I''ve been doing some reading lately and have two books which made me think about this. Chris Crawford''s book on game design, in which he has the idea of the PC being a culture, in a strategy game, the object being to further your culture. In essence, you are a social construct instead of a deity like person such as in AoE or Civ. I am now reading a book, Manhattan Transfer for a class in American lit. The book really got me thinking about Chris''s abstraction idea. Basically, in the book there is no protagonist in the actual sense. The protaganist is the city itself, which is the real actor in the story, changing and grinding the lives of the people in it. As my teacher said, the characters don''t have any real depth to them, it is really the interconnections between characters that give the depth to the story. So I was wondering how possible it would be to do something likethis, without making it too god-like or concrete. The problem is translating an abstraction into a concrete object for gameplay. Based on Man. Transf. say you are a city. You would have little control over the interactions of you citizens. What you might be able to do is subtly effect decisions of characters, how though I have no idea. I guess the real question is how do you make a mindless object active? You can''t exactly say "What does a city do" Maybe by taking a macro view of society, in which it is greater than the sum of its parts and use structural functionalism and/or conflict theory (I don''t really think of these as oppostions as some sociologists do) to give it a way to modify the social constructs within itself, you can give a conscious thought to the city. Anyone have any thoughts on this? It might be intersting as a game, but it is intersting as a little mind exercise.

This would be fun to code!

You could come up with all kinds of variables that effected the people in your sentient city''s lives. . .

But the implementation would probably be it''s downfall. Let''s say you made a code that stated if you have X number of coffee shops then this would happen to person X.

In the end you would have a game that merely allowed the player to control people''s live in incredibly indirect and mysterious ways. . .

I don''t think this is a game I would have fun playing.

This is similiar in some ways to both SimCity and to a greater point The Sims. You modify the environment and watch how it manifests in the reactions of the people within the environment. Sandbox style games are interesting from a theoretical point of view but are hard to keep interesting on their own - it''s the reaction to the environments that keeps it interesting, so a focus on that would be needed, I''m guessing.

Somebody was talking about having abjects in the world influence character AI, coding it so that doors would shout "open me!" and monsters would shout "slay me!" and books would shout "read me!" to passing characters. Maybe the city game would use that as a control interface. You could have a character, fully autonomous, but you would influence him by blowing a newspaper into his foot, or having a car almost hit him. You want him to meet the chick coming down the stairs? The elevator is suddenly out of order.

You''re still a sort of deity, but less overt. You''re like a combination between luck and conscience. Could be neat.

I had an idea for a game in which you play a ghost. The ghost could not physically interact with objects, and could pass through walls and such, but he would have the power to whisper in people''s ears, influence their dreams, haunt people at night, or maybe even write on the wall in blood, as long as no one''s looking.

The game would be a strategy of sorts. To get enough power to do these things, you''d have to get people to worship you (ancestor worship), by haunting them in their sleep when they don''t. You''d breed strong warriors by whispering to a man and a woman at night about one another, and how they should have lots of children, and then telling the children they should become warriors (you get to be a sort of boogeyman for children). You''d get more physical power by whispering to chieftans that they should seek counsel from people who worship you. You''d also be sort of omniscient, in that your incorporeal form could be anywhere. So your followers would also get influence by knowing things others do not, and using that to their advantage. You may also be able to inpersonate other ancestor ghosts, so you could deceive followers of other ghosts into believing things that aren''t true, in order to embarass them.

Flarelock- that sounds awesome.

And I just was struck with an idea: if the city is conscious, it could maybe manifest an avatar in some form. Say the city could manifest itself as a philosopher or maybe a shrink or a waiter or somthing like that.
Like God did in the movie Dogma. That would give you a concrete way to influence things.