The Ultimate God Game or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

I've been playing about with some God-type games recently, and I've been trying to design "the ultimate god game." Here's what I have so far.

The game would generate a universe in much the same way that Space Engine does, including various cosmic phenomena. You would be able to navigate the universe seamlessly, similar as you would in Space Engine.

On top of the vast universe of Space Engine, you would also possess the abilities that you do in Universe Sandbox. This is where I would assume the main issue would be: N-body problems on a universal scale. This would likely render this hypothetical game beyond the reaches of current technology.

On a planetary scale, the game would work like Species ALRE, simulating evolution in a more "realistic" way than The-Evolution-Game-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named. The player could influence life via events such as asteroid impacts, solar flares and gamma ray bursts to name a few. This would be another hurdle; simulating evolution of trillions of species across the "universe". Presumably once a species reaches a sufficient level of advancement they would become a civilization, eventually spreading into space, etc etc.

Now, since the processing power required to do this will likely not come about for hundreds of years, I have been replicating the experience by loading up each game mentioned and switching between them as the scale changes. Not quite the same experience, but still pretty fun.

Eh, who knows?

Computer/graphical technology advances pretty quickly, it'd require a lot of processing power, yeah, but it might be possible sooner than one would think.

[rant]
By the way, while we're talking about god games, WHY ISN'T THERE A NUKE LAUNCHING SIMULATOR YET?!
Just think about that ****. Fully rendered planet earth to scale (using satellite images or street-view for accuracy), fully destructible environment, a casualty calculator, a planet editor, maybe even some hypothetical human-colonized planets and the ability to just nuke whatever you want.
That **** would sell so damn fast.
[/rant]

Oh, man, that'd be great. It could simulate things like dust in the atmosphere and how it impacts life...
Somehow I reckon it would generate a bit of controversy, though. What with the whole nuclear holocaust thing going on.

Eh, everything generates comtroversy, that's one of the glorious things about the information era.
It'd probably be the first game in a long time to be rated A for adults, though, for subject matter alone. Other than that you could probably get away from a lot of the controversy by saying it's a tech-demo for nuclear weapons effecting and destroying environment.

There are a few games that let you nuke civilian populations. Two off the top of my head: DEFCON (which is awesome, btw) and Civilization, neither of which are rated for adults. I suppose the added realism of a dedicated nuke simulation would bump the rating up a bit, though.

Unless you can zoom in and see legless people crawling among the ruins with their organs falling out as they die in agony of blindness, burns and radiation poisoning, I doubt it would be controversial. Nobody cared about Fallout, and when they did, it wasn't because of the whole nuclear war thing.

DEFCON, though pretty depressing, isn't really "realistic" it's just ice cold and direct on the subject matter and civilization is, well, civilization, it's a strategy game, the nukes in that game don't really effect that much, they're like nukes in any strategy game.

Well, fallout didn't depict the nuclear explosions, nuclear war was just the backstory of that game's world.

CoD 4?

Fair point.
Edit: sorry about off-topicing the thread there by the way.

By far the scariest game I have ever played.

Re the nuke sim, this video completely changed the way I think about nuclear war. Ignoring the obvious political nature of the video and just focusing on the content, it's pretty chilling stuff.

Discretion strongly advised, you might find it disturbing

Goddamn, that's unsettling as all hell.

On the topic of depressing and terrifying nuclear war stuff...
...this

Nice thread derail btw, tehtrekd

Yeah I just completely destroyed the original topic...
I'm sorry Optimi ;~;

Yep, gotta be some kind of record set here

No worries tehtrekd. Universe simulations or nuclear war, both are good. Well, not good, but you get the idea.

Nope! NOPENOPENOPE. I watched it once and that was more than enough.

Oh hey the title changed, I have a gif for that:

Title change seemed appropriate. And Geers delivers, as usual.