Gameplay ideas for full-on nanotech society?
prolly the simplest, most effective, and most plauseable thing would be for the nanites to redirect the electrical signals from your brain...stop your heart from beating, stop your muscles from contracting, make you blind/deaf/mute by redirecting the sensory signals (hell even cause you to "see" things...maybe even say things, lie in a court room, tell your boss off, tell your wife she is fat, etc) they could possably even rearrange your memories (from something as simple as forgetting where your car is parked...to full on personnel history replacement..yeah you are physicaly a 20 year old guy...but after the nanites do thier job, you think you are an 85 year old great-grandmother) just messing with perception alone has so much potential.
Quote:Original post by MSW
prolly the simplest, most effective, and most plauseable thing would be for the nanites to redirect the electrical signals from your brain...
Why do that when you can disassemble the molecules of matter themselves, turning the enemy into primordial goo.
My idea is this. The emergence of nano-warfare would shun people into hideouts with inpenetrable shields, they would have to create their own oxygen/water etc. There would be little communication between these "communities" and the space between would be barren of life though filled with hibernating nanites...
Nano-tech weaponry.
They rearange the atoms of the surrounding matter into more nanites.
Grey Goo.
From,
Nice coder
They rearange the atoms of the surrounding matter into more nanites.
Grey Goo.
From,
Nice coder
Quote:Original post by Kuladus
Why do that when you can disassemble the molecules of matter themselves, turning the enemy into primordial goo.
Why do that when redircting brain waves is simpler, cheaper, and far more plauseable? wouldn't take many nanites to stop the electrical signal to your heart, but it would take a lot more energy to turn you into mush. Why physicaly rip your enemies apart when you can actively sever thier brains control of physical action, amplify pain, then sit back and watch as they cannot do anything physical to prevent death from starvation?
Besides there arn't really going to be many enemies when the nanites change your perceptions to everyone being your friend. Or even completely wipe your mind of the knowledge of your enemies existance.
Quote:
My idea is this. The emergence of nano-warfare would shun people into hideouts with inpenetrable shields, they would have to create their own oxygen/water etc. There would be little communication between these "communities" and the space between would be barren of life though filled with hibernating nanites...
the reality might be you laying on a bed...but your perceptions could be changed by nanites to you liveing in a virtual world just as you describe. Or changed to the perception you exist in any imaginatble world for that matter.
Quite the post there Nathan. ;D
Two things came to mind, the first is in a society with limited raw resources, it would also make sense that death would be handled different, bodies may be broken down for raw resources. Having a persons consiousness stored within nanites or living on, and other religious/philosophical changes could be apparent.
The second thought is "He who controls the nanites, controls the world", hackers and other people who could create malicious nanites and/or code would create a new kind of crime. I could see a new kind of symboitic relationship like that between humans and virus's/bacteria, with infections and anti-biotics, evolution, etc. essentially patterning the technological over the biological at a deeper level.
Two things came to mind, the first is in a society with limited raw resources, it would also make sense that death would be handled different, bodies may be broken down for raw resources. Having a persons consiousness stored within nanites or living on, and other religious/philosophical changes could be apparent.
The second thought is "He who controls the nanites, controls the world", hackers and other people who could create malicious nanites and/or code would create a new kind of crime. I could see a new kind of symboitic relationship like that between humans and virus's/bacteria, with infections and anti-biotics, evolution, etc. essentially patterning the technological over the biological at a deeper level.
Major nano-tech issues include control method and energy supply. Depending on how you solve them, you could come up with different behaviour - maybe significant nano-activity generates a lot of heat, or maybe nanites draw power from their surroundings so activity lowers the temperature. If nano-activity is energy hungry, it'd be mostly restricted to very small-scale uses. If it's cheap, it'd be used for just about everything.
On the control issue, sooner or later, someone's going to design programmable nanites - so rather than having to design specific nanites for a given task, you could just program generic nanites somehow (like has happened with microchips - nowadays you don't design a specialist chip for a given task; you get a generic chip and design specialist software that's cheaper to produce). The programming interface could be interesting - getting nanites to recognise objects larger than a micrometer or so would be tricky (like us interacting with objects on the kilometer scale - and that's still 100-1000 times smaller than we can see with the naked eye) although some form of distributed intelligence could enable the nanites collectively to respond to human-scale objects - in which case Minority Report style holographic interfaces are possible - control interfaces literally appearing out of thin air - or you could go for the trickier option of mind-reading to a limited extent and have the control interface literally all in the mind (or brain). If you have mind-reading, then telepathy becomes possible. If you have gesture detection, then you're getting very close to outright magic.
