Upstart Canada-based studio Frozen North, with the financial assistance of Infusion Development, is currently crafting a PC and Xbox 360 MMO with the working title Project Hippasus, themed around ancient Greece. The setting is relatively uncommon for the genre, but the game's mechanics are what really set it apart: it features an open-ended spell crafting system based around actual mathematical principles. Frozen North CEO Julian Spillane is quick to note that the MMO is intended first and foremost as entertainment--but that "at the end of the day you might accidentally learn something." Nick sat down with Spillane and Infusion's Gregory Brill to find out what exactly Project Hippasus is, and what it isn't.

Julian Spillane: There are a few different levels. First of all, there's your traditional MMO questing system. We don't want like, "Kill ye 20 rats and bring them back to me." We want a kind of system where there are more mathematic quests and puzzles. I don't know if you ever played Knights of the Old Republic, but in that game they actually had a version of the Towers of Hanoi--a famous, hundreds-of-years old mathematical problem--which they disguised completely. So we want to work with things like that, and take classic [mathematics], like magic squares, and turn them into something mythical and arcane. Of course there will be your standard quests, go defeat so-and-so. But so-and-so will be a powerful mage who's well-versed in quantum theory, or chaos theory, or probabilities. And it's different then, because it becomes more of a thinking man's battle. It becomes a lot more about thought processing as opposed to grinding. I hate grinding. It's a problem that we're really facing in the MMO field. Everything is grinding. We want to get rid of that completely.