Movement

Although there are some games and some virtual worlds where change takes place without movement, worlds become much more interesting when there is movement.
A movement is an event, in which the position of an object is changed, and is usually described by the initial position, final position, object moved, and time.

This suggests a new property for objects in addition to being removable or destructible, and non-removable or permanent. They may be either fixed or movable.

The possibilities for movement of objects also need to be considered and limited. it should not be possible to move objects outside the space, which brings up behavior at boundaries. Permanent, nonmovable object may be treated as boundaries and barriers and in effect create irregularly-shaped spaces. Whether movement is connnected (one location to an adjacent) or may take place in jumps also needs to be considered. Interactions between obects also may occur.

I've fallen behind on my design of a program that illustrates these principles I am outlining. The addition of movement makes it possible to consider games such as checkers or chess. There are several ideas I would like to explore further, including rate of movement, connectedness of space, relations among objects, and I'm not quite sure which ones I want to explore next.

As I mentioned at the beginning, this blog is not solely intended for game-playing. There are elements of scientific simulation and education involved. I believe that games should not be purely entertaining, but ought to include an element of education, and the more elements of reality a game can successfully incorporate, the better its educational vaue. Nevertheless, there is a great deal that can be learned about the creation of virtual worlds from games and game programming, so for a time, these will be a major source. I'm going to follow the history of computer games as discussed in Wikipedia, in the hope that I can borrow the best elements from old-style games into the virtual worlds I am constructing. I can't hope to compete directly with major companies that can pour hundreds of designers, artists, and programmers into MMORPGs
(Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games), so I'm not going to try...but there are some good ideas that they have overlooked.

With that in mind, I'm going to start small, with a variety of tic-tac-toe such as
OXO, first done in 1952. I'm going to skip over Tennis for Two (1958) and Spacewar (1962) for now, although I may come back to them later. Starting in 1971, there were new computer games every year. I have little interest in Baseball, either the real-life version or the computer version. Rather more to my taste are Oregon Trail and Star Trek I was playing this on the computer lab in high school around 1973. As part of my self-education in C programming, I managed to ported a later version of Star Trek from BASIC to C, sometime around 1992.