quote: Original post by The Senshi

What can you do that hasn''t already been done in a first person shooter? The only way that you can really shock people would be to change the targets in the game (ie, you run around eating children or something equally grotesque).

Hmmm... How about having a horribly violent game where the player is not the violent one ? The player could be surrounded by violence, but not an active participant (merely trying to avoid it if anything)... Put the ball back in their court, with the whole passive vs active violence bit.

To further refine the idea you could do any or all of the following:
- Make the perpetrators be suits/media types
- Make them characters from other forms of violent media (slasher flicks, etc)... Would this qualify as fair use?
- The players avatar is a child doing something fairly childish. Perhaps looking for toys, candy, pet or parents or something. Power ups could be silly things like roller skates (move faster), etc.

Don''t think that''s been done yet

pwd

---
What makes you think I''m not going to like a goatse pic on my window? - nes8bit



E.A.R.E. To keep your children away from elephants!

The only way to shock politicans is to irritate politically influencial special interest groups. Like human rights or something like that. Problem is it will still have to be appealing to the public (great graphics and gameplay ).

Your soccer mom fps sounds like a real cult classic in the making, right on man!

Me and an associate were talking about a game like this, something just to *SHOCK* the censors and make people hate it because they love the gore and violence so much. But again, pure gore like SoF wouldn''t work. and neither would just excessive amounts of gore, ala Serious Sam. It would have to both be real, and the characters would have to be shocking.

Intro: A detective is on vacation, driving through some woods a night. The woods thin out and he sees a house up a little ways, ignores it but then takes a second look. Half the lights are out, the front door hangs wide open and the living room light is on, flickering once in a while. He decides to pull up and make sure everything is ok. As he comes close to the door, he hears the soft singing of a young girl, "Ring around the rosies, pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, all fall *down*". He knocks once or twice on the door, but no one comes to answer. He walks through the entry way and turns to face the living room. Bloody handprints adorn the walls all about. The singing is louder and as he steps through the doorway to the next room, he sees a little girl, in a blue-with-yellow-flowers dress, sitting on the floor with her legs crossed rocking back and forth tightly grasping a doll. He tries to talk to her, but she continues with her song and rocking, the handprints are all over the walls, and her dress is covered in bloodstains, there are bloody footprints leading back into the house. He follows them to a closed door, the handle rhythmically dripping onto the floor. He pulls out a handkerchief and opens the door slowly. Zoom to his face, a shocked look as he turns away and gags. Camera turns about and comes to a view of the room. A king-sized bed, a light blue ocean-pattern bedspread turned red sits still, two forms under the covers. The detective walks in slowly, the mirror is shattered with "Love" written jaggedly across the spiderleg cracks. He walks over and quickly flips the cover over, on the bed lie a man and a woman, their throats cut wide and pools under their necks. Their eyes are peacefully closed and their heads are tilted ever so slightly towards each other. He turns around and the little girl is there still with her doll against her chest, he asks what happened, and the child pulls a knife out from behind her doll and licks down the bloodstained blade.....

Now tell me this, what would be more *shocking* to see in a game, and what would piss the suits off more? Laughably blowing limbs off in Soldier of Fortune, or starting up a game and seeing *this* as the opening cinematic? Its not about gore, and its not about loads of violence. Its all about being shocking and macabre and morbid. Surprise isn''t the way to scare people either, yeah, its a quick adrenaline rush when something suddenly pops out at you, but its a whole lot more creepy when people and things are used in ways you don''t expect.

Oh, and I really don''t need therapy or psychiatric help. I''m just fine...really!


-Ryan "Run_The_Shadows"
-Run_The_Shadows@excite.com
"Doubt Everything. Find your own light." -Dying words of Gautama

That is wonderful... I like seeing sickness of the mind... now, the games main character? That little girl. You have to act all innocent and get the people to trust you before doing all sorts of morbit death acts on them...

The more inventive the death, the more points you get... That is how you would get a law suite on your hands.

