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friendofrobots
Hunt the Wumpus (take 2)
Story
A new Athena game is released on campus by some company. People play the game for a while and then get to a part where the game says something like “come back tomorrow for more.” That night, something bad happens in a physical location at MIT.
People somehow connect the bad thing that happened with the game. There is some contact information on one of the screens that mentions the developer of the game (this has to be realistic somehow). The players contact the developer, who didn’t know this would happen, but had a feeling that the company was up to no good. He installs a backdoor into the program so he has access to a small portion of the game (maybe just the text) without the company ever knowing there was any changes. He uses this to communicate with the players as the game progresses and he learns more about what the company is trying to do.
It turns out the company is trying to sabotage all of MIT (or something like that). Every time the players reach the end of a level, something starts to go wrong at some location in MIT and the players have to stop it from happening, but the company continues on believing everything is still going as planned. The players have to keep playing because they want to learn more about why the company is doing what they’re doing.
Toward the end, the plan starts to become clear and the players learn what they need to do to stop the company. The last part of the game consists of the players mounting an assault on the company and trying to destroy the plan.
Timeline
Beginning of the week is all about getting people to play the game. Advertisements are really really important here. Even more important is a game that can be timed out so that the players reach some sort of checkpoint at a specific time.
Middle of the week consists of nightly puzzles at physical locations that are triggered somehow by the game. This happens every night until the weekend.
Weekend consists of the players mounting the final assault on the company.
Benefits
- If the athena game is fun, it’s a great rabbit hole. And we have something to directly advertise.
- The game gives us an outlet to communicate and guide the players through the game. Our developer is a sympathetic character with important information that can lead the players through the game.
- The nightly events are a good way to bring people together for collaborative puzzle solving.
Areas that still need work
- Everything needs to be believable given a set amount of suspension of disbelief. We need to make clear early how much things will make sense with the real world so people don’t get pissed.
- Game unlocking real world puzzles
- Company trying to hack MIT with game
- Developer caring and being able to help
- Why does the company want to hack MIT?
- We still need to work out how the game will work. Ideally it will be time-based somehow. Think Animal Crossing. It should have things that are based on both the real life clock and on what other people have done. This is a big component of the game.
- The real life puzzles are going to be tough to make well. In addition to figuring out specifics of the story that will allow them to fit in to the rest of the game, we also need to make them fun and big enough that all the players can participate and we only need to have one per night.
- The end game is also going to be really important and we haven’t started trying to piece that together yet.
Potential Roadblocks/Difficulties
- The appeal of this game relies heavily on the appeal of the video game itself. We need to work really hard on this aspect of the game. It may need to stand alone as a fun game by itself or people will lose interest after trying to play it the first time.
- The puzzles need to be more fun than the video game or people will be pissed that they aren’t just playing the video game.
- We need to have a good way of getting people excited about the puzzles so they move from the video game to the puzzles without losing too many people.
Resources Required
- The video game will be hard! We need game designers and coders! And we need to be really smart about it. We are going to have to be coding it from about now until the game starts.
- The puzzles are going to be intricate and will also require a lot of work.
- We need solid advertising for the game. How are we going to get people to play a text-based adventure game they need to be at an athena computer to play? (or we need to allow them to play it online or something)
- We need to write a part for the developer and he needs to be adaptable and probably played by one of us.
