My Pet Earth: User Manual

Abstract

This document is meant to explain the "My Pet Earth" game. It is divided up into different parts: a section with tips to get you started quickly, a section explaining how the game works(along with the reasoning behind the vague variable names), and a section going over the user interface in detail. The "My Pet Earth" game was created in response to a computer science assignment on finite state machines- the goal of the assignment was to make a so called virtual pet, much like a Tamagotchi style of game.

Quick Tips-

You cannot edit the 'time' and 'state' text boxes...
The only boxes you can directly change are the group of four on the bottom right. The only way that you can modify your planet is by using those four boxes in conjunction with the + and - buttons. (the boxes on the right are the amount to add or subtract)
"Primordial Soup" and ideal life conditions:
Your planet won't get very far if it doesn't have the "primordial soup" conditions. It is very picky about temperature- if you are not having success, try entering five for the kinetic energy...
Try leaving the planet alone for a change
After you get the hang of keeping a planet happy by careful attention and periodic intervention, you might try to just let the planet go and see what it does. Sometimes it will reach some kind of equilibrium cycle and carry on for a while; other times it quickly spins out of control to reach a terminal state from which it can't recover(without user intervention). see what happens!

How The Game Works- Objectives, Concepts, Meaning

Premise and Hippy Crap:
The idea behind this game is that the earth is a being. This is a complicated claim that brings up an incredible mess of other questions, issues, and details, some of which are as follows; does the earth really have something like what we call "emotions"? is it "conscious"? what does it really mean to be conscious? how are "consciousness" and "being" related? what about sleep, semi-sleep, and dreaming? and animals? beehives and anthills? buildings? countries? Computers? God(s) and transcendent being(s)? are there perhaps different levels of consciousness?
I have heard people refer to a single cell bacterium or virus as being "alive"; This may be true, but bacteria are not alive in the sense that people are alive. are bacteria conscious? I don't know, but if they are, the consciousness must not be very complex;
The earth does exhibit characteristics similar to those of things that many of us classify as conscious, or at least living beings. the planet, as it exists today, is very complex. Its surface is where most of the interesting stuff is happening, much like our brain. Similar to the way that we have a circulatory system to transfer(among other things) blood cells carrying oxygen, the earth has developed many roads, to transfer(among other things) people carrying money. similar to the way that we have a centralized nervous system, the earth has the internet, and real-time cable networks, with hundreds of simultaneous, parallel, streams of consciousness.

The Goal of the Game
Much like the so called "god games" or "software toys", This is a simulation type game that has no real predefined end. I encourage you to make your initial goal an attempt to get your planet to the highest level of consciousness that you can achieve. That, however, becomes quickly boring. Try to see how long you can keep it going without intervention. I suppose the real objective is to play around with it until you figure out how it works and get board. Before you go, may also look at the source code, as it is only Java script embedded in the HTML (it is very C++ like, you may be able to more fully understand the rules by looking at it). Also, keep in mind that this simulation is meant to represent a closed system (there are no aliens or asteroids, only earthly armageddons).

State Rules and Game Concepts:

Time:
The idea behind this value is nothing more then the age of the planet since the game began. The game works in cycles, where one game cycle is one second. The time counter starts at zero(0) and increases by one each game cycle. even though the image shows the earth rotating only once in the course of several game cycles, a game cycle is meant to represent a very large, geologic, amount of time. Time is not really that strict in this game- I suppose that some game cycles may really represent much longer amounts of time than other game cycles(e.g. a war is probably much less time then the evolution of a humanlike species from bacteria), but in the interest of playability I tried to make it so that the player doesn't have to wait around all day. Just keep in mind that we are looking at the planet on a geologic scale of time, where the blink of an eye can mean the erosion of the grand canyon or the melting of the ice caps.
State:
This game revolves around states(its engine is nothing more than a finite state machine). During different states, different sets of rules apply. I tried to pick these as best I could, so please bear with me:
- Simple:
  All that the planet can do it this state is move to unconscious, but that requires very specific temperature.
- Unconscious:
  This is a transitional state to one of the three conscious states(though it must go through at least one cycle of happy before moving to the other conscious states.) when in this state, the potential energy increases(plants absorb energy from the sun, die, and are buried by layers of soil), the waste goes down, and the useful materials go up, as plants and bacteria do their thing.
- Happy: This is the main conscious state. The planet uses the potential energy stored up during unconsciousness (and whatever may have already been there), increasing the kinetic energy of the system. It also puts materials into active use, and produces useless and harmful materials. from this state, the planet can only move into one of the other two conscious states. there is also a small possibility that a random political war lasting one turn will break out (and that war has a small chance of blasting the planet back to a simple state).
- Tired/Sad/Ill
  When in this state, the planet stops any further development until the waste level lowers. There is a good chance every cycle that civilization will be destroyed, but some form of life, like bacteria, lives on (or in other words, the state changes to unconscious)
- Unstable
  This state is kind of like over drive- things go faster, use more resources, and produce more heat. But there is a chance that the war will either raze all civilization or all life (reducing the state to unconscious or simple).

User Interface

Picture:
This is where you can see your little planet buddy! This image is a graphical representation of the state that you are in. With it you may get a better idea of what the states mean; for example, when your planet is sad there is space junk everywhere and the polar ice caps melt; or when ever the planet is in any of the conscious states, it has a halo of light, a space station, and periodic space flights.
Detailed Text Info:
This is a space for more detailed information and instructions. this is text output.
Time:
This shows you how old your planet is (in game cycles). There are two buttons in this field:
- Pause:
  Stops time for your little buddy. This makes it easier to intervene in a hurry.
- Continue:
  This button only works if time is currently paused. Use it to make things normal again after you pause.
Complexity/Awareness:
This number represents the complexity (and/or consciousness) of the planet. It is the major indication of planet development. It starts out low and grows as the planet does. For example, a complexity of zero indicates empty space;
State:
your little planet is represented by a finite-state machine. This field shows what state the planet is in.
The Environment Variables:
For each variable(like a property, or a value) that effects your pet planet, there is an entry in the table. The text that is displayed on the left is the variable name; on the right, there two text-boxes and two buttons(one set like this for each variable). The text box immediately to the right of the colon(:) is for output only; it shows the current value of the variable. All of the rest of the stuff in there is used for user intervention. User intervention is the manual changing of the variables after the life of your little planet has started. You can intervene by specifying an amount in the far-right text-box(which defaults to 1) and pressing one of the operation buttons(the ones with a plus or minus sign) to add or subtract that value from the current value.

UPDATE NOTE: the design has changed from the earlier design, but only in form. the same functionality is possible with this interface; the new one is just more compact, with the User Intervention buttons built in to the output table. the reason for this is that the design was getting too big- users with small monitors(like mine) would have to scroll down to access the User Intervention part of the interface. This new way makes sense to me, though I admit it may be slightly crowded, and less intuitive.