

All the space and resources in the universe, are out there, waiting, for life. How those resources are born into the world, and what mechanism they are born into, hinges, on the state of life that brings it into existence. We could turn every planet into a sextillion murderous people, that live to kill each other, or we can bring a sextillion people into existence from each world, each with it's role in the process of converting every planet into the chemistry to sustain a sextillion more and life from Earth can grow throughout the stars and galaxies, for more time than it has ever known.

Every step on that journey, is necessary. Every one we take, in the present, is the most important one we can take, at any time.

Here on Earth, the greatest highways began as space, between blades of grass. Where the smallest of creatures tread, making way for larger and larger animals, until people followed those paths, people that brought with them other animals and machines. Those paths became wider, and wider and were traveled by vehicles at ever increasing speeds, between each repaving. Every stone, every shovel of asphalt, every truckload of concrete, every bridge of wood and steel, each action initiated by a single person, at any time, part of a series of steps.

This game, these mechanics, of birth, care, and aging, these are steps in the right direction. The right direction being the one that is most beneficial to life itself, in the greatest number of it's forms. The one that brings the most of it into existence, in the largest volume, containing the greatest amount, and variety of resources, with all the ability and information capable to accelerate it's own process of growth.

This gave rise to us, and with every breath, this we carry on.

--

Sorry if I typed a lot, or even, too much for you. I do this a lot, and most of the time I wind up deleting most of it or just closing the tab and forgetting that I had some kind of message to send at all.
I don't want to delete this one this time, I'm getting too old and too unhealthy to keep deleting messages because I thought I said too much. I'll submit it and leave it up to someone else, to erase what I say this time.

Ah, so this is what the variance thread was about... hmm

I quit playing the game for awhile after the biome temperature change. Knowing youa re going to do these things ahead of time is one thing, but having these changes occur out of the blue, as I suspect most people are going to experience it, is quite frustrating.

This is one of those examples of times where I suggested (via email) that you be more subtle, and make it a gradual transition, rather than a sharp, sudden change, that always seems to drives more people away, than towards, the game.

Please, before you do this change, or any like it, consider a way to make this a transition, not a sudden shock.

Your process for these sorts of things tends to go like this:

think
think
think
think
big change

instead it should be more like:

think about big change
think
small change
think
small change
think
small change

For this example, I suggest the ponds become less and less effective each week over the course of a month, while the springs become more and more effective.

Please Jason, gradual changes, for the sake of the community.

Sure, it'll be nice if you stick to all the big, wild changes, and in the end you are left with 5 loyal players who enjoy your experiments, then you can name them all in a list of friends when you are talking to people who complain about your next game, but man, you have a great concept right here in One Hour One Life. Don't tarnish the game's future place in history for the sake of your own, personal, experiments with game mechanics.

Maybe make a test server, and make knowledge of it public, so people can go there, experiment, and then come back to the community and share their findings, or, be the heralds of changes to come, for their own little niches of the community.

Otherwise, all it takes is for the most vocal member of that niche, to say "Fuck this, I don't like this game anymore, I'm going to play X" and then those people in that community all migrate away from the game to X, or, worse, drift apart, to other communities, or worse worse, away from game communities in general.

I suspect you've got the best parenting game on the market right now. This whole aspect of the game is dependent on the population being here. Please, don't turn more of them away with big, fundamental changes to the game's other mechanics, that people have learned and enjoy, at least, not with big, sudden overhauls, as I suspect this is going to otherwise be.

Just dawned on me that my first example is already, potentially, exploding die.
The 1d4 roll with each use, 1 moving the object to the next state of 'decay' would mean if 2, 3 or 4 are rolled indefinitely, the object could potentially stay in that state forever, obviously not likely, but there is that 75% chance with each roll, that the item does not decay.

Still reading google searches for "geometric random variable variance standard deviation" but this is a lot of math.

Having taken many calculus courses, I *could* recall all this, but not having used any of this stuff in 20 years, I'm tempted to look away when I see it. Surely someone younger, or with more recent experience, will have all this stuff fresh in mind and your answers will come to you.

I'll keep reading though, it's refreshing.

Am I missing something?
1d4 *5, you only roll the next d4 if you get a 1.

I must be missing something.
But, this means would mean 6 states.

Let's say the 6 states are New, Slightly Used, Used, Well Used, Breaking, and finally, Broken.

N, roll 1d4, if 1, move down
SU, roll 1d4, if 1, move down
U, roll 1d4, if 1, move down
WU, roll 1d4, if 1, move down
B, roll 1d4, if 1, move down
Broken

You must have been trying to say that, somewhere in there and just lost me.

Side note, I'd love if you added the other end, what is known as 'exploding die' in some games. Where the life of an item is potentially indefinite. Say, the item had ((1d20) * 6 states) uses, but if you rolled 20, you'd get to add another d20 roll to the number of uses at that state. Everytime d20 is rolled, you add 20 to the number of uses in that state, and roll again.

https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Exploding_die

Maybe then someone can forge the mythical "Grandfather's Axe"

YannaChan, here are the sites I check if I want to see some simple things that can be done with BBCode
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBCode
and
https://www.bbcode.org/
other than that, there are a lot more things you can do with the code, some Jason allows on this forum, other things I can't get to work.
Trial and Error will teach you which is which.

Ponytail Girl (no link to image by clicking on picture, url is https://imgur.com/eBxVtVs

Maybe that's enough kids

"A life I had today, we made a goose pen and I wrote on paper that we were the geese gods"
Clicking the image will link people to the URL.

The BBCode used:

When on imgur, or any other image sharing site, you can right click the image, click open in new tab, and copy and paste the URL from that tab to paste into a BBCode with the

 [img] and [/img] 

tags.