I've been working on a new idea lately and I'm looking for some advice on where to take it.

THe idea is to build games that are playable through commands from IRC chat rooms to control what's going happening on the screen. (think something like Twitch Plays Pokemon)

The end result would ideally be where there are a few hundred (or potentially way more) people viewing the game and entering commands into the chat box to hopefully create a chaotic experience where your individual actions dont have so much as an effect as the collective cooperation of the mob of players

Right now, Im trying to figure a way to launch a game like this and some design elements that can come with a control scheme like this. I made one game under this idea already, but it was originally intended to be streamed on a twitch.tv channel 24/7. It wasnt too reallistic of an idea to keep one of my computers tied up 24/7 to stream a game noone knows about. I'm considering changing it to a web app and loading it up to a server to run from a webpage.with its own IRC.

I have a couple other ideas, ones like an adventure game where the character runs around on procedually generated levels to create a sort of endless adventure.

Some of this borders onto marketing but I thought the idea of games played with an IRC to be interesting. THoughts?

It's quite fun to play games via IRC, most well known are quiz games or "dare or truths",... basically games you'd play with a couple friends in a room without many tools/items.
More advanced are managing games, e.g. sports manager simulators where you have to deal with the issues of your team on a daily basis (e.g. someone broke a bone, was bribed by the opponents) and 'watch' the game against other teams on the weekend (basically just text scrolling along as if it was radio). It's a lot of managing with a little bit of interaction and sometimes no interaction between players at all (e.g. a shop manager).
Most fun game I've ever played was a space strategy game, where the world was incremented every hour. everything had a distinct moves it takes (e.g. destroying a building was 1 move, building a miner was 6moves, flying to another planet in your solar system was 12moves). it all boils down to simple commands that you queue, some statistics and mostly due to the communities/allies you could build. sometimes more than 100 people in an alliance combining their forces in an attack against an enemy ally. It took weeks to build your planet up to a state where you could colonize other planets and then again it took weeks to colonize all your solar system and then it took again weeks to build a strong fleet (a battleship could cost you more than two weeks of resources of all your 10 planets). sometimes you had skirmishes with local solar races, sometimes you've just build up a fleet of amazing 5 battleship etc. and send them on an invasion course to an enemy planet.

really fun stuff to do back then, but nowadays I'd expect it make more sense to make it a web based game (or at least add a web interface additionally) for a broader audience.

I remember playing these (even wrote one), it was quite fun :) But I'm not sure it makes much sense resurrecting these (IRC became very niche nowadays).

Anyway, I would start by simply playing these (which might not be so easy, but I guess these IRC scripts should be somewhere around, try to find the RPG ones, not trivia).

Well maybe I'm not really trying to resurect irc games, but moreso the idea of large ammounts of commands coming in to control a single element on screen. So maybe not necessarlly using an irc as the input, but maybe a built UI with a list of controls.

I was thinking of something more dynamic/modern than text based games that has a gui and animated graphics on the screen.

Doing this as a web app might be the most realistic way. One of the questions would be to host it under a unique domain and try to build a community from scratch or partner up with an already running community to have atleast a hand full of ppl play and try it out.

I just had a couple of theme ideas I figured I'd share.

• Mob mentality - Something like a riot, a battle, or maybe a Zombie horde simulator. Each person might be one person (or small portion) of the mob. When everyone does the same thing, the mob is effective, but if half the people go west, and the other go right, they split off into 2 distinct groups. If you go off by yourself, you can't do much.
• Lifeform/AI Sim - Maybe everyone is an impulse in a brain trying to control one person/robot/animal. The most impulses generally gets chosen.