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Original post by sunandshadow This is sort of what I was originally thinking - colonization, a family dropped on an island/planet and trying to establish a home base and defend and feed themselves. I was thinking that starcraft-style RTS/sim play where the player controls a group of diverse individual units is sort of like a family. This is especially noticeable with the Zerg where you literally lay eggs and have to protect them until they hatch into new units.

I'm not sure if the Zerg are the best example; I pretty much treated them like cannon fodder. The Humans and the Protoss, however, I tended to protect very jealously as they had a bit of personality and I didn't like to see them die (and yes, I was extremely bad at Starcraft because of that, unless I played as the Zerg [smile]).

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I don't think it would work real well in a single player RPG to have one player control all the members of the family because, like WierdoFu points out, that wouldn't create much internal conflict. So you can either have the player control one member of the family, or the player be the disembodied 'shepherd' trying to manage a semi-cooperative family. It would be fascinating to see MMO families, or get current clans to act more like families, perhaps with anyone new to the game being spawned as a child of a clan. Although there's always the problem of getting members to be online at the same time.

Well, it depends entirely on what sort of game you want, as I think all of these ideas could work.

If the player controls the whole family, you can still have conflict through a prewritten story (like present RPGs).

If the player only controls one character, I guess that would make it a bit similar to Harvest Moon, although you can add more dynamic character interaction; it might be a bit difficult to get all the interaction between NPC to happen within sight of the PC however.

If the player is the diesmbodied 'shepherd', that would make it a bit like the Sims, or the game I'm presently designing (where you watch over a small village, which I guess is "family" of sorts).

I suppose it would also work as an MMO game, but as you've said it would be difficult to get everyone online at the same time. I guess you could get groups of real life friends and family to be part of the family and play at the same time, or you could have "clans" like in ancient Scotland and adopt people in to a village environment (I guess they have this already in MMORPGs; I haven't played any so I'm not sure how the guilds work).

Actually, it begs the question why most fantasy games pull out of Europe's middle ages and we barely see any settings that are in Africa's cradle of civilization, where the hunter/gatherers were still also Nomads. Consider a game where your prototypical adolescent becomes seperate from his travelling group and ends up forming his own, through varius circumstance and plot threads. Right there is about as Jungian Archetypal as it gets, and its one that not too many think about, since humanity became literate *after* we all learned how to domesticate the lands.

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Original post by Inmate2993 Actually, it begs the question why most fantasy games pull out of Europe's middle ages and we barely see any settings that are in Africa's cradle of civilization, where the hunter/gatherers were still also Nomads.

This is a good point, but I think the popularity of "high fantasy" settings started the trend, with big time stories such as LOTR leading the way; although it would be interesting to see a successful fantasy game based in a none-middle ages environment.

As far as inter-tribal/family situations, and someone talking about a people with different personalities, such as the "troubled teen" example could be solved with some sort of way to keep track of personalities, that could possibly even be altered through events that happen in the game. (This would assume a mostly non-linear game, which I think is one of the best approaches if done properly)

Very interesting. Talking of primate sociology I think it would be great to see it so that there was an interesting power system in place. With different 'leaders' and wannabe leaders. Ie. Do you just do missions for the head of the clan, but who is getting old and may soon be replaced by a younger fitter ape. Do you buddy up with the females and try to create a web of fellowship that way, but risk the jealousy of the alpha male apes?