When I was a child

My interest in artificial creativity started when I was a child. I had no friends, I was lonely. So I decided to build systems that would create them. This was back before I had access to a computer. The best way to build friends back then was by playing or creating games and creating the players in my imagination to play them with me. Games like Risk were a good platform for this. Risk is a board game in which multiple players build up armies and try to take over the world. Games like Risk would allow me to play some of the players more aggressively, some less, and this would be their personality. Often while playing Risk, I would not be one of the players, but I would watch the progress of the various players as the game went on.

Later came Dungeons and Dragons. This game had rules for creating universes filled with potential adventures. Dungeons and Dragons however had negative spiritual characteristics which meant that these potentials were rarely realized. Somehow in playing and running D&D regularly for over ten years I never once developed the quality of stories which I did running Call of Chthulhu, and Dragonquest each for a few months, or the quality of characters which I did playing GURPS. D&D had something the others did not, actual rules for randomly determining what terrain or creatures would be encountered next.

The role playing games moved more and more toward preset adventures. I felt called a different direction. I still wanted to have computers create universes full of potential adventures. I wanted have more characters in the universe than I could possible create. I want people to be able to enter into these universes and interact with them. And I want the techniques I design to do this to be applicable to the real world in the area of test scripts and author's associates, and report generators, and applications for the models produced to real world opportunities, and a new game board for a game each time you play it, and a way of glorifying God by having a computer that creates because Jesus created the universe and we are to do likewise. That's what I'm after. And that is what this blog is all about.