Game ideas with a different feel

David Stark / Zarkonnen
24 Aug 2014, 6:19 p.m.

So I make no secret of the fact that I am... wary of the games industry as an industry, and tend to think of it as a giant fleshgrinder using up young people and producing samey output.

Independent games are less harmful, but as Jeff Vogel has repeatedly pointed out, asking indies to do all the innovation is asking them to endanger their already precarious financial situation. I mean, look at me as an example - I freely admit that I am making Airships because I think it's really fun, not because it means anything or is breathtakingly original. My next two scheduled projects, which I love dearly, are also not going to be Completely Different To Everything That Came Before - though they should be fun.

This leaves us with Art Games. Which are great, and I am very happy that here in Zurich, things like this are made, but there's a danger of ghettoization. I have to admit that when I think art game, I think of a particular kind of game that is conventional in its mechanics but has an edgy topic - one drawn from a short list that is mostly commentary on social issues. Again, it is good that these exist, but I worry that Art Games' conventions again limit them.

Can we have games which don't insist that they are Art and yet feel really different? It's a tall order, and I don't know if I'm the right person to figure this out. I am used enough to existing games that it feels hard to imagine something that is different. Still, I thought I'd give it a try, by imagining games that feel different, or come from some alternate reality where different conventions hold:

  • A game where you construct a story, and a visual pattern forms from your story choices. Can you make your pattern and story match?
  • A game where the game mechanisms are all visible as physical machinery.
  • A game which puts you into the skin of a foreign creature. The thrill of the hunt, hiding in patterns of light, the joy of babies.
  • A game where you try to perform everyday life tasks while suffering from anxiety that is represented as a blinding white light that threatens to blank out your vision.
  • A game where an adventurer is going through a dungeon. You must create monsters for her to fight that she can defeat.
  • A toy where you can see a small patch of dirt and grass with some playing figures on. You can tell the figures to do things when they get close to another one.
  • A game that generates the ruins of an ancient civilization, complete with artefacts, language, and history. Dig out the ruins, carefully clean and piece together the pots and study the carvings. Publish your findings in a museum that others can see online.
  • A game where you repair electrical goods. Press buttons, remove covers, user your multimeter. Replace only what needs replacing to make a good profit, and quickly, to get more customers.
  • Cryptographic teetotal truth or dare: A system where a number of people each submit something they think everyone secretly believes. Each secret is shown to all players but one, and no one knows who submitted it. Players then enter whether they believe this. Finally, all the secrets that everyone (but the person who did not get it) agreed to are displayed.
  • Multiplayer game where players are characters in a murder mystery or similar. Players must work together to identify the murderer while only being allowed to communicate in anodyne stock phrases.
  • Survival/building type game where you die every ten minutes and some time passes in the world before you get back. Use your time and your deaths wisely.
  • Music game where you are one musical theme struggling against another. Preserve harmony to gain points but look for weaknesses in the enemy's performance.
  • Games that teach you (interesting) things: reading text upside down, estimating the number of objects in a picture, reading microexpressions, spotting nasty rhetorical devices...
  • A game that asks you to agree with ethical statements and then serves up contradicting scenarios.
  • A religious game for religious people that lets them worship together. (As opposed to most religiously influenced games I've seen, which tend to be more about pushing a particular viewpoint.)
  • A game where each level is based in some set of streets of your local city, with local creators making levels infused with opinion and gossip.
  • A tool that lets you set up particular gaming experiences for purposes of self-conditioning or magickal ritual.
  • A game that teaches you to come up with non-biased random numbers by telling you when the distributions of numbers you come up with is skewed.
  • A game that uses a microphone to listen to your breathing, which you use to control the game.

Are these any good? Not sure yet. Some of them might be both original and workable, and I'll have more of a think about them later.