When I entered the 7th grade I made up a daydream in my head, partly inspired by video games. In my head, I was a warrior, and I had to get up out of my tent, and march into the wilderness (school) each day. Whenever there was a test, classwork, or homework, it was a battle, and the score was the casualty count – when I got a question correct, my army scored a kill. Get a question wrong, and one of my dudes died. It didn’t help my grades – I don’t recall the marks as bodycount part lasting more than a few months - but as escapism it was awesome. For a year and a half I had an imaginary adventure with the same characters, a feat of attention span which I credit to how effing boring and unendurable everything was then.

People have mentioned that giving people bonus points to do stuff they should just do will in the long run demotivate them. That makes sense to me – my parents paid me to do chores, and now that I have my own place and nobody pays me to tidy up, I hardly ever do. I promise myself junk food and goodies to do chores – to no effect. I’ve tried to start  imaginary adventures, with my characters winning glorious victories when I do chores – but they just end up with the characters sitting around in camp, telling each other that they’ll totally slay that dragon tomorrow.

On a different topic, I didn’t buy the bit in Jesse Schell’s talk about authenticity being what customers want. What all the games he mentioned have in common is that they are aimed outside the gamer-ghetto of introverted, escapist, perpetually adolescent males who want to be the stars of big dumb action movies. Now, people outside the gamer ghetto also happen to be less introverted and escapist, and thus more reality-oriented. All this talk of authenticity reminds me of the old saying “the most important thing is honesty. Once you can fake that…”

Imagine rival bands summoning demons to battle each other, rappers doing drive-bys of each others concerts. Jilted fans are out to get you for selling out, psychos are out to get you because you’re famous and they’re psychos…

Rebellion makes for an awesome theme. Not only are rivals trying to kill you, the authorities are out to get you as well. And religion – make sure your demons kill any missionaries, or else your Cat Stevens will become the next whatever the hell his name is now.

The creative part of the game could be like Garage Band on the mac. The game wouldn’t be able to judge the quality of the music, but it could challenge you to try different things – your manager wants you to follow every trend, whether it’s thrash, or slow ballads, or acoustic, or lots of treble or bass – the game can figure out what your tempo or instrumentation is, and choose your place on the pop charts accordingly. You could also create the album art, videos, stage show, clothes and hair – all of which your band, fans, and the public has their own opinions on. In multiplayer, success could be judged by how many other players like your song, artwork, videos, etc. It should be possible to just hole in up your studio Beatle-style, without having to worry about the management and action elements.

If you do want to tour, you have to worry about management – you want to have the most awesome stageshow with all the lasers and fireworks, but everything costs money. How much to spend on security? You can save money by hiring a motorcycle gang which takes payment in beer, but the results might not be so pretty. And how far do you sell out? Will you allow your music to be used in ads? Whose ads? Will you re-record it with the lyrics The Man wants? Also the drummer’s addiction is going overboard – do you replace him? With who? Send him to rehab?

Action elements could include driving the tour bus, while fighting off hitmen, demons, censors, and jilted ex-fans. Then on stage you have to double as a bouncer, fighting off crazed fans along with all the above threats.

In multiplayer there would be huge rock festivals, with more bands than stagetime. There would be a king of the hill battle, with the hill being the stage.

Picture this for a game setting: A valkyrie awakes in a room flooded with blood. “Oh No!” She says “I’ve been sleeping through the Battle of Ragnarök!” She runs towards the sound of the guns, through rivers of blood and mountains of corpses that are flaming like volcanoes. She finds Thor. “Have I missed Ragnarök?” She asks. “No, all you missed was a small skirmish between patrols. Here comes the main force.” He points into the distance, where a massive cloud, an epic thunderhead, reaches up into the stratosphere. The camera zooms in, to show this is no cloud – it’s an endless swarm of B-52 bombers, massive dragons, floating castles, starships…Down below we see, from horizon to horizon as far as we can see in all directions, soldiers marching shoulder to shower with heavy machine guns. Wait – these are towering mega-mechs, and those ammo belts don’t have bullets, but scud missiles! With them come tanks that look like skyscrapers with artillery guns at every window…

Imagine if you were at a movie theater, and every time they have to change reels, the movie stops and the audience has to sit there, maybe reading some little quote or factoid on the screen. Absurd, right? Yet that’s what we have with video games, in the form of load screens. Give us something to do! The Call Of Duty series gets this right. A very least give us a mission briefing, or something relevant to read. Lots of games have text logs or books that you can read in-game. Have them appear during loading, instead.

NOT FUN: DUDE-BOOTY

NEW RULE for any games using the 3rd person perspective: the playable character has to be a hot chick with lots of booty. Who wants to have a dude’s butt in the middle of their screen for hours on end? Not me. Velvet Assassin does this right. Metal Gear Solid 5 does this SO wrong. GTA4 is tolerable because you can put on a suit. Granted, we all have our own tastes, so let’s at least have an option to switch to a 1st person perspective, use a female character, or at least change your clothes.

People who get kicked out should have a chance to try again in a few years, in case they’ve grown up.

A brawl sim would be in the first person perspective. This is important for realism, in real life people tend to fixate on one opponent, while another sneaks up behind them. situational awareness, people.

It would be in slow motion, simulating the adrenalin rush and just for playability.

The puritan asks “Is somebody I don’t like having a good time?”

I’m a skeptic when it comes to the theory that digital zombies being shot leads to real-life violence. After all, your average DM FFA is less violent than an old fashioned game of cops and robbers. I mean, try to remember the last time you witnessed this:

Quake Player #1: Bang! You’re dead!

Quake Player #2: Missed me!

Quake Player #1: Did not!

Quake Player #2: Did too!

