The Hatchery

The Hatchery was a one-week project (i.e. concept, creation and coding all done within one week) as an exploration into alternative work systems in games, as well as user-generated content.
class
Interactive Design and Production (CTIN 542), Preparing the Interactive Project (CTIN 548)
lecturer
Mark Bolas, Steve Anderson
medium
PHP / MySQL
completed
Spring 2009
The class The Hatchery was built for was geared towards making the students start to consider topics for their final thesis projects. Due to my curiosity about MMOs and the various ways in which players accumulate their rewards in such games, in Hatchery I built a game in which the "work" was simply waiting for your reward to appear.
View project.
The user-generated content part was added to permit players to upload their own rewards and set the equivalent wait times. This feature was specifically placed in order to explore whether players might inherently value the contents of an egg that required a longer wait, merely because of the fact that they "worked harder" for it. Essentially the project tries to address what exactly is it that defines a game reward's value.
category
Games
tags