Dear Gamedev Community,


I am requesting your ideas/feedback on a massive mulitplayer game that would consist of real life events, economy, and features. This game would start as your being 18 just graduate from high school and you must pick your path either college or work. This game would help increase your better ability of real life economy choices. There would be stock, bills, and many other positive and negative of living the "Real World". It would be open world and you would interact with 100% real people from across the world. The economy would be one of the most advanced systems, evening complex banking depending on how you store your money. Whether your put it in checking or savings account you would draw different interest from the bank. Yes this also does mean that at times gas prices and other necessary things may rise and cause bad events. Or you could be playing the lottery and win millions. This game would be 1st person with 100% 1st person driving ect. You would need to purchase vehicles to drive from your job to home. There also would be real people playing the role as police officers so that, if you were to cause crime then you could be arrest and lose all your hard earnings. This would be a very fun and addicting game.


Thanks for taking the time to listen to this idea, and thanks ahead of time for giving us feedback. Also my main question is would you purchase and play this game?

Yes may/may not consist of the subscription part. But would not allow anyone to have a advantage over other players due to real life money. This means no matter what dollar amount you cannot increase your in game assets, through purchasing items that were not purchased with in game money.

This sounds like Real Life: The Video Game [sup]tm[/sup]. People usually play video games for escapism, and I'm not seeing any of that here. IT looks like all the grind of a typical MMO without any otherworldly elements to differentiate it from reality. Perhaps I missed something?

EDIT:

As a suggestion, abstract away all the boring, dull stuff (jobs, driving around, gas prices). Perhaps look at the Game of Life from Hasbro as an example for making a fake "real life" entertaining.

I really appreciate when game designers take from life and build lessons that help a player teach themselves something broad and useful about our world. Will Wright is probably the king of these designs in my opinion. But his trick for this isn't to build a game that teaches us what life is like. He builds a toys that simulate general principles that exist in life. I'm not entirely sure the best way to explore a topic such as economy, money management and life in a capitalist society in a broad way but because I just finished doing my taxes my burnt out brain appreciates the idea of this game design. There are no toys that teach us what its like after high school, moving out, buying things that we need to rely on, dealing with social stratification pressures, making good money decisions, day to day expenses, the added responsibilities a person takes on as they connect with people and things. Even the Sims tends to make money or "Simoleons" a straight forward thing to make, save and costs of living are not the challenge of that game. I would presume because money becomes overwhelming quite quickly.

We have a big world with many variables to consider, the task of simplifying those variables to create a post high school experience seems daunting to me but take the time to try and write a flow chart for the players choices from the splash screen to the games win condition. It'll help you to visualize the game's content. From there you can be sure you are representing all the aspects that are important to this journey while weeding out the gameplay that isn't fun.

If I could live in a world where the focus of production was social need instead of capital gain I would. Frankly I would not play this game because I hate money, however from the perspective of someone in high school with a barrage of peers and adults asking me how I'm going to a make money after I graduate I might welcome this game with open arms. So I guess I'm saying the game has a market, but that market is not me.

So basically this is an idea for an economical simulator with as much realism as possible. The only problem is that the author didn't think it through enough to figure out the mechanics of gameplay and instead tried to pitch this idea in the same way a used cars salesman pitches a car to somebody. Or at least that's the impression I got here.

My suggestion would be to think through the gameplay mechanics. After that if you still want to proceed with the game - go ahead and do it. Most likely though, you only want such a simulator for the sake of coaching yourself in making the right choices when it comes to finance, so after you figure out the rules of the game your interest in making it will wane.

Personally, I would not touch this game at all, but then again I don't like The Sims or things like that; which judging by the popularity of The Sims doesn't say much for my opinion.

One thing I would ask, is what is the timeline like? I wouldn't want to play a game that literally moved as slow as real life lol.

Personally, if you haven't already, I would do a Comparative Analysis of games like The Sims and Second Life and look for what people enjoy about those games and what does or does not work well and then try to accomodate those ideas in your design.

Real world simulators seem to do well in the market.

So, you seem to be describing the Matrix, and not a game that you could ever realistically make. Even making a driving simulator is a big task in itself. I suggest you just pick one element (driving, economic simulation, whatever) and try to make that, rather than shooting for some pie in the sky mmo.

In no way would a real life simulator be fun. But if you could actually make it successfully, I'm sure the United States army, or some finance corp, would throw a lot of money at you.

Goodluck!

Yes may/may not consist of the subscription part. But would not allow anyone to have a advantage over other players due to real life money. This means no matter what dollar amount you cannot increase your in game assets, through purchasing items that were not purchased with in game money.

Only way to prevent that would be to ban all player-to-player trade. (possibly except auctions, but you'd have to think twice there too)
You can't really stop people from making a deal offline, in a forum or meeting irl, then log in and sell the asset for 1 simdollar.