*Real-life fight breaks out*

Now on to a less effective form of persuasion: facts. Fact: games are getting more popular, more violent and/or realistic. Fact: the violent crime rate is still dropping, and it’s been dropping ever since around the time Doom came out.

Why is this? Well, before Doom, young men would go outside, join other young men, and together try to ignore one billion years of evolution urging them to kill everything male, impregnate everything female, and steal anything that might help them achieve the above….Today, young men are inside, playing games that let them live out their caveman instincts, shooting, looting and….Drinking hot coffee. In short, it’s catharsis.

For a century or so we’ve had the prison industry try their approach: take criminals and young men who get mistaken for criminals, then put them together in a building where there’s nothing to do but build muscles, join gangs, and learn how to commit crimes. How’s that been working out? We got a crime rate that rose, until Doom. Doom does the opposite: it takes the same young men, keeps them inside and alone, with no excercise. We’ve got no gangs, we’ve got no muscles, and let’s face it: after you’ve gibbed a bunch of imps with berserk strength, real-life crime looks pretty boring.

It’s enough to make me wonder if these anti-game activists are funded by the prison industry.

Mech should be used as real weapons systems are used – as part of a combined-arms system, with mechs being used for specific jobs using specific tactics to make use of their advantages, while avoiding their disadvantages.

The important things about mechs is that they need to have usable hands, for climbing, swimming, picking up weapons and objects, and hand-to-hand combat….Otherwise they’re just overcomplex tanks with a huge target silhouette that bog down in soft ground. A big, slow target with lots of soft spots. Not cool.

Advantages of Mechs:

Thanks to their ability to climb and jump, mechs are suited to otherwise impassable terrain, such as futuristic-mega-cities, alien worlds with giant trees, mountains, and general cluttered areas. Mechs are particularly well suited to polar conditions, being able to swim, climb icebergs, bust out chunks of ice to build fortifications or even throw at the enemy to conserve ammunition. They can deal with frozen lakes where tanks would fall through the ice – the mech uses its arms to bust the ice while it walks on the bottom, or swims. Their huge size means they won’t get stuck in deep snow, and the ground is frozen so no worries about bogging down in the mud.

Mechs are mega-engineers, using their arms to dig foxholes and trenches for themselves and others, to build things like bridges or barricades, and deal with unusually shaped objects and odd jobs that otherwise would require a large amount of specialized vehicles.

Mechs can fight hand-to-hand, which is useful in a war where armor is relatively tough, and ranged attacks are relatively weak. Shield are so tough vehicles run out of ammunition trying to blast through them. So, bring in the mechs, who can punch and kick.

Their intuative control scheme makes them ideal for cheaply mass-producing and giving to poorly-trained cannon-fodder. It’s hard to learn how to fly a helicopter, but everybody knows how to walk.

Inside a mech, the pilot is already in an exoskeleton suit. If the mech is disabled, the pilot can escape and even fight in his/her suit, using the same controls he was using to pilot the mech.

Disadvantages of Mechs:

Not suited for soft ground, mud, sand etc.

Easy target when not lying prone or dug into a foxhole. Mechs should be well equipped with smoke bombs, invisibility devices, and decoy holos.

Intuitive control means mechs panic like real people – running away, hiding and covering their head uselessly, or going berzerk and fighting hand-to-hand when missile combat would work better. This happens a lot when using the untrained cannon-fodder strategy (see above).

Brave infantry can attack their feet with satchel charges. This is important because good mech terrain is also good infantry terrain. For this reason, mechs should have defenses against infantry close assault – claymore mines attached to the feet and legs, flamethrowers, the option of dropping grenades (the pilots call it ‘nade pooping) or dousing the surrounding area with cluster bomblets. Also, energy shields that can be set to roast or electrocute anything nearby.

Why don’t they bog down?

The reason tanks have threads us to spread out their weight over a wide area – sort of like how you can cross over snow if you have skis on. Yet Mechs put all their weight on to their tiny little feet – like trying to walk through snow in high-heels. This is especially strange with insect-inspired vehicles, with no feet at all. There’s only two ways I can think of for this to make sense:

The mech has some sort of anti-gravity device – makes sense if your universe already has spaceships with artificial gravity. It’s just the same technology in reverse. Maybe the anti-gravity device can be damaged, causing a mech get get heavier – slower, worse at jumping, and more likely to get stuck.

The mech has a device that spreads the weight over an area beyond the actual physical feet – this means that your mech can stomp on enemies who come anywhere near. That would make a fun gameplay element – squashing people at a distance.

As a shooter/adventure/RPG:

1. You’re a time traveller, stuck in a future without humans. You have to find rare items to repair your time machine, and in the process you discover the chilling secret behind what wiped humans out. (Whether it be disease, some superweapon, alien slave-raiders, robotic uprising, nanobots eating our brains, imported alien brain-eating slugs, or zombiefication.)
2. Or, you’re a refugee from the present, using a time machine/freezing device/near-lightspeed spaceship you’ve escaped the disaster that killed all humans. The game would alternate between surviving in the world without humans, and flashbacks to your survival of The Apocalypse.

As a strategy or MMO game:

1. Aliens/robots/zombies have exterminated humanity, and then mostly died/moved on to greener pastures. Human colonists from another planet are counterattacking Earth. They have to deal with remaining aliens/robots/zombies, monsters (imported alien/genetically engineered) and the few surviving humans, who are barbarians with extremely paranoid cultures.
2. An alien species has been exterminated by unknown causes. Humans are settling the planet dealing with the above threats, as well as struggling to uncover the mystery behind The Apocalypse – which then threatens the settlers as well!
3. Humanity discovered that humanity was doomed, so we all jumped into time machines. Now people are beginning to arrive, and there is fierce competition as now everything is up for grabs.