2.3 days ago
(Edited)
No. 37
[copy]
This is the design for a new way of transportation in the world.
Imagine if one day you're bored, you open Portal 2, download some random user-made maps, and solve one.
Suddenly you feel like you need to pee, so you go towards the bathroom, open the door, and pee... normally, then flush.
But when you open the door, you're a in a whole different place. Somewhere on Earth. You explore this place for a while, eventually going through a door that leads back into your room.
Some time later you play another Portal 2 map and the same happens, so you notice the pattern, solving portal maps open literal portals to explore Earth.
You probably keep this quiet, you won't tell a soul for a while, explore the world, find strange, niche, complicated portal maps. You discover that the more complicated ones lead to very special places, some are dumb random places.
You treat this as your secret, this is your way to travel. But maybe one day the secret leaks, some guy shares a video, or stream, or post, telling people to just try it, because it works. Slowly people start realizing it works.
At this point a Portal economy starts to develop. Communities form to find the best locations, the special maps. Some intel and knowledge of these get sold for hefty sums of money. People just start following walkthroughs on complicated maps and travel around.
The mechanism of what binds a map to a specific location is understood. People start making maps to get people to visit their room. Businesses and places pay map makers to make them fancy maps that allow people to visit them. Trolls send others to disappointing locations.
If this was a new way of transportation it would make some sense because effort is required, people can't simply tap a screen and get transported, they need to personally solve a map.
The idea that effort can be used as a way to rate-limit or gate-keep locations could be adopted into other systems.
Somebody should make a Black Mirror episode about this.
Imagine if one day you're bored, you open Portal 2, download some random user-made maps, and solve one.
Suddenly you feel like you need to pee, so you go towards the bathroom, open the door, and pee... normally, then flush.
But when you open the door, you're a in a whole different place. Somewhere on Earth. You explore this place for a while, eventually going through a door that leads back into your room.
Some time later you play another Portal 2 map and the same happens, so you notice the pattern, solving portal maps open literal portals to explore Earth.
You probably keep this quiet, you won't tell a soul for a while, explore the world, find strange, niche, complicated portal maps. You discover that the more complicated ones lead to very special places, some are dumb random places.
You treat this as your secret, this is your way to travel. But maybe one day the secret leaks, some guy shares a video, or stream, or post, telling people to just try it, because it works. Slowly people start realizing it works.
At this point a Portal economy starts to develop. Communities form to find the best locations, the special maps. Some intel and knowledge of these get sold for hefty sums of money. People just start following walkthroughs on complicated maps and travel around.
The mechanism of what binds a map to a specific location is understood. People start making maps to get people to visit their room. Businesses and places pay map makers to make them fancy maps that allow people to visit them. Trolls send others to disappointing locations.
If this was a new way of transportation it would make some sense because effort is required, people can't simply tap a screen and get transported, they need to personally solve a map.
The idea that effort can be used as a way to rate-limit or gate-keep locations could be adopted into other systems.
Somebody should make a Black Mirror episode about this.