Fireplace videos like the one above are pretty popular. There are some aquarium videos as well, and some simple peaceful landscapes. But the motif can be anything, really, as long as it isn't too distracting. I think this might work, in some kind of animation style: Blu sky with lots of slow-moving clouds. And zeppelins! The occasional rocketman can perhaps spice up the view, zooming across the sky in the far distance, leaving trails that go away very slowly. Some birds can show up not so far from the viewpoint of the camera, and maybe a floating island in the sky can be momentarily uncovered by a huge cloud passing by.
With the proliferation of high quality screens, the demand for this kind of thing can only rise. I wish I were proficient enough with After Effects to make a mockup.
As far as I know, MMOs come in two flavors: ones that try to get you to spend an endless amount of time gathering experience points and ever better and shinier gear, and ones that try to get you to make stuff and admire the stuff that others have made. Of these, I think the latter has a lot of potential, if only the tools for making stuff could be made more intuitive. And I have some ideas for how that should be as well, but what I want to discuss now is is an idea for a third kind of MMO, where, in a sense, the world itself is the maker of cool stuff:
When the game starts, the world is populated by all sorts of quite well working AI people and animals. But over time, they will randomly mutate. The only thing that keeps their virtual genetics stable is attention from human players. Unpopular creatures die after a while, and conversely, popular ones sometimes spawn "children" identical to themselves, thus starting new mutation lines from genetics that are considered by human players to be good, or interesting. The role of human players in this evolution is thus as providers of the criterion of selection. The game is one of survival of the most interesting. And as the creatures generally stay close to where they spawned, one would soon start to see regional differences. Which would make the human players that find the same kinds of things interesting hang around in the same areas. One would probably develop completely separate cultures, with completely different kinds of human players and artificial creatures.
The creatures the game begins with should be quite sophisticated, like the ones made by NaturalMotion:
Some kind of communication AI would be fantastic, if not impracticable to implement.
The evolutionary principle can be applied to the design of areas of the map as well. So if the people who, say, like scary creatures tend to stay away from areas around them that are idyllic and full of flowers, then those areas will "die" and be redesigned (unless people who like such places find it first, and stick around). The redesign is a random mutation roughly in the direction of the most popular bordering area. Or something like that. Anyway, it should have some chance of eventually resulting in just the kind of place that the human players that live in the area might like.
Perhaps an additional method of creature selection should be provided, namely a way to mix the virtual genomes of two creatures. The "offspring" would be something half-way from them both, which, if they are too far apart genetically, most often would result in something hideously maladaptive. This kind of selection should not be too easy, because then all creatures would be immediately sacrificed in breeding experiments. And I think it should have some kind of a social context. One solution is to make special sacrificial temples randomly appear on the map, where two creatures can be placed in sacrificial chambers. All that is needed to start the gene mixing process is that at least 10 people "pray" (i.e. vote to approve of the selection of creatures). After a little while, the temple turns to smoke. The offspring is found when the smoke clears.
Saw the Matrix trilogy today and yesterday. Had only seen the first one before. Now I can confirm what the rest of the world has told me: the two last ones are crap. The following would have been a better plot for the continuation:
The reality Neo awoke to when he was unplugged from the Matrix turns out to in fact be just another layer of virtual reality. There are no evil flying squid robots or human battery farms. The truth is that the entire human race has gradually, and completely voluntarily given up their physical bodies entirely. They are just brains in vats, connected to a vast and immensely powerful but entirely benign electronic system. Every human consciousness lives forever, by having their brain wetware supervised by nanobots in the bloodstream and locally regenerated whenever needed. It is impossible to wake up to this real world, because one would have no real body to possess, no real eyes to open.
Some nodes of human consciousness might be spending their virtual lives doing empirical science, by connecting to sensory machines in the real world in such a way that they are telepresent in reality. They might control observational satellites as one would one's own eyes. Or the tools of mining robots like one would one's own limbs. But most people prefer fictional worlds. Some because they only feel truly comfortable in an environment like the one their ancestors lived in, others because they crave intense excitement. Neo is one among many who has lived for so long inside fiction that he has forgotten the truth. He might have lived a long series of lives in a reality like the one we live in now, with each death and rebirth intentionally blanking his memory. The Neo we meet at the beginning of the first movie is one who is completely alienated from his situation, and yet on some level senses that something is wrong. His struggle to look beyond the virtual reality around him is what is interpreted by the benign AI in the real world as a wish to alter his fictional world in the direction we saw. The dark theme of it all is simply a result of his paranoia and terror at being lost in a kind of solipsistic world narrative. And the creepy anthropomorphic assassin program Mr. Smith takes on an important role as a result of Neo's wish to shake himself conscious. Smith is a subconscious self-image, and that's why he is his natural nemesis.
A couple of interesting themes that could be dealt with:
Everyone he think he knows are fictional characters, perhaps based on someone real that he knew hundreds of years ago, but completely controlled by the AI. Maybe there should be some exception to this (like some curious old friend coming to visit Neo just to catch up after a thousand years of not hearing from him), but it would nevertheless be hard for Neo to deal with the fact that nothing he knows is real in a much deeper sense than he thought.
Most people have gone insane after thousands and thousands of years of virtual omnipotence. The benign AI system just keeps trying to please us all, however crazy our wishes are. This is one of the reasons it didn't interrupt Neo and remind him of the truth: The AI has lost all expectation that a human consciousness should be rational.
The awesomeness of virtual omnipotence could be explored. When Neo understands the truth and exits the Matrix, he can do and make anything just by willing it into existence. He has got to start playing, see what he can do. He should try to create worlds with intelligent populations, interact with them as a God would interact with his creation, and watch them build silly shiny stuff to make him happy. He should dive into a Mandelbrot for a whole day, just to see if the AI will reach a limit to its rendering power. And he should have fun wrecking stuff and remaking them. Also, I would like to see a mythical universe, where the sun and the moon really do have faces, and gods really do walk the Earth, backstabbing and eating each other, and passing the time by trolling humanity.
Neo should visit people he once knew, see how their various mental imbalances have given rise to weird and scary realms.
Someone should provide Neo with a timeline of humanity, and thoughts on its possible future. This is important to situate the story, since all places we see are in virtual space. An important problem should be that most of humanity prefer ignorance- and excitement-induced bliss. If everyone closes themselves in like this, all responsibility for the continuation of intelligent life in the universe would rest on the kind of naive AI.
Questions should arise about whether or not the "truth" is in fact just another layer of fiction. This one is tough, and might lead into some heavy duty epistemological issues. The problem of radical skepticism should be dealt with head on, as the concluding climax!
