A recent post by Dauntless, in the thread regarding the psychology behind decisions made by gamers, led me to this thought. Imagine a game that evolves based on the players actions -- but in reverse chronological order! Something like this would be best as a very story-central game.. an adventure game, for instance. A FPS might also be satisfactory. An RPG definitely wouldn''t work because the player is not going to be interested in starting strong and getting weaker. Here''s the basic idea: The story is being told backwards, with individual events happening basically in real time (i.e., I''m not talking about having PCs walk backwards).. but the events lead back to a starting event. That starting event, though, and the events that happened after it chronologically (before it in the game order) change depending on how the player plays. Part of the twist of the game might even be that the player doesn''t actually KNOW the story is progressing backward.. eventually he''ll figure it out. A character with amnesia might be an easy place to start. Player starts the game in a jail cell, for instance, and has three or four options enabling him to get out. One option might include killing a guard, another might be MacGyverigging a device to trip the fire alarm, and so forth. After the player escapes, he blacks out, and wakes to find himself in another location, under different circumstances. This event, which (unbeknownst to the player) is something that took place prior, is dictated by his behavior in the first event of the game... if he''s a killer, he arrived at the jail cell because he killed someone; if he plead with the guard to set him free, perhaps he was framed. As we can see here its not a simple design goal. It would take an enormous amount of effort to plot out exactly what happens in each event, and what prior event led to the outcome of the current one (or vice versa). Its also a large game to build.. few if any games have yet achieved a full scale, branching chronology tree in a standard game.. let alone in reverse order. Its just something to consider.. Brian Lacy ForeverDream Studios Comments? Questions? Curious? brian@foreverdreamstudios.com "I create. Therefore I am."

I think that would make for an interesting conspiracy-type game where you have to figure out what is going on. Stuff isn''t actually happening in reverse order, but the game makes up ''the truth'' as you play based on your actions. It would take a complex engine for creating stories and enancting them (it would have to be able to create anything it needs, like a building of a certain type, a whole neighborhood, dialogs that make sense, etc), but if you could do it you could have something like an interactive X-Files (but better =-). It would have unlimited replayability, but you could sell version 2.0 with more advanced graphics and a better tweaked engine, same for 3.0 etc =-)

Momento. Director Christopher Nolan, based on a story by Jonathan Nolan, starring Guy Pierce.

http://www.otnemom.com

Great film.

Nice idea! It''s basically reversing the idea of cause and effect. So, you start with the effect, and your actions choose the cause! It would be very tricky to pull off though. How would you get the effects to "happen"? The jail cell is easy because it is the initial condition of the game. Blackouts could work for this. Then the initial condition after you wake up could be the effect. Like you wake up and you''re in the army. Later (or before??), when the character starts to feel patriotic for his country, you realize that THAT is why he joined the army in the first place! Weird but cool.

I personally do not like the idea. It may have worked well in Momento, but movies and games are not one in the same. To me, the whole point of playing a game is getting up to the final confrontation, the last level, the toughest puzzle. If you reverse the chronology of the game, you basically just show the player the ending to the game, and then are like "Okay, you know how it ends, now lets get you there." If I played a game like that, I would not feel motivated to continue forward, because I already know the outcome of my actions.

Actually, I think it would be very interesting to play such a game. First of all, you wouldn''t know that the game is backwards until a while later. What would draw the players in would be: how did I get here? What will happen if I do this? Think about the classic SquareSoft RPG - you start in one place, and there are many endings. In this game, you know the ending, but there are many ways you could have gotten there! Curiosity would drive the player. Clearly some people would be turned off by this, but others (think of the popularity of Myst) would love it! Perhaps a form of "death" in this game is if you mess up something, making it impossible for you to have ended up where you were at the "beginning" of the game! Wouldn''t that be awesome? So the goal of the game will be to preserve the space-time continuum by not doing anything that would mess up the future you already experienced! irbrian, I think you are really onto something here.

This is remarkably similar to the ''flashback'' design techniques of screenplay writing, where all events we see now resulted from something we had exposited to us, or will have exposited to us. The flashback does not have to be linear, as in the movie version of ''The illustrated man'' by Ray Bradbury. Another excellent example of this is "The Manchurian Candidate" sadly starring Frank Sinatra, but is a good example of how this technique, and it''s permutations can work extremely well.

Since you are talking basically about choices being made for the player anyway (blacking out and waking up in another place not of his own choosing) then the flashback technique would absolutely require the degree of design you noted, and is really the standard good screenplay writing would require anyway.

I am not certain how this would work out as entertainment value in a game, but I can tell you the flashback was a very heavily used technique for many years in filmic storytelling, and it is now considered in that business to be a red flag, or a crutch, and is to be used sparingly and with great care only if the story cannot be told any other way.

Addy

quote:Original post by Inmate2993
Momento. Director Christopher Nolan, based on a story by Jonathan Nolan, starring Guy Pierce.

It''s "Me mento". And actually, the new film "Novo" it''s playing again with the same kind of amnesia.

Anyway, I like a lot the idea; there are not a lot of plots based on amnesia, insomnio, double personality and many other psicological disorders.

theNestruo

Syntax error in 2410
Ok

Memento. otnemem.

Anyways, if you had two running story lines, one the present, and the other the flashback series, you could work from the center and reveal the first event and the last event at the same time. A cop game would work best here. An investigator who has no tie to the story until the middle. This would probably work well through confessions, or stuff.

5 COP
4 DRUG DEALER
6 COP
3 SMUGGLER
7 COP
2 CARTEL
8 COP
1 DRUG LORD
9 COP

Sorta like that. It might help to watch the Usual Suspects to get in that mindframe, though it starts with both the first and middle event and both advance in parallel (though, time is esqued).