Hold up, hold on, give me a second! Wait up! Stop, drop, and listen! You’ve got to listen to me, you just GOTTA. You’ve got to listen to my idea for a video game!
Okay, so the thing about this game is, it’s a role-playing-game. It’s fully immersive, and it’s really comprehensive, and it’s happening at this moment, this very moment. You roll your start randomly, and everything you do determines what happens next. There is so much RNG and so many huge overarching factors but the moment to moment decision-making is always down to you, and the stats are so complex they’re impossible to figure out, and and and
Oh. Are you sure?
Oh. Okay. I guess yeah, we’re already doing that.
I’m sorry for wasting your time, I’m going to think this over.
***
Hello again, my friend my pal my buddy my chum my friend! You’ll be pleased to know and happy to hear and delighted to find out that I’ve come up with an idea for another video game!
It’s a real-time-strategy thing. Rare these days I know, but nonetheless – and there’s even some basic automation built in, so you can set up a schedule that happen almost every day to perfect your build order. There’s limitless depth for micromanagement down to the twitch of a finger or you can zone out to see the big picture and let the whole day drop away without oversight and suffer only non-permanent setbacks. And the best part is: it’s free-to-play, so you can spend all your time playing it and getting addicted and spending way too much money. I even set it up so you can combine random experiences from the day’s play overnight and reroll them into new strategies-
Really? Really really?
Oh right. Yes. I understand. I guess that’s true.
Piss in a cup, I was so sure