Gesellschaftsspiel
(The name is a play on words: translates to both ‚board game‘ and ‚society game‘.)
I will just paste the Answers for the experimental gameplay thing at gdc09 for now:
Game Description
The overview of a city, people walk through the streets. Each person lives the stereotype of a roll. The role makes the individual behave in certain ways. Everyone reacts to and interacts with the people around him.
The game doesn't present the player with a goal per-se: His perspective is that of a ‚god-like creature‘. He can change the role of a person by clicking on it, he decides what to do with the world. A city with all people living a single role is certainly possible, but ultimately the interaction between different roles is the most interesting. At the core of it, the game is about observing, understanding and balancing: the inhabitants, their interactions, the balance of roles.
All this is displayed in quite an abstract way: the city isn't much more than the outlines and shapes you see on your typical street map, the persons are boxes. Roles–which could in reality be recognised by their clothing–are symbolised by different colours. This abstraction ensures that the focus of the player doesn't lie on the individual, but rather on the ‚society level‘ of interaction.
Experimental Core Gameplay
It's about directly changing the roles/mindsets of the NPC-inhabitants of your city and toying with the consequences–with a focus on the ‚society level‘ of interaction.
Current Phase of Completion
A playable version of the game is available. All core functionality is ready. More work is necessary to allow unintroduced players to fully understand the game mechanics: A simple user interface with a few buttons for role selection needs to be developed and the representation of the roles in-game could be improved upon further. The original deadline of the project didn't allow for these improvements to be made.
Expected Phase of completion
I expect the game to be completed at workshop time.
Why is this experiment important?
This experiment tries to make the player raise questions.
When the player interacts with a computer game, he (not necessarily subconsciously) tries to understand the underlying systems, which can be rather complicated. Can interactive computer games allow us to create art that makes the player think about complex systems? Can our games inspire him to compare these systems to similar structures in real life? Will he analyse these structures, because he dissected them in our games?
In this work we present to the player a system that ‚simulates‘ parts of his every-day life. Because we limit the presentation to a quite abstract, narrow view, the player can analyse this slice of every-day life as a game system. He can explore different ways of interaction with it and observe the consequences. Our goal is that he tries to translate the idea of obversation and analysis over into the corresponding parts of his real life.
We believe that the media controlled world we live in makes it very necessary to explore these ways to inspire to ‚analyse for yourself‘.
Is this experiment a success?
It is very difficult to inspect the success of this experiment. Because its message is ‚analyse‘, it is important that it doesn't advocate a specific view. Thus, it can't be as provocative as certain–obviously successful–art. Can you measure the immediate success of art pieces that try to make the observer think about certain things in a subtle way? It might be important that you don't just pass by such an art piece. Transfered to our game, this means that the concept is a success if it makes people spend time with it.
The abstract presentation has one main flaw: Making the player instantly identify and understand roles can be difficult. This is strongly related to the key point of this concept: The presentation needs to inspire the player to analyse real life systems. Finding the best ways to do this will be important in the future.
Further info
A paper focusing on the technical aspects (in German) is available.
Play the core gameplay prototype. It requires Java 6 with Webstart installed and a graphics card with OpenGL support.
- Controls
Mouse left: apply role to persons1: select role Musician2: select role Aggressor3: select role Police Manr: restart simulationspace: pause game