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The future of RPGs - Thanks to all the goblins over in our little Game Design Corner niche
          

Or what about this...you are a young man living in some parallel-universe in a city that is somewhat like earth but it is EVEN WORSE! It has to be a really dark place full of violence and all sorts of stuff, everything that is bad in our world but even more exaggerated, BUT all these horrible things are more or less hidden, everything seems to be more or less okay when you aren''t looking close enough, people live their everyday lifes, go to church and do their jobs and around them is chaos and destruction and mighty corporate bosses hold all the strings in their hands and people get entertained until they don''t care anymore. But from time to time somebody sees what a piece of shit this world really is, and goes insane, commits school shootings and that sort of stuff. YOU play the part of some young guy/girl who does see the world as it really is, and you make it to your goal to really FUCK UP the people! You go around the city in RPG-manner and commit brutal ritual murders while trying not to get caught, you can found a sect of satan-worshippers who sacrifice little children, or get a rock-star and distort little, innocent children''s minds, or become a politician or a mafia-boss, maybe start a war and so on...and your ultimate goal is to fuck up the citie''s inhabitants so much that it finally collapses in chaos, everybody kills each other in a gigantic carnage and finally, in the end, after armaggedon has come, everything is peaceful at last...

Now I just made this up spontaneous, but this would be a) violent and b) (and this is the more important par ) it would have a really sick message and disturbing gameplay...make this game fun to play, give it good graphics, put lots of satire and cynism in it and make sure it spreads like the plague and you have really created one sickening piece of software everybody will love to hate!!!

Wavinator, the game idea sound amazingly fun. I can picture aiming an electric prong at Joe Leberman lol. It works on so many levels, but there is one problem. What happens when Leberman recieves an anonymous death threaght, or some poor anti-violence polititian is actually killed? Then you would be just giving the media more stuff to use against us. Even if it wasn''t that severe, it is ammo for the media to throw at the innoscent designers. No offense at all but this would just screw us more.

quote: Original post by Newbie101
Even if it wasn''t that severe, it is ammo for the media to throw at the innoscent designers. No offense at all but this would just screw us more.

Not really. The legal Buzzards and politicians are slowly tightening the noose around the industry. I, personally, would hate to try to develop under "government sanctions". We NEED something like this as simple shock therapy.

Show the general public just how sick and twisted it can get, really scare the beejees out of them. That''s the only way to stop this spiral.

Include, as the game-over screen, a message explaining why the game is this sick & twisted, though. Else the point will fly way over the media''s heads.


Run_The_Shadows is right on the mark. We need something psychologically shocking, more than we need something gory. Something that worms its way down itto the heart of the human condition and slowly begins to chew...

Poloticians, censors, the press, the general public... if this is who the target audience is then the essence of what''s trying to be achieved will be missed completly. I think that such a game should be written for us players and designers. If while in the process of making the game you get sick just trying to think about what you''re putting into this game, then you''re on the right track. The idea isn''t so much to shock people as it is to get them to turn the game off because they can''t handle it. I guess the game has to be entertaining enough to make the player want to start it up, but I think it should also make them want to turn it off not long after. Haven''t you ever read something from a web page somewhere that disturbs you so much you leave the site immediatly (assuming you don''t first flame the hell out of the admin for being a...)

Leave the macabre and morbid to Steven King. (Insert any other apropriate write if you wish.) Come up with an idea that''s so disturbing that you yourself would never be able write the code for it. (coding ability notwithstanding)

quote: Original post by kseh
Poloticians, censors, the press, the general public... if this is who the target audience is then the essence of what''s trying to be achieved will be missed completly. [snip]The idea isn''t so much to shock people as it is to get them to turn the game off because they can''t handle it. I guess the game has to be entertaining enough to make the player want to start it up, but I think it should also make them want to turn it off not long after. Haven''t you ever read something from a web page somewhere that disturbs you so much you leave the site immediatly.[snip]Come up with an idea that''s so disturbing that you yourself would never be able write the code for it.

I think it has to be aimed fairly and squarely at the politicicans, and press, obliquely, if not directly. To do this, it has to aim at the players, I agree, but it has to do it in a way that discusts them (If you see what I mean).

Therefore, to expand upon my prior post, it needs to be a multiple-level crawler. Some gore, I believe is essential, but not too much. The brain tunes it out if its overwhelming. Something simple, such as a shotgun blast actually blowing an opponent''s head into a cloud of fine grey, and red mist, with shards of bone, and intact globules of brain would probably suffice, rather than gutting every corpse you see. Also having each different victim gutted a different way (As in the film "Event Horizon").

At the same time, however, there need to be multiple levels of psychological twisting. Excessive use of phobias (Aracniphobia, vertigo) to turn large majorities off. The evil monsters being the good guys, and the ordinary people the bad ones.

For example, mission X - armed with a shotgun, two dozen grenades, and a pick-axe, your mission is to run rampant round a primary school, killing everything that moves (Combining the above brain-cloud head-shot with a 5 year old would be provoking )

Its not enough to turn people off, you have to really, really sicken, and discust them, right through to the core.