One of our lasting concern is how to prevent audience from intentionally breaking the game for comical effect. Since we are granting the audience a public chat platform, they have the freedom to essentially post whatever they wish. And that has the potential to seriously disrupt our narrative.
Last week, Jesse Schell came to us with a game-changing piece of advice (pun intended): we shouldn’t be afraid of audience’s impulses to mess about; in stead, we ought to embrace such impulses and harness their energy to make the game a lot more fun. Jesse also echoed other faculty members’ suggestion that we address the current volatile political environment, riding on the hot topics and emotions of today.
This inspired us to look for game play solutions where people’s innate desires to express themselves intersect with the heated issues of our time. We identified a list of key concepts that are right at this intersection:
- Group mentality.
- Public political debates.
- “Us” vs. “Them”.
- Spreading of dubious information.
- Different versions of truth and justice.
From these building blocks, emerged a brand new game idea: a two-team public debate presided by a judge, with lots of true and false information circulating around players. We paid close attention to ensuring the game exhibits strong metaphorical quality and features rich interactions for every role.
With the constraints we have and the technologies we have chosen, our design goals can be broken down as:
- Incorporate VR meaningfully. Take advantage of its immersive, 360-degree interface.
- Construct meaningful relationship between VR player and audience.
- Motivate audience to engage actively. Let them be part of a bigger group, let them have a common enemy, give them a controlled degree of freedom.
- Create satisfying interaction. Let audience influence game, make control simple, let their inputs be reflected, give their choices consequences.
By the end of the week, we have compiled a design document and crafted a rough outline of the narrative structure behind the game play:
“Across an ancient grand river, there are two rival city states, each of a different culture and history. A series of conflicts arise between the two states. Unsettled by the chaos, the god of truth and justice descends upon the land. The god will hear the voices of the people, discern truths from lies, and unleash judgements.”
As audience enter the room, each person is randomly given a sealed envelope. Within every envelope are pieces of information, half marked as truths, half lies.
A series of chronological events will be presented, one at a time, in front of the god.
When an event is presented before god, its description is vague and incomplete. The missing truths, as well as fabrications, are scattered among the envelopes the citizens hold. Only some audience hold information related to each particular event.
A timer begins ticking. Citizens are invited to open the envelope and post to Twitch what they know. They can choose to share the truth, or the lie. They can also see other relevant information being shared on Twitch by other citizens, but they can’t discern the truthfulness of those. They can “re-twitch” whatever they see on the screen multiple times to increase its visibility, to get more people to “re-twitch” it, and ultimately to get the god to believe it. Their instinct may be to advance their city’s own interest, but possibly at the cost of their conscience.
When time is up for the round, the god will make a verdict. Whichever city the god deems guilty in this event will be punished.