In fact, a post-apocalyptic society after a nanite driven society self-destructs could quite plausibly resemble the traditional generic fantasy setting where the pervasive but long forgotten nanites allow individuals with the proper knowledge to produce magical effects.
To produce actual gameplay rather than just touring the wonders of a potential future, you'd probably want to add more restrictions to the nanites - probably including having conflicts between sets of nanites with different purposes.
On the control issue, sooner or later, someone's going to design programmable nanites - so rather than having to design specific nanites for a given task, you could just program generic nanites somehow (like has happened with microchips - nowadays you don't design a specialist chip for a given task; you get a generic chip and design specialist software that's cheaper to produce). The programming interface could be interesting - getting nanites to recognise objects larger than a micrometer or so would be tricky (like us interacting with objects on the kilometer scale - and that's still 100-1000 times smaller than we can see with the naked eye) although some form of distributed intelligence could enable the nanites collectively to respond to human-scale objects - in which case Minority Report style holographic interfaces are possible - control interfaces literally appearing out of thin air - or you could go for the trickier option of mind-reading to a limited extent and have the control interface literally all in the mind (or brain). If you have mind-reading, then telepathy becomes possible. If you have gesture detection, then you're getting very close to outright magic.
In fact, a post-apocalyptic society after a nanite driven society self-destructs could quite plausibly resemble the traditional generic fantasy setting where the pervasive but long forgotten nanites allow individuals with the proper knowledge to produce magical effects.
To produce actual gameplay rather than just touring the wonders of a potential future, you'd probably want to add more restrictions to the nanites - probably including having conflicts between sets of nanites with different purposes.
Wow, There are some crazy nanotech ideas in this thread. Remember nanites are just really tiny machines they are useful for whatever you would need a tiny machine for. So you would not use them to build buildings since it would require trillions upon trillions of nanites and even then it would take a long time to constuct a building one molecule at a time. Nanites can't turn anything in to anthing else.
The main question about nanites and their use depends on the cost of replication.
Some possible uses include:
Nano clothing - "The nano suit the only suit you'll ever need to own. With its portable control console you can change the color, and style with the touch of a button and even purchase the latest styles as the become available. More durable then traditional clothing and even self cleaning. And if suit ever gets damages simple soak it in a nano bath(fluid containing suspended blank nanites) and it will be as good as new in no time."
Nano equipment - again stronger, lighter, and more durable the normal equipment, and can be repaired by soaking it in a nano bath.
Nano medicine - an inject of medical nanites allows for the fighting of diseases, accelerated healing, and repairing of injuries. Medical nanites last only a few hours before the bodies immune system destroys them.
To be honest its rather hard to come up with any practical applications for nanites let alone ones that would make good game play. What about Micro machines? No not the toys, but tiny machines a micrometer in size, thats a 1000th of a millimeter which still seems a little small so what about milli machines?
The main question about nanites and their use depends on the cost of replication.
Some possible uses include:
Nano clothing - "The nano suit the only suit you'll ever need to own. With its portable control console you can change the color, and style with the touch of a button and even purchase the latest styles as the become available. More durable then traditional clothing and even self cleaning. And if suit ever gets damages simple soak it in a nano bath(fluid containing suspended blank nanites) and it will be as good as new in no time."
Nano equipment - again stronger, lighter, and more durable the normal equipment, and can be repaired by soaking it in a nano bath.
Nano medicine - an inject of medical nanites allows for the fighting of diseases, accelerated healing, and repairing of injuries. Medical nanites last only a few hours before the bodies immune system destroys them.
To be honest its rather hard to come up with any practical applications for nanites let alone ones that would make good game play. What about Micro machines? No not the toys, but tiny machines a micrometer in size, thats a 1000th of a millimeter which still seems a little small so what about milli machines?
Quote:Original post by TechnoGoth
Remember nanites are just really tiny machines they are useful for whatever you would need a tiny machine for.
Err... Tautology. Obviously tiny machines are useful for what tiny machines are useful for.
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So you would not use them to build buildings since it would require trillions upon trillions of nanites and even then it would take a long time to constuct a building one molecule at a time.
