Psychological games
Recently, I been thinking about games that force players to trick and lie to each other. Also, I got the idea of cooperation for planned game like RoboHunt. All of them are online, multiplayer games, and involves ultimately nothing more than simple rules. It is these kind of games that involve interesting possibilities and the suspense to go with it. Since it involve intrudes, suspense, suspicion among real players, I guess I’ll called these kind of games pyschological.
Pyschological games continues the theme of social games such as the game design of RubyTet, which is the planned evolution of my oddball tetris-like game. The final game evolution of Rubytet will all be about the tensions between players’ temptation to destroy each other in attack or the absolute advantage to help each other to achieves extreme high scores.
The idea in that game evolved from observation of the free market and concepts from game theory. I sought to make interactions complex and much more interesting than the zero-sum style that is prevalent throughout the medium of video games.
I’ll be seeking through the ideas of psychological games as well. My first idea is the Human RoboHunt which have not yet see any coding yet. In that game, a giant intelligent man-eating robot basically eat prisoners for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, only to leave a man alone, who will be the sole survivor. The jail was actually an army research prison in which criminals are experimented on. The prison warden got the sinister idea of feeding men to man-eating robots until they become efficient enough for war.
However, the interaction of only the last man is not the only possibility there. Robots, even if they are impervious to most attack can break down and be destroyed as well. If men actually cooperate, more of them will be able to survive to the next round of experimentation.(On the other hand, if men wishes to kill each other, no one will probably be alive to be in the next round of experimentation)
People can also try trading on the market after the experimentation is done since they can also pick and save items from the arena.
The idea is to survive long enough to figure out a way to break out of the prison and tell the world the cruel and unusual punishment administered to the prisoner. Of course, the prisoner’s goal is to escape from the prison. If he do that he win. But if tons of players managed to escape from prison, it illustrate the point of the game is that cooperation is better for one’s goal.
The escaping part is pretty vague, so I’ll have to devise some interesting game mechanic for that part when I come to actually write the game.
Of course, the game will state only the rule of eating game(Every man for themselves as robot will eat all but one) so players won’t be able to see beyond to see the real point of the game. The prison warden and their henchman will performs extortion attempts as well reward for rating out players to break up alliances so to force the continuation of the eating game rather than escaping. So in that sense, the game will include opportunities to betray as well lies.
My last idea is based on a manga called the Liar Game in which people lies their way through the tournament. What is interesting in the real world is not interesting in a game because of rule inflexibility. So it won’t reflect many of the games characters play in the manga. Also, since there are not much stake because money will not be used, I’ll have to design a vastly different mechanism that will motivate players. This game, will however requires lot of mini games, so I’ll have to come up with lot of fun one.
I have a few idea in mind, mostly based on the manga though. One of particular interest to me is the minority rules in which the minority of voters are declared the winner and move on to the next round of voting. It will eventually whittle down to the last 3 players since the game will always have odd number of players. In addition, there are always 10 minutes in a voting round to put pressure on players.
In this game, the objective is to achieve the most positive rank. Even if you win the entire tournament, if you have negative points, you will lose. It is up to them to determine their strategies. Some will form alliances and be honest, while others pretend to be allies only to betray them at the end.
Well, that’s all the ideas I have for psychological games. Admittedly, they are not as well thought out or interesting as I would like to be. In the future, especially after writing these games, I’ll have more interesting ideas to force players into interesting dilemma and mind games.
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