091102 Brainstorming 3

Allen, Dwight, Erik, Justin, Melissa, & Sean met to kick around ideas, especially about plot.

In no particular order:

• Allen noted how a character within "The Da Vinci Code" never thought they were solving a series of puzzles. Instead they thought they were trying to achieve an end result and puzzles were just the way they were getting things done. He expressed a desire to create an immersive experience that invites players to get into this mindset. (Of course, not all players will take this invitation, but he wanted to "issue the invitation" nonetheless.)

• Allen would prefer it if players did not feel "I'm working to rescue Doctor When before the other teams," but rather "I'm contributing to the overall effort to rescue Doctor When."

• Allen recommended that we reveal all key plot points through the puzzles & tasks instead of before or after the puzzles via "flavor text." We observed that many games have this sort of "binary modes": either puzzle solving or plot explication.

• A big question arose as to how much plot we really need? If the game is *very* short then probably all we need is "Doctor When gets lost in time while demonstrating his time machine. The players are recruited to do 'research projects' that help recalibrate the machine. Doctor When is rescued." But if the game is longer, we'll need plot twist(s) and/or new characters and/or "raising the stakes" and/or etc. to re-energize the storyline part way through. But we acknowledged that even a longer game is best with a modest amount of plot.

• It was noted that very early games pitted the teams against active adversaries who would do things like shoot the teams with water guns. We're not sure how much our players would like that. On the other hand, we could put more adversaries or other impediments up against the fast teams to slow them down.

• Maybe the plot twist is that the unknown adversary who caused the machine to malfunction is Doctor When himself (or a future version/parallel earth version). He wants to stop the machine because he knows it will lead to some disaster (just like that article suggested that the large hadron collider was sabotaging itself).

• Maybe instead of rescuing Doctor When, the focus of the game is on restoring damage to the timeline caused by the machine.

• Along this line, maybe the players have to return a collection of objects to their rightful places in history.

• Another approach to the "repair the timeline" game is that we do it all as a conference room game. We say that the damage has caused the laboratory to be locked in some sort of "temporal bubble" so that we can't exit the building to the changed world...but we can turn on the TV and see news reports about what's going on. This would give us an excuse to make lots of funny fake news videos that would give hints about how the world is different from/similar to the "correct" timeline (such as the Confederate States of America). The teams would know they've succeeded when the news returns to normal.

• One of the problems with trying to create a collaborative spirit among the teams is that then they'll each want to feel they've made a significant (or even unique) contribution to the end goal...but as players they also want to solve each puzzle. It will be difficult to justify within the context of the story why different teams are doing the same "research project" yet still making unique contributions.

• We might have in some instances that the same puzzle yields different answers for different teams. That could help with the uniqueness problem above.

• We might have some instances where one puzzle requires a piece of input from an earlier puzzle (one that the team did...or perhaps that a different team did). This harkens to the high school "puzzle relays."

• To enhance the time travel theme, we might allow the plot to branch (within constraints) depending on the choices of the players. This harkens to the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland which has 3 paths...many visitors ride it three times so that they can see all three.

• Or perhaps a puzzle might require a team to live through the same situation multiple times but make things turn out slightly differently each time.

• Sean came up with the idea of making some of the puzzles have the "jigsaw puzzle" attribute, i.e., they are easier to solve once more people are working on them. So the very first team to start work on the task can make real progress on it...but it's very difficult for them. As more teams catch up, "many hands make light work." This might be perceived as a "fair" and "in character" way to "compress" the teams.

• Similarly we might have a puzzle where the amount of data/information or instruction to solve it increases over time. So it's inherently a more challenging puzzle for the fast teams.

• Maybe a task is "assemble the Mr. Fusion kit." But the instructions are in 23rd century Ikea broken English. (Perhaps by the 23rd century Ikea has taken over almost everything.)

• Maybe at some point the players have to fill out a form (tax? Health insurance claim?) from the bureaucratic nightmare of the 23rd century.

• Perhaps the players will obtain an IP address to the future so that they can communicate with "advanced humans."

• Perhaps we should make the time machine emit a cloud of smoke when it first goes haywire so that it's clear to all the participants that something is horribly wrong...and that parts must be obtained and replaced.

THE WHY QUESTION

It was pointed out that a BIG question that was left out of the original concept is WHY Doctor When created the machine. Allen had always assumed that the Doctor did it just because it was cool... But perhaps we could mine each character's motivation for more plot and more fun.

• Perhaps the Doctor never told his investors that he really wants to go back in time so he can save his old girlfriend from dying (or maybe just help himself avoid an embarrassing situation in high school).

