Created Tuesday 11 February 2025
Here are some game ideas I would like to see in the world.
Social islands
This game looks like a typical RPG. And it starts like a typical RPG: your mom is sick and she needs a herb that only grows on a far-away island, inhabited by terrible dangerous creatures. There are no "civilized" ways to get the herb: traders don't sell it, expeditions are not sent to that island because of how dangerous it is; besides, you are poor and mostly unskilled, you wouldn't be able to afford the herb even if it was somehow available. Everybody expects that your mom will die — unless you do something unimaginable and go to that island and manage to retrieve the herb yourself...
The trick of the game is that "terrible dangerous creatures" are other people, whose civilization developed so much in isolation from yours, that their customs and way of life is completely alien to you. Their traditions seem cruel and inhumane to you — but so do your traditions to them. The peace between the two civilizations would be unimaginable if not for the vast ocean separating the two. Yet, you, the player, are driven by the ultimate need. You are forced to give up your social lens, to study and understand the alien traditions, and to find a way to peacefully interact with the other island's inhabitants to obtain the herb that you need.
...
I actually imagine the game to have multiple islands, each with its own, unique way of life, so that the player has a chance to slowly practice removing their personal social lens. For me, it would be interesting to generate the different social norms via some sort of simulation involving machine learning and game theory, but I am not sure how feasible that is. Besides, it would be impossible to craft a learning experience for the player if the island civilizations in the game are randomly generated.
I'm also tempted to allow a game path, where the player keeps leveling up their fighting skills, until they are forced to face the fact that bullying is not the way forward. That would be a harder path (unlearning is hard) but still feasible.
The impotent God
This is a game inspired by a genre of "God" games, where the player represents a god, protecting a tribe and helping them develop. Normally, you don't have a say in what the tribe does, but you provide them with resources, like biomes around their habitat, or ideas that lead to new inventions.
In this game you play as a God who has no control of either their people or their environment. Your only action is to speak to your people — and even then they don't have to follow what you say, or even to listen to you at all.
Basically, your goal is to form the concepts, the ideas that your people will explore, develop, and agree or disagree with completely on their own. I want the players to see that creating new concepts, new abstractions, is a powerful tool on its own, even when you have no power whatsoever.
Also, don't actually call the game "The impotent God", its an internal name aimed to concisely describe the idea. Call it "The omnipotent God" or something. Lead the player throught the "I can do anything" — "I can do nothing" — "I can do anything" rollercoaster.
Strategy that teaches (functional) programming
You are a bacterium that fell to Earth in the core of a meteorite. In the huge Earth gravity you are powerless on your own, but you are able to infect an ant and rewire their brain as you wish.
The ant's brain is represented by visual functional programming language, similar to Luna/Enso when they were a general-purpose programming language and before they were forced to focus solely on statistical analysis and data science. Unlike other programming games, you do not start from scratch. Instead, you already have a fully-functional program, that does all the ant things: gather food, protect the colony, explore the world, etc. You can modify it at the high level (like, increase the drive to explore, so that you learn the world, or vice versa increase the fear behavior to drive your ant to its colony to infect more ants, etc) But you also can dig into how each function is implemented, learn from it and modify the slightest details.
Your goal is, obviously, to build a space program and leave Earth for your home — deep space.