There are video game competitions. Some, like the one celebrated in The Wizard, are about playing video games. The more interesting ones are about designing video games.

The Game Design Challenge of 2011 challenged designers to create a game that was also a religion. The winning game, Chain World, sounds like a game that I would love to play:

There’s only one true copy of Chain World and it exists on a USB drive Rohrer carried with him into the GDC session. This USB drive contains a Minecraft world and a custom script that Rohrer created. A player of Chain World inserts the USB stick and loads a Minecraft world onto his PC. He then plays in this Minecraft world as usual and does whatever he desires.

He plays until his character dies. Following the character’s death, the player must immediately save, quit to the main menu, and leave the game. Rohrer’s script than creates a duplicate of this altered world, saves it onto the USB drive, and deletes it off the player’s PC. The player can never play again and must pass the drive on to the next player.

Of course, the game will only truly become a religion once somebody has hacked it and returned to life after being dead for three days.

Photo by Brent Stirton, found at Smashing Picture.
Webcomic is Murray the Nut, by An unidentified individual.