we go that way

I think up a lot of games with no point, no overarching story, no real drive. This is because I'm an absurdist. But today I'm going to think of the exact opposite, a game with so much purpose it's sick. No, I'm not talking about a long haired hippy named "Jesus" running around and popping a cap in every wicked sob's @$$ while saving kittens from an impending armagedon. I'm talking about a tribal shaman guided by voices to save his village from commercial success. There was a game I once saw from a stanford game design class in which you had to blow into your microphone to make a balloon bigger. When the balloon got big enough you clapped and your avatar shot a dart at the balloon, making whoever was tied to it fall. Let's steal this idea for a moment and make an adventure game out of it. We'll have Krug, the shaman, who's a skinny little old guy with a voodoo stick. He picks up head dresses, makes dirty-old-man jokes with the ladies of the village, scares children for the hell of it, draws pretty symbols in the sand. Pretty much a loser of a priest, but the elder of the village so they can't complain. Some turmoil comes to his village in the form of bulldozers and men in nice suits (way too hot for the desert, but what do men in nice suits know?) Krug performs a ritual of spiritual guidance, and guess who gets to be his spiritual guide? That's right, you do! You can speak to Krug in clicks and ooooos and hissses and all kinds of wierd noises. When Krug gets in fights, for instance, you might have to click as fast as you can or make really loud falsetto noises or really low guttoral noises. You command which direction he goes by your voice and give him clues to find ancient artifacts and inspire comrades. Krug is clearly not invulnerable, of course, and he also loses faith at times. He'll have to go to his temple and make sacrafices and perform rituals to renew the strength of your voice in his head. Of course, in the end, after Krug has successfully fended off the corporate whores and kept his village in the dark ages for another five years or so, he'll have to die. But it's alright, because then he'll pop out of the game console's cartridge slot as an action figure for the player to remember him by. How sweet is that?

its all about moving fast

Okay, so this is kind of stupid, but I wonder if it would be possible to plug an electric guitar and/or a mic that picks up an acoustic guitar and make a game out of it. Like, the program somehow reads the frequencies/tone to determine if the player has used the correct note and you wind up getting a dance dance revolution type thing. They have this new "guitar playing" game, but it only uses five fingers and is kind of lame with a special guitar and all. There needs to be something that actually recieves notes from a real instrument and let's the player know they're playing the right thing. There could even be strumming parts and solos and everything. And maybe turn it into an adventure game where you run around killing stuff with your guitar... or not just killing, but other things, like taming them or appeasing them. Maybe your mission could be not to kill people, but to win their favor with music for some greater cause, like bringing two kingdoms together. The player's avatar could travel around the world and learn how to play different styles of music, from several different cultures! All to bring the two kingdoms of "light" and "dark" together like in Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories! This is brilliant. This would be an incredible piece of art! What a storyline. What a revolutionary teaching tool. What a step towards world peace! Nobel Peace Prize, watch out!!@!!!!!!

after break

For the not posting in over two weeks I blame exams and subsequent "recovery time."

I saw I Heart Huckabees a few weeks ago and loved it. I don't think there's a game that captures its nonsensical approach to dialogue, the same approach shared by other indie flicks such as The Royal Tenenbaums and Igby Goes Down (long time favorites of most all my friends). And there should be. There have been too many RPGs with points and overdramatic, one directional characters. It's about time there's one made with little sense and monotone, complex characters. Such an RPG could even take place in modern day. Maybe you wake up and everything's pretty normal, but soon you find yourself involved in some sort of mystery that takes you beyond the limits of human imagination. You find yourself in a world where everyone and everything has a will of its own and you must develop your own agenda or be swept into something senseless. Say, for instance, you agree to join causes of others that lead no where, until you learn to just refuse and go your own way, then you finally begin to get somewhere. The game wouldn't be about doing everything or collecting as much as possible or even about anything at all really. It'd be a dynamic storyline done in a one way fashion. In keeping with that theme, the gameplay should be open ended, with the ability to fight and have dialogue being equally split. The player shouldn't be restricted to one option but should have to make decisions as to how to deal with things on his/her own accord. Consequently, the player's avatar wouldn't be super human in any way, so fighting would probably result more in conflict creation than conflict resolution (i.e., there wouldn't be so much death as people punching one another and walking off). Everything in the game should look and feel desireless.

In other thoughts: The "MMO/file transfer" game described before should be transparent, like a whole other dimension on the player's desktop. This world and the player's desktop world could be switched between either via hotkey or by clicking both the left and right mouse buttons at the same time. Naturally, this option would only be available/desirable on faster processors and video cards.

I didn't realize

It's been three days since my last post. I dug an old game out of the ruins of a crashed harddrive and have been playing it nonstop for the past few days. Halflife. Brilliant game.

