Love: Loving?

I recently came across Love. Love is "a game to play with your friends, and for them to play with their friends", and it's  being developed by a sole individual, Eskil Steenberg. I highly recommend watching the gameplay video.

It claims to be a "First person not so massively multi player online procedural adventure game" - I will now boldly state that it's the first FPNSMMOPAG. It's entering public beta on Jan 7, so soon we'll be able to put that unwieldy acronym to the test.

Essentially it looks to be a combination of Second Life, in that players can heavily influence the world and the objects in it, and Quake Wars, where you have to shut down specific parts of the base in order to take out other parts. It also has elements of The Incredible Machine, thanks to intricate links between different elements of the world, and Fracture, an ill-fated third-person shooter that attempted to pioneer use of terrain manipulation in an action game. Ooh, and perhaps any number of real-time strategy games where you have to develop a base and try to take out the opposition's.

So, basically, it's a bizarre mix of disparate genres, with a procedurally generated coating, some (hopefully) clever AI and a unique art style. I'm intrigued.

What I find particularly intriguing is the name. If I had to guess at what a game called Love was going to be like, I'd be imagining a game about developing relationships, about exploring what love is in the context of a series of game systems and rules. Perhaps that's what this game is. There certainly seems to be a lot of emphasis on cooperation, and of learning to understand each other's efforts and the environment that's being created.

That said, when he starts going on about radio frequencies, keywords, proximity sensors, weaponry, power generators and forcefields, I wonder how appropriate the name really is. Maybe it's just a ploy, a clever use of evocative language to engage people so they'll dig deeper - if so, it certainly worked on me, and now I plan on checking out the beta. If it does turn out to be a good FPNSMMOPAG, that's awesome, but if it doesn't expand on and justify the "Love" theme, I'll feel a tad betrayed.