"This month’s Round Table challenges you to design a game that deals with a social issue that personally troubles you."
My game idea's simple.
Pixels rapidly shift all over the screen. Gradually, faces of people are formed. The object of the game is recognize faces forming as early as possible and shoot them before they're obvious.
The earlier the correct shot, the more points. As the game progresses, more and more faces form on the screen. Shoot all the images before they become clear. But shoot a full revealed face and the game ends!
HA! Are you still contemplating getting a hunting rifle?!
ReplyDeleteI'm curious to hear what other people make of this design. It's simplicity is misleading, as I find my response to it is quite layered.
ReplyDeleteI'm curious whether a game like this would actually get played, and how it would feel. Would players become increasingly uncomfortable as the faces are nearly completed?
ReplyDeleteI'm assuming some of the images that congeal would be of non-faces, right? Or even animal faces?
ReplyDeleteI think the design really challenges us to think about how we identify with people and what that means about our willingness to harm them.
I'd also be very interested in seeing the response times for different nationalities of both players and images within the game.
No animal faces, but plenty of children's faces. ;)
ReplyDeleteNon-faces? No. But I might have faces fail and dissolve at different stages of completion.
It's actually more open-ended than I was originally going for, and I like that. As is, it can apply to multiple moral lessons and is more personal. The player's interpretation strongly reflects his or her self. And, like a good fable, the mystery encourages deeper reflection than an outright statement.
This design, so simple in it's description, yet so deep in its meanings and interpretations, reminds me of nothing more than chess meets duck hunt. Mad props good sir.
ReplyDeleteMad props.
So simple, yet so much potential for narrative, psychological, and game design analysis. I love it.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure how good I would actually want to be at this game.
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