An idea occured to me while trying to jump to a particularly difficult-to-jump-to place (which I later found out was an altogether not-to-be-jumped-to place) which was to blend a FPS with a skill based system. And, while I'm at it, might as well blend it with a Zelda-style puzzle game as well. Halflife does this to an extent, with excellent puzzles. But I found that each puzzle led to a different area (which was oftentimes a different portion of the same area) and therefore the complex seemed immense. I thought to myself, what if, while you played the game, your skill with certain weapons/actions got better throughout. This is done in Morrowind, and I'm sure it has been expanded on in other games, but in Morrowind your skill only really determined how powerful your hits were. I'm thinking you might have a skill called "Shotgun", and the more you use your Shotgun, the better you're able to use it. You may even learn "Shotgun tricks." Slower levelling but still potent skills might be "Jump" or "Run." With level-ups like these the game becomes much more puzzle oriented than hack-n-slash. The player isn't expected to make it through an area in the first go. As a matter of fact, some places may be innaccessible to the player until they build up their skill in a certain feat. For instance there might be an area that the player needs to climb, but their "climbing" is too low so they have to go to other areas before they can tackle that obstacle. Okay, this is a pretty lame game idea, and I'm certain it has been done before, if not in a right out FPS, at least some sort of "sneak-around", "covert-ops" game. Rainbow Six, for instance, relied on the player's skills in weaponry and certain tactical things to achieve goals. Rainbow Six was much more tactical than adventurous, however, and wouldn't have skills in things like "Climbing", "Jumping" or "Running." I'm thinking more a Doom, Halflife, Quake, Unreal style game that incorporates skills to give the player more mobility and power (i.e., survival) rather than tactical advantage, while also incorporating a puzzle element. Rainbow Six, for instance, didn't use skills to solve puzzles so much as to make different parts of missions easier to accomplish. It's difficult to say how multiplayer for a game like this would be best handled. Part of the point behind multiplayer is that each player's skill is determined by how well they handle the controls. But I have a feeling that having a skill-based system will only make players want to play the game more to get the slight advantage over their adversaries. Well, that's enough on this crappy idea. Back to the forums.

Supplement: The Grand Design

Yes, a title for the last game idea, "The Grand Design".

And more to add to it. Some time ago I had an idea for a game/file sharing program. In the game, the player's avatar would have a power equal to how much files he/she was sharing. I think the last game would be the perfect outlet for this concept. It would be total exploration. Players would have to travel the lands to find/obtain the items necessary to feed to the great Machine and at the same time they would be searching each other's file archives and sharing data. People could, of course, just stand around with their avatars, making themselves permanent servers in certain places, or they could roam about, and trade files while fighting House Dragons. This would also be a software friendly file sharing scheme, as large downloads would be difficult due to the dynamic nature of the servers. That is all.

Not Drunk Enough

This past weekend was just... no person should have to endure that kind of mental torture. At least it's over now.

Flinging bytes at a server and praying it responds over and over again does, however, give me an idea for a game. This could be either a server/client deal or just a single player game, it really doesn't matter. The player finds herself behind a "screen" of sorts with certain objects which she can drop into a chute. The machine will spit out different things depending on what the player puts in and the order they are received. Maybe it'll feed some ticker tape out of a moose head or have a rabbit with a frog's head hop out and sing Ava Maria or simply spit the object back out in various states of health. How does once piece together these seemingly meaningless clues into a coherent picture? The player might have certain actions, like "Analyze" or "Beat with Stick" that could provide her with clues as to the machine's instructions. The machine should focus on the order of the objects placed into it, i.e., it's clues should revolve around trying to get the objects in the correct sequence. This would probably just make a fun little minigame in some bigger game, like you see in those Japanese tactical RPGs. Hell, if that were the case the player could just bring the items with her to the machine and expiriment with what kind of wierd stuff she can get to happen. If it were a standalone game, however, I think it would be neat to include "Have a Play" and "Have a Picnic" buttons where all the objects would get together, a moldy shoe at the head of the table, hosting a party with a used textbook, a dead frog, a ball of lint, a half-eaten donut and a two headed stuffed racoon. And in the Play or during the Picnic or whatever there might be something revealed as to the order of the objects. And if we wanted to make this a meaningful game the objects could be symbolic with the machine having a "Word of the Moment" like "Success" or "Daring" or something. And if it were an online game we could invite multiple people in who work together to try and solve the puzzle. That sounds like a lot more fun. Maybe have a giant warehouse with a whole bunch of items and a giant Machine and the players bring the items to the Machine and try to solve the ordering together. How magnificently absurd.

Ghostly Matters

Train of thought went like so:
Eyptian Addiction, hrm, what and interesting puzzle game, never would have thought of half these levels, very clever. The "ghost piece" really doesn't do much for the game, but whatever, what if there were a game where a person had to use certain robots to accomplish tasks, like they climbed in, performed the task, then had to climb into another robot somewhere in the level to perform another task and all the while their robots are getting stuck behind barriers that only other robots can pass so they have to figure out ways to get the necessary robot past these points and well... fuck that. Let's just make a game about ghosts. (pardon the french)

Don't think there's been a game made about ghosts. Maybe about getting rid of them, yes, but how about playing as them? There's Dungeon Keeper where you play as the "bad guy" and keep minions in your dungeon and kill heroes, but I don't think there's a game where your objective is to torture intruders/scare them shitless. (pardon again) Oh wait, there's the Sims, but the Sims ghosts just sort of float around frightening potentially erotic moments away. They don't have control over the entire structure, which is where our player will play. In fact, let's surprise the player. At the onset of the game let's have the player start out alive. Why she's in the house? Don't know. What's her objective? Not sure. Does she innevitably die and think "Man I suck at this game?" Yes, absolutely. But then, lo and behold, oh holy powers! She's back! But now she's a ghost. And sure, let's give her an avatar. So she's wandering around and she's pretty much got two things to do: First, make peace with the house. She's got to tame the furniture, the utilities, the creepy memories, the ubiquitous portal to hell in the basement, etc. Second, scare the hell out of people who are trying to inhabit the house. Think Beetlejuice, only with less of the miniature town and sandworms (well, maybe the sandworms can stay). But how does she lose? Well, her power will pretty much subsist in her control over the house. So her job will be to setup "traps" to scare potential inhabiters. Of course, the potential inhabiters will become more and more resolved, having been forewarned that the house is "haunted", so her job gets harder and harder. How hard is the hardest? Is there a clearly defined losing point? Well I suppose the Ghost Busters could come, that'd be pretty hard. Yeah, maybe some ghost squad she has to defeat will be the "Boss." And then when she defeats the boss, well, she inhabits the house for a really long time. And then she can be ported to the Sims to create mayhem there! Haha! Brilliant.