Hi guys, I'm trying to develop a RPG game, and I've come up with I think a pretty interesting background story.

I was influenced partly by the movie "Inception". Feedback and criticism would be welcome :)

"I.D.E.A.S." - Injected Dream Experience Application System

The core mechanics of this machine called 'IDEAS' was first developed by scientists in order to understand how the unconsciousness, consciousness, and dream worked. The system injects an information into a brain part called Somnia Mundus, region responsible for the imagery projected in dreams, while the user is in a forced REM (rapid eye movement) state of sleep. They found out that the user was able to recall the dream upon waking up, and said that they felt like they were in a real world and had full conscious control over what was happening.

This system was quickly picked up by an entertainment company named "Evirus", and they made it into a form of video game where the information injected would be a game setting and user would be able to actually 'live through' within the game world. The hardware of IDEAS look like an over-the-ear headphone, which can scan and interact with the brain.

The information was physically stored in a portable drive (much like USB drive) called 'Memory'. The game informations were written by both Evirus and amateur developers, and soon became the leading form of video game entertainment. There was one major problem with IDEAS to be played enjoyably and without much restriction, and that was error handling. Since the user is able to consciously be able to do whatever they liked, any unexpected behavior that the Memory has not been programmed to handle would cause the user's conscious mind to reject the game world and kick the user out of dream. Although the available memory space within Memory grew larger and the complexity of the game world grew bigger allowing for more error handling, the problem always existed: users did not have a complete freedom in the game.

Eventually, a quite revolutionary development was made, in which the game world was generated from the user's unconsciousness mind. Called Dynamically Imported Memory, in short DIM, solved current video games' shortcoming: impossibility of error handling all behaviors, and an infinite world. Once DIM was developed, pre-programmed Memory became obsolete. The game world was unique to each user and
was never unenjoyable as DIM passed the informations from the creative mind to the emotional mind and rejected the information if the feeling was negative on the user. All these informations were just fed into the Somnia Mundus, which took care of all the actual building of the game world, and the user would interact with the game world, causing many informations to be made within the creative mind, and the cycle continued, making a truly interactive game.

Now, the actual game that I'm developing makes use of this "duality setting" where there is a sort of science-fiction setting within the 'reality world' and a fantasy setting within the 'dream world', but mostly will be in the medieval, generic fantasy genre within the dream world.

Hopefully, the background story made sense to you, as English is not my first language so there might be bunch of places that can be more clear if worded differently.

It sounds interesting, I'm a big fan of this topic (total recall, inception, otherlands etc.) , but it is more like a wikipedia entry in your universe about a certain technology than a story, thought it could be enough as background information. To make it a story, you need to introduce some kind of conflict.

It sounds interesting, I'm a big fan of this topic (total recall, inception, otherlands etc.) , but it is more like a wikipedia entry in your universe about a certain technology than a story, thought it could be enough as background information. To make it a story, you need to introduce some kind of conflict.

Agreed. It's a great concept but it feels like it's only a small piece of a much larger world. Are there any known problems or anyone who opposes the idea? Can it be modded or hacked? Start asking questions and really start to flesh the world itself out. Then start creating conflicts.

thanks guys. The story I was thinking of happens something along this line:

The main character and his girlfriend gets into a fight. After the fight, the girlfriend goes to play in the realm of IDEAS to cool herself off.

2 days later, the main character is really worried that his girlfriend has not picked up any calls or responded to the texts. So he goes to her house, only to find out that she's still in her dream world. The only problem is that she seems to be unable to return to reality. He brings her to a hospital where she gets fluids and nutrients through IV, and the doctors say she's in coma, or more accurately in a sleep state, and it seems to be impossible to wake her up. They suspect IDEAS has something to do with it and call the Evirus company to see if they know how to wake her up.

After running through many tests, they figure out that something in her dream world is suppressing the consciousness to return to reality, and the only way to get her back is to wait and hope that this 'something' disappears. They have no idea when or if this will ever happen.

After hearing this, the main character is crushed, and feels hopeless. He plans to commit suicide, but just before he acts upon it, the chief developer of IDEAS contact him and say that they might have something that can fix her. He tells the main character that they have been developing a machine that will allow a person to enter another person's dream world, and to interact with it. The developer tells him that he should enter into his girlfriend's dream world and find out what's suppressing her consciousness, and to destroy it, and that will enable her to come back to reality.

So off he ventures into her dream world, where it is filled with medieval/fantasy cities, towns, creatures, and magic to rescue his girlfriend from never-ending sleep.