2-3 Space

Fully malleable light-weight environment for open ended interaction.

Overview

Intended to demonstrate that a "conceptually complex" fully malleable virtual environment is at least as engaging as a "visually complex" static environment. We live in an environment where every object has many qualities and aspects that can be acted upon. Most of these actions leave marks on the world in the form of changed objects or new structures. Unfortunately the current popular approach to virtual environments is to focus on modeling the physical forms of the real world while largely ignoring the conceptual forms and interactions involved. This results in "canned" environments that can only be "played back" and not really interacted with because the conceptual structure is not there to support open-ended interaction. In most commercial environments, such as games, the minimum amount of information about the state of the environment is retained. As the user "plays back" the environment different parts operate independently and are reset as needed. Though these environments are becoming visually more similar to reality, the linear playback of a static environment is about as far from reality as possible. 2-3 Space is one attempt to demonstrate an open-ended fully malleable environment that reflects the actions and presence of its users and is largely a product of their interactions. To this end 2-3 Space uses a simplified visual structure that puts content creation within the reach of all of it's users and focuses users on the "conceptual content" of their actions. To support malleability, all users can create new objects in the environment and new actions or attributes can be added to all objects. Users interact with the environment by activating actions on objects and creating new objects. Nearly all actions leave marks on the virtual environment that provide a sense of time outside the interactions of any one user. Even if 2-3 Space were cast into a game, you could never play the same "level" twice because interacting with the environment changes the nature of the "level" itself.

Documentation

2-3 Space is a work in progress. While most official information can be found on this page, pre-press documents, a blog, and other odds and ends can be found in the 2-3 Space portion of Silicodon Snaps.