radio
Hello and welcome to Creatorama on Cosmic Radio 99.9 FM. I’m your host Kir and you’re in for a treat today! Live in the studio today is the two time Milkie winner for being the ‘Most Innovative Creator’. He is the author of the intergalactic bestseller “How to Create new Life Forms” and he has been crowned ‘Spacetastic Superstar of the Current Orbit” by Andromeda Magazine, not once, but thrice!! Please welcome, G15-4, a.k.a. Cree!!!
“Thanks for having me, Kir!”
Thank YOU for making it to the studio! I’m fangirl-ing a little here. I’m going to take my voice down a notch and calm down. Phew!!
Okay, tell us, Cree, how did you come up with the idea of creating Earth and its elaborate life forms?
“Well, it’s no secret that I’m an avid gamer. But in the midst of a round of Galaxy Blaster with my friend, Woz, I realized that the Triangulum gaming space needed something more life-like to enhance the user-experience for our audience. Our idea was for players to get emotionally attached to these life-forms and I think we succeeded at doing just that.”
Let’s talk about Earth 1.0. What went wrong there?
“Oh boy! Dinosaurs! we had hoped that there would be more interaction between them. But they didn’t do much other than killing and eating. Users didn’t enjoy it and our stocks plummeted. We obviously needed something much more complex. We had to position a meteor just so it would destroy all the dinosaurs at one go. It was the most cost-effective solution, plus it gave us a clean slate to work with.”
And then you designed Humans, the beings we all love playing with! What inspired that?
To make the gaming experience better, we knew we needed something that could communicate. With one another and with players. Woz came up with the initial sketches. When we first went live with them, they communicated in grunts and hollers, nothing complex. The real fun started when we programmed Humans 2.0 with artificial intelligence. They could feel happiness, fear, sorrow, the entire shebang of emotions.”
“We created pretty complex dungeons and rewards. One of the most elaborate dungeons was World War II. It took us half an orbit and a whole team of artificial intelligence and robotics engineers to create the Nazis. And then their leader took us by surprise, and not in a good way. What a barbarian! And then he takes the coward’s way out. That’s how it is. You give them intelligence and the game throws up stuff like this. Sometimes they amaze me by being incredibly kind and sometimes they shock me with cruelty beyond my imagination!”
Times like WWII make me feel glad that we’re not human. I wouldn’t have lasted a minute with those Nazis! But you know what my favorite part is? When Humans request players for favors and we feel all important when we grant them!
“Mine too.”
What’s next for Earth?
“We’ve created seven more levels. Players are only now discovering their first level up. The user interface is very different from Earth. Mars is coppery red and desert-like, devoid of water and oxygen. Can humans survive there? They’ll have to find out. It’s going to be very exciting.”
Any words of wisdom for budding creators?
“I think the best thing I did while creating Earth was to give my humans free will. That way anything that goes wrong is someone else’s fault. Hahaha! I created them and they now use their intelligence, or lack of it, to bring on something like the Dark Ages and then the Age of Discovery upon themselves. The game keeps getting interesting because of these random things Humans come up with. So yeah, let your imagination run wild and your characters will do the rest for you.”
Thank you, Cree, you are absolutely inspirational, and may I add, striking!
That’s all we have time for today, folks! I’ll leave you with one of Earth’s wildly popular creations. Gangnam Style!
This is such a clever piece of creativity, Hema. Enjoyed reading and imagining the non-real real world in which we live.
Thanks, Suchi! One of my flights of fancy..what if we’re all characters in a game?
This piece works on so many levels, Hema: the format, the humor, the mythology you’ve introduced.
Thanks, Nate! You made my day with your comment 🙂 Writing this was totally out of my comfort zone since it only involved dialogue and no visual cues to show. So glad to hear that it worked.
Hema! You’ve done it again. This was just soooooo clever and fun! I wish I had half your talent. Xoxo
You have truckloads more talent than me, Melony! I’m so glad you enjoyed this piece. I wasn’t very confident submitting it 🙂
Cute premise! I love the dinosaur part. I’d be interested in learning more about the mechanics of the “game” – do these beings create characters just to watch them go, like in an ant farm? Or do they have control over the actions of a character, as in an MMO? Can any player modify aspects of the environment (ie, in response to prayer), or just admins? You have the makings of an interesting, complex sci-fi on your hands here!
Thank you for asking these questions! It is part ant-farm, part player controlled. Players need to keep their characters on a certain path, which is the human’s life path. Although they can grant/reject prayers, they need to make sure that their humans do not stray from their path and that’s how players level up. And the game throws up random surprises, something which players cannot control. Does that make sense? It’s all there in my head, but it doesn’t all come through in words 🙂
What a fun little story.
Thank you, Cynthia! I needed a break from all the seriousness of the Super Challenge 🙂
Mars totally has water. Or are my difficulty settings just adjusted lower?
Hahaha I love your comment more than my post. I meant potable water and enough of it to survive. Should have done a better job of writing that line.
Well, well, well look at you and your fabulous dialogue! I love all the showing, I love that Kir had a crush on Cree…”fangirl-ing,” taking the voice down a notch…perfect ‘shows!’ And what a concept! The whole thing brilliantly entertaining.
Thank you, Kay! With this post being so dialogue heavy, I was worried it would sound like a boring tech interview. So glad you found it entertaining 🙂
Creative and fun, and I loved the interview format.
Thanks, Jennifer!
I was looking forward to reading this when I first heard you were doing an interview format and wow! Clever setup and very funny. Having the other half of the conversation in italics threw me off a little – is she interviewing him telepathically? – but overall I think having only dialogue worked really well!
Thanks, Laura. Took a risk this week with an “only-dialogue” post 🙂 You know, I hadn’t done the italics first, then I started to worry that people would get confused between the show host and the guest and I changed it. But I’m happy the tone worked! I wanted to write something light after all that super-challenge seriousness 🙂
What a lovely piece of imagination this is. Great play of characters!
Love this, Hema!