There's so much that's wrong with this sentence.
Firstly, what's so impossible about having trillions upon trillions of nanomachines? Before you answer, bare in mind that there are already trillions upon trillions of nanomachines making up life on Earth.
Secondly, why would trillions upon trillions of nanomachines build a building one molecule at a time? They wouldn't, they'd work in parallel. Suppose it takes a thousand nanomachines a nanosecond to move a single molecule into place, and we have a billion trillion nanomachines. They could construct the Empire State Building in 4 hours.
Thirdly, why would nanomachines make buildings out of anything when they could form themselves into a building? Supposing a suitable nanomachine could move at 5m/s, a swarm of them could fill a volume the size of the Empire State Building in about 80 seconds. If nanomachines were built with Bucky-tube support struts, such a structure could be thousands of times stronger than steel, but tens lighter.
Fourthly, these examples are based upon nanotechnology as it might appear in our short or medium term future. Wavinator's game is set in a future so far advanced that civilisation has spread across the entire galaxy. It isn't unreasonable to suppose that any minor technical problems will have been resolved.
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Nanites can't turn anything in to anthing else.
And why not? Why can't nanites employ the same laws of physics that other machines can?
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To be honest its rather hard to come up with any practical applications for nanites let alone ones that would make good game play.
Previous posters have come up with some and you've failed to explain why they wouldn't work. Making trillions of nanomachines isn't a problem because you just need to build nanomachines that build nanomachines.
Actually, if you talk to enough NPCs in Xenosaga, you'll find out that in their society, nanomachines are primarily used for construction purposes. Like constructing battle ships and large buildings. And these are very specialized nanomachine that you feed blue prints to. However, they do say that there are cases where nanites have malfunctioned during construction and built doors leading to nowhere, locked rooms with no doors, hallways that are just dead ends, and just things in general that weren't in the original blue print. Of course, that is completely feasible, since we're talking about a highly distributed and parallel construction process. Sometimes you get two teams that end up building the same thing, and its cheaper for one team to just tag their finished product somewhere randomly, instead of throwing it away and start on another task when they realized there are duplicates.
So, programming nanites may be a little tricky, since we have to consider parallelism and distribution in the scale of maybe 10^9 and up, which no one is even close to touching, since we can't even get parallelism right many times on the scale of 10^3.
Scenarios where you can use nanites are many. There are a few paths you can take. One is the usual post apocalyptic path, where nano technology is like lost science due to the fact that it destroyed the creators who eventually lost control of it. Then you can have your sci-fi fantasy setting, where people just seem to know how to operate things, but don't know why they work. And the list goes on.
The other path would be having the technology be an integral part of society with laws governing use. Then you can easily have specific uses or applications be outlawed or only implemented by the mafia or crime syndicates, etc. You can then also have defense mechanism against it, like airport screeners also make you walk through a low level EMP screen that effectively destroys 99% of all nanites, etc. Just some intersting ideas.
Personally, I feel it is wise to stay away from uses where you construct things in short amounts of time or take things apart. Even though nanites are designed to interact with atoms and molecules, they still have to obey the general law of physics and thermodynamics. So, there will always be some sort of energy issue with putting something together or tearing something apart, like someone mentioned earlier.
So, programming nanites may be a little tricky, since we have to consider parallelism and distribution in the scale of maybe 10^9 and up, which no one is even close to touching, since we can't even get parallelism right many times on the scale of 10^3.
Scenarios where you can use nanites are many. There are a few paths you can take. One is the usual post apocalyptic path, where nano technology is like lost science due to the fact that it destroyed the creators who eventually lost control of it. Then you can have your sci-fi fantasy setting, where people just seem to know how to operate things, but don't know why they work. And the list goes on.
The other path would be having the technology be an integral part of society with laws governing use. Then you can easily have specific uses or applications be outlawed or only implemented by the mafia or crime syndicates, etc. You can then also have defense mechanism against it, like airport screeners also make you walk through a low level EMP screen that effectively destroys 99% of all nanites, etc. Just some intersting ideas.
Personally, I feel it is wise to stay away from uses where you construct things in short amounts of time or take things apart. Even though nanites are designed to interact with atoms and molecules, they still have to obey the general law of physics and thermodynamics. So, there will always be some sort of energy issue with putting something together or tearing something apart, like someone mentioned earlier.
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