Village the Game

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Village the Game

• Play the world of social enterprise.

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Darian Bio

• Grew up in Locust Hill, VA
• Graduated JHU Comp Sci 2001.
• Boring high-paying defense jobs for 4 years.
• Now working on Village after an inspiring
  conversation with friends in LA.

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Summary

• What is Village?
• Where did it come from?
• Where is Village now?
• Where are we going?
• What are the technical challenges to getting
  there?

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Kenya Scenario
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The Problem

• Eradicating extreme poverty.
• Life is so easy in developed countries, people
  are bored.
• Life is so hard in undeveloped countries, people
  are hopeless.

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The Solution

• Bring the Bored and the Hopeless together.
• Use video game entertainment to inspire a new
  generation of social entrepreneurs to connect
  with the micro-entrepreneurs.

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VillagetheGame.com Goals

• Raise awareness of poverty solutions.
• Make platform for experimentation.
• Get people addicted to third world development.

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Started in May 2006

• Original Idea too big SimVillage but not Sim.
• Village the Show
• Conclusion Village the Game started in May 2006.
• Did travel to meet social enterprises in person.
  Great response from everybody.

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State of Game and Company

• Finishing up playable demo.
• Revising design for Village Casual Download.
• Not even a garage office yet.
• About 5 teammates working steady on the project.
  Micro-Multinational Company.
• Jason still writing business plan.
• Entirely funded by my condo in NoVA.

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Village Demo

• Coincidentally all the companies in our demo are
  connected to Stanford.
• Kiva - microcredit
• Kickstart irrigation pumps
• Cosmos Ignite. affordable off-grid
  lighting.

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Village Vision

• 2007 Single Player Casual Download RTS
• 2008 Multiplayer Online RTS, cooperative teams
  and competitive play.
• 2009 Village Tournament. Compete to win cash
  prizes. Team that wins builds their village for
  real.

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Major Technical Goals

• AI Pathfinding, its only 2D pathfinding but
  still hard apparently, especially with MMOs.
• Making available entertaining choices. Paradox
  of Choice. How to objectively pick which
  companies end up in the game.
• Scaling simulation quality for system specs. How
  detailed can it be on 600 MHz 64mb Win98 box?

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Optimizing Fun

• Biggest factor of fun is being challenging enough
  to keep the player engaged yet achievable enough
  to avoid frustrating the player from playing.
• Dynamically adjusting pace of disasters to
  respond too or adjust speed of consumption so
  something keeps happening.

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Q A

• http//www.VillagetheGame.com
• darian_at_villagethegame.com
• 650 464 5342.

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Questions for You

• Does this game sound fun to play?
• Which game dev challenges interest you?
• How should Village partner with Stanford?

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Team

• Artist Blake Douglas
• Programmer Anton Bursch
• Business Advisor/Partner Jason Carvalho
• Simulation Expert Daniel Winterstein
• Game Producer/Designer - Bryan Wiegele of
  BigTimeGames.com
• Sound Designer Todd Kinsley
• Advisors Matt Langley of GarageGames.com, Angel
  Inokon of Playfirst.com, and many others.

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Press

• www.WorldChanging.com
• www.NextBillion.net
• www.Kiwanja.net
• Many other blogs.

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Needed Infrastructure

• Referral commissions management.
• Peak load management for media blitz.
• Upload user-created content.
• Plugin API for domain experts.

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Experiments We Can Do

• Open source AJAX/Flash version of the game
  playable virtually everywhere.
• Integration with Google Earth.
• Deployment on OLPC laptop so kids can learn how
  to engineer their village from the start.
• Sim Iraq. How to rebuild while in civil war
  grassroots style DOD Directive 3000.05

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More Experiments
Build Computer AI with Numenta HTM Hierarchical
Temporal Memory (video)