Innovation, Startups and Venture Capital in Iceland

Lawrence Lessig to design politics in Klang’s new game, Seed

Lawrence Lessig, law professor at Harvard and founder of Creative Commons, will assist indy game studio Klang with designing the politics of their upcoming massively multiplayer online game Seed. This is reported in Venture Beat.

Lessig happened to meet Mundi Vondi, CEO of Klang, and start talking about games.

“After talking for a while, we moved on to how they were going to govern these places, the structure for governing,” Lessig said in an interview with GamesBeat. “It was clear that no one had really thought through that much. That’s what began our conversation about whether there was something fun to experiment with here.”

Seed is a continuous, persistent simulation where players are tasked with colonizing an exoplanet through collaboration, conflict, and other player-to-player interaction. Using unique gameplay based on managing multiple characters in real-time, communities are built even when players are logged off, allowing the world of Seed to be a living, breathing entity.

“We’re building a virtual world filled with vast, player-created communities where every player-action has a repercussion in the game world,” Vondi said in a statement. “For example, a player might chop down a tree, which affects the planet’s ecosystem. This wood can then be sold on, which has an impact on the economy, and if the player chooses to, use the money to bribe another player, which affects the balance of power. We create and provide the tools and incentives to build these communities…the rest is up to the players.”

Klang Games, which is based in Berlin, was founded by a group of Icelanders. They previously released ReRunners, a multiplayer endless runner. The company has raised an undisclosed amount from Greylock Partners, MIT Media Lab founder Joi Ito, and Unity’s Davíð Helgason.

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