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Topic: AMA, i was a developer in Polybius
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SavannahDJ
Atari Fan
Member # 764
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posted 01-21-2002 04:35 PM
I will respond the questions i think are the most relevant:
- I was one of the lead developer in the game, but only for a short
time, because we all got changed from project some months later in
development
- We where 5 people initially
- Polybius means
many lives, the game changed when you died, adapting to your skills, so
thats why i think the name was choosen, also maybe an inside joke? An
internal production code? Maybe it was that
- I
don't really know if it had ties with the military, it was a very messy
time at Atari. They got at us one day and said something like: "You
need to make a videogame named Polybius that changed between every
player", to make to the demands we had to give the game concience.
- In
my opinion, the games was never supposed to be released, it was a
experiment to the idea of a machine adapting to a person and without
them knowing changing their opinion of things. I believe the machine got
to an arcade by a error, it was never meant for that. And for that
reason a day later it was taken away never to be seen again. So the
objective was only to test the limits of controlling people using
audiovisual mediums.
- The game isn't "talked much" because it was
present only one day in the arcades, from what i have been told(not
very much), an accident happened and the game was quickly taken away
after the authorities found out it wasn't where it was supposed to be.
- There
was one person in the team, i think the most talented one, he was the
one that pushed the most the conscience and adapting to players thing.
He after testing the machine with various tasks was so scared with the
results that later he quit his job and never talked with us again. Weird
stuff
- You may ask, how did this game affect the human syquis?
Well, we had a database of all the people that lived in the area that
the game was runned on, in this case, a very rural part of Oregon. The
game used facial reconicion to detect them, and get their name, age,
etc. The game used an intelligent program that used that data to
manipulate the player. Just imagine what it could have done with the
data that the internet holds! Amazing, but terrifying at the same time.
Did you know that you can affect the brain of a person indirectly? You
don't need any special tools, just the right messages to tick a certain
part of their brains, and thats what Polybius did.
Posts: 19 | From: Georgia | Registered: Dec 2001 | IP: Logged
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