I was thinking about zombies, as I often do, and was thinking about a way to make a multiplayer game in which players, upon death, become zombies and have to fight against their team mates and former adversaries alike. The problem there, of course, is that the "zombies" aren't really shambling flesh-eaters, they're the same Dew-chugging gamers that were weilding imaginary SMGs moments earlier, and the temptation to eat only "enemy" players would be overwhelming. I'm framing this narrowly, but it's hard for me to describe the idea in broader terms without an example. So what if the zombies couldn't see the game arena the same way the humans did? What if you couldn't tell friend from foe and couldn't see their uniforms and couldn't say, "Jump if you're on my team" into Ventrilo and identify targets that way? In an unrelated example, let's say it's a flight game, and when your F22 gets shot down you become an alien who uses EMP powers to bust up airplanes from orbit. Your screen switches to a color-matching game, and the effectiveness of your attacks is determined by your success at the game, and there's absolutely no way for you to know which airplane you're zapping, zince there's nothing in your game interface that could even really be identified as an airplane. Doing better at this game increases your score and lets you unlock sweet new airplanes for the next round, but it cannot in any way be used tactically to achieve the goals you worked toward before dying. Thus, having more "dead guys" makes the game more dangerous for the "survivors", as a proper zombie horror situation should. Are there any examples of this being done well, or at all?

Well, the question there is - is there a punishment for the zombies team killing? If you remove the punishment, but also remove the reward, than there's less reason for players to try and identify their team mates.

It should also be relatively simple to provide quite a different experience for zombie players than for humans, change the rendering techniques used and how things are represented (replace the player models with something "amorphous" and generally unidentifiable and you're half way there!)

What an intriguing idea. To answer your question, I don't have a clue if anyone has done anything like this successfully. I offer a complimenting idea though. What about a vampire-like theme. The only way to beat the game, is to beat the game properly of course. You die, and you can start from your last save-point or whatever, and go on. But if you choose not to start from the last save point (or whatever) than you get turned into a vampire (assuming thats what killed you) or a ghost or something, and then you have all these amazing abilities... invincibility, unlimited ammo (just bite someone etc), flying, super-speed, walk through walls, whatever. Now the people that want to beat the game can take on the challenge of the game, and the people that just wanna throw in some secret codes and cause destruction only need to get themselves killed on purpose! Awesome thought Iron Chef.

Cheers
-Scott

So you want to bend the perspective of zombie players in a way that causes zombie behavior to make sense?

In Return, the zombies ate brains to get rid of the pain of being dead. They could only eat live brains to accomplish that.

You could implement zombie penalties and bonuses. Something like a vampire. The zombie gets weaker and weaker as it goes without flesh/brains. When very weak, a few bullets will take it out, it can't wrestle with humans very well, etc. If a zombie is very "successful", its strength could grow. Since it is just animated flesh, you could create a limitless pool of health points, where each feeding increases that pool. Since it is limitless, no kill would ever be wasted.

I don't think it will be easy to remove the friendship or team bonds that a character had when it died. Even if you do distort the representation, players will find ways to cheat the system. For example, humans could stay in some type of funky movement pattern, or give off subtle signs to help friend zombies recognize them. However, if the bonuses are big enough, and the human goal conflicts with the overall zombie goal, you may be able to convince most zombies to turn on their older friends for their newer cause.

It would also help to make humans fear proximity with zombies. You could implement some type of random infection system, where medium proximity with a single specific zombie will cause a human to get infected and die.

I regret the zombie reference now. I mean make it a totally different experience. Look at Puzzle Pirates. There, you do things like play Tetris to sail a ship. That's what I have in mind. When you die, you never see the game arena again. Your screen turns into Bejeweled, and your character in the "real" game floats at absolute random, invisible, through the map. When you get a kickass combo in Bejeweled, your ghost (unbeknownst to you) emits a pulse of destructive energy, damaging the nearest player. You have no way to know who you hurt, they have no way to know who hurt them, and at the end of the round your bejeweled score is added to your team's score, and you get a bonus for having the highest post-mortem points-per-hour.

So maybe your points will save the team, and maybe you'll kill your flag carrier, but you've got a solid reason to work hard at sabotaging living players indescriminately, and they've got a solid reason to be pissed when their best Bejeweled player bites it.

I'm talking about a total disconnect between one game experience and the other.