Be it in strategy games or RPGs. Someone may remember Evil Genius, ill-concieved as it was. How would you like it, if you, the player, was the personified evil itself, and in the course of the game you got an especially pesky hero captured, and then you engage in a dialogue with him. A very, very heavily branched dialogue, in which you describe to him in a very, very specific detail, just what exactly are you willing to do with the world, and exactly what will you do to reach that goal. And lo and behold, as those exact things you proclaimed you will do - become your actual endgame goal. And you get to turn all those small details to life, each and every one of them. The clever part is that the dialogue is branched in such a way, that even those most miniscule details of your ingenious (of course!) plan actually fit several goals, and so your plan, when assembled in its totality, may range from deadpan epic awesomeness to just Pinky&Brain kind of sillyness (yet still kinda sorta making some sense). You get to decide.

It's certainly an interesting frame for a story. Too few games use interesting frames around their narrative - the story is almost always told in a temporally straight manner. Every once in a while you'll get a Pulp Fiction-esque out of order chapter based story, but rarely do we get to see a game story use in media res or other interesting narrative techniques.

That said, this idea might work better as the cutscenes between chapters, so that the player does not know the full breadth of the game from the very start. It would also cut down on the amount of branching that not only the conversation but the game itself would also have to contain.

It could also be interesting to see the dialog set up as what you as the villian had to do to get to the point of having your death ray up and running. "I bet you're wondering how I got the trilithium crystals needed for a stable ray beam? Well, let me tell you..." And then the end of the game would of course be the hero breaking free and the player/villian defeating the character that's served as the story's audience.

Why not just make an interactive fiction game based entirely around this dialogue?

Maybe this could be used as an introduction :

http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20070829

Of course this has to be tongue-in-cheek and involve numerous overly complicated and painful-looking torture devices.

I could see a fun game consisting mainly of branched dialogs and machine puzzles (how does that hamster-powered death-ray works, again ?)

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I could see a fun game consisting mainly of branched dialogs and machine puzzles

That, actually, is a marvelous idea !
Except...i think the premise doesnt really work if you make all puzzles logical, and to make a game of ridiculous puzzles fun - you have to be Ron Gilbert, i'm afraid. :(

Well, yes, it is a game that would probably be quite easy to program but that would take good writing skills !

I don't think that "logical" and "ridiculous" are incompatible. After all, who said that a doomsday device couldn't run out of bicycle-power ? (faster, Igor !)

You could also have a logical solution and a lot of ridiculous suggestions : "What piece is missing in this complex gearbox ?
- 12-teeth copper gear ?
- 15-teeth copper gear ?
- 12" long iron chain ?
- 2 weeks old cheese in shape of a lightbulb ?"

But I think that this is more of a job for the "Writing for games" forum.

Awesome idea. and it offers the possibility of hiding special alternative outcome possibilities in the nested dialog. Secret endings and whatnot. Sweet.