• If this is the case, then maybe airhead lab assistant Kitty isn't such an airhead after all. Maybe she is secretly in love with Doctor When and sabotaged the device so she could have him all to herself.

• Maybe Prof. Chronus is a mysterious figure and who is later revealed to be Kitty

• Maybe Doctor When wants to commit a crime and so needs the machine so he can be in two places at once and thus have an alibi.

• Maybe Doctor When is jealous of his high school or college or graduate school acquaintance Prof. Chronus and wants to use the machine so that he'll have Prof. Chronus's success.

MORE GENERAL IDEAS

• Maybe the players encounter Prof. Chronus part way through the game. It's not clear if Prof. Chronus is a bad guy. In fact, Prof. Chronus may cast doubt on Doctor When, thus causing the players to have to decide who they trust. Perhaps this introduces a plot branch point here...

• It might re-energize the game if part way through we "raise the stakes," i.e., the players may think that the only goal is to rescue Doctor When, but it will turn out that much more is at stake.

• This could be a full-on if you don't succeed the "the world will be destroyed" task.

• To be more tongue-in-cheek we might want to make the dire consequence a little less dire. Instead of the whole world in danger, it might just be Pittsburgh...and Pittsburg, CA at that. [We kept laughing to ourselves as we imagined the players being told over and over "if you don't succeed it will be the end of Pittsburg (not *that* Pittsburgh)."]

• Raise the stakes: Perhaps we structure it so that the players themselves cause some sort of temporal problem and thus they'll feel motivated to fix their mess. Or maybe some temporal problem happens that directly affects them (e.g., they're erased from history). That should motivate them...

• Running Gag: We all liked the idea of the game having a running gag. "Pittsburg (not *that* Pittsburgh)" might work... Or, if not, something else.

• We imagined a puzzle or task with degrees of success based on how quickly it's accomplished. For example, the team has to get a power pack for the time machine. If they solve it very quickly then the power pack is fully charged. If it takes them a long time then it's only partially charged (which might require them--or another team--to obtain additional power packs).

• We noted that most games these days are almost all puzzles. There was general consensus that we should consider including a variety of tasks. This would be both fun...and potentially could compress the teams because presumably even a brilliant puzzle solving team isn't the best at *all* kinds of tasks.

• Allen expressed enthusiasm for alternate tasks...but wanted to make sure that they were fully integrated into the plot line (as opposed to tasks that just feel arbitrarily tacked on).

• Alternate tasks might be things like physical challenges, information gathering, item gathering, detective work, etc.

• As an example of alternate tasks, people recounted stories from Paparazzi where they had to enter the Ruby Skye nightclub and find a contact within the throngs. Dwight shared a funny story of talking to someone for quite a while before realizing she wasn't actually in the game. Erik told a similar story for Hogwarts.

• In addition to alternate tasks, there was discussion of being open to alternate solution formats. Typically in a game one knows that one is done when one finds an English word or phrase. Perhaps for a detective task the answer is discovering the "story" of what happened around a certain incident.

• Erik pointed out that even if the solution has an alternative format, it should be clear to the players whether they have succeeded at the task or not.

• A task whose solution is of an alternative form might even lend itself to being a call to action. That is, once they finish that task they can actually suggest to GC what they should do next.

• We might structure the plot into different chapters, each one focusing on a different character...explicating the motivations of a different character. We might even have the players see the same event through different characters' eyes. (Sort of like Rashomon.)

• Perhaps Game Control becomes part of the story. Already our characters (Doctor When, Rodney, Kitty) are parts of the story. But, for example, in the Pharma game [please correct the name] halfway through the players found all the GC people murdered! [Not sure if we should "break the fourth wall."]

• Perhaps we assign roles within each team: one person is the temporal mechanic, one is the quantum mechanic, one is the computational wizard, one is the linguist, etc. This might be useful in specific puzzles...and it might be useful for collaborative puzzles (e.g., for this puzzle we need all the quantum mechanics to work together).

• Perhaps instead of roles, we give each team a set of discrete objects (flux capacity, Mr. Fusion, chronometer, etc.). Tell them to assign each object to a different team member. Again we could use that as an excuse for cross team collaboration.

• Perhaps we build the game on the conceit that they're all actually the same team...but from different parallel universes. This could fit in well the assigned roles idea above.

• The parallel universe idea might help us with bottleneck problems: it would give us an excuse to have different people play the same roles (Doctor When, Rodney, Kitty) in different scenes. Thus different teams could do the same puzzle at the same time.

NEXT STEPS

• Allen to draft & post notes on wiki
• Those in attendance to review and edit
• Team to meet in about 2 weeks; Allen to create a Doodle survey to pick date
• Allen to draft a candidate plot line for discussion at meeting