On Thursday, 21 February 2008 at the Game Developer’s Conference 2008, Eric Zimmerman of gameLab, hosted the annual Game Design Challenge. This year, the players were challenged to design an Inter-Species game, with the basic rules being:
This cannot be an ordinary game being played by an animal (e.g., cat playing Quake)
This cannot be a game about special hardware
The players were none other than Alexey Pajitnov (developer of the original Tetris!!!), Steve Meretzky of Blue Fang Games, and Brenda Brathwaite of the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia.
Alexey was up first. His titled his game concept, Dolphin Ride. The idea here is that the game would be played by humans and real dolphins. The humans, two players per team, would play in a virtual space, with the player’s positions following the motion of a real dolphin onto which a camera is attached, along with two probes for navigation and a paintball gun. Effectively, the human players virtually ride the real dolphin, one directing the dolphin by sending low voltage electrical shocks to the dolphin via the probes, and the other firing at various virtual targets. If the game simulation determines that a hit would be successful, a real paint ball would be released towards a ball in the area where the dolphins are swimming. Several of these three player teams compete, and the goal is to take out as many targets as possible. It is also possible to “take out” another team’s dolphin, which wouldn’t, Alexey supposes, hurt the dolphin since the paint ball would decelerate rapidly in water and because the paint ball gun wouldn’t fire if the dolphin was too close. So, an interesting idea that would surely result in protests by various animal rights groups both because of the probes and the paintball guns. Although kind of cool, it did seem to me to violate the rule about special hardware. Play testing issues were raised in the Q&A time.
Meretzky was up next. He put some thought into this, and considered the various prior art…games in which humans and animals participate. The classic game is, of course, fetch, which we are most familiar with these days. Others included the fox hunt (or, in France, the Sanglier hunt), and pig wrestling. He did analysis of various aspects of the game industry, searching for animals with disposable income (pets), animals with value (sheep….shear poker playing for wool), animals that like to collect things (squirrels who might become Chinese gold farmers…Ha!). He considered the demographics, such as size of market (avoid endangered species), considering ants (1 quadrillion), then settled on the animal species as….bacteria (5 trillion trillion!, for a game called Bac Attack. So, for this to work, an I/O device is needed, which Meretzky named the Traystation, part eye toy, part petri dish, which projects color on to the petri dish. The human player would see the game as a traditional RPG, building defense, etc., while the bacteria population grows due to sensitivity to light. The Traystation displays the bacteria as marching army’s in the human-side’s virtual world, and transmits microwaves to kill off bacteria according to the human-side defenses. The game would have good longevity, since at the end, some bacteria are bound to survive, and evolve even stronger, thus having naturally leveled up! So, the problem with the idea is that bacteria have no disposable income. The solution to this is to make them useful, e.g., change the EULA to assign rights to the evolved bacteria to the publisher, who can then sell the bacteria to a biotech company. Meretzky described this as the “1st massively micro player game.” During Q&A, someone asked what sort of in-game reward might be given to the bacteria.
The final contestant was Brenda Brathwaite, who also had done quite a bit of homework. Here initial ideas were sort of outside of reality: ninjas vs. space marines and zombies vs. dinosaurs. Kind of out there. She decided she wanted to be able to play a game with her dog, and began conceiving of names such as: Assassin’s Breed (ha!) and Poop Scoopem Forever (double ha!). Her key goal became designing a game that could reasonably be done, considered tying GPS transceivers to the dog, but didn’t want to wire up the dog. She settled on an idea that she tagged as an “Interspecies Facebook ARG (alternate reality game)” Her game is called One Hundred Dogs, and at this point she actually is looking into various production models. (See the website, here.) The gist of this game is that there would be 50 real dogs and 50 virtual dogs, the game played in 50 real cities. The game would include owner-based challenges, as well as challenges for the dogs. Phase 1 would build a community in each city, to build dog packs. In each city, local dogs would compete to become the city’s alpha dog. When 50 alpha dogs are found (one for each city), then the virtual 50 dogs are introduced, providing (as I understand it) a way for all the city winners to virtually meet. The cities would initially then compete against one another, but eventually collaborate to solve a larger national goal. For example, a possible national goal might be, if a dog goes missing, find the missing dog. Clues could be placed in Facebook pages and invitations, hence the category name. Rewards might include dog collars labeled with the One Hundred Dogs logo. This was my favorite idea, because I think it is something that could actually be implemented, and that the dogs and their owners actually would have a lot of fun playing it.
When it came time to vote, One Hundred Dogs and Bac Attack were essentially tied, though the latter one in a re-count. Personally, I think Brathwaite’s idea is fantastic, and I’d love to see it come to fruition.
Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games (NetGames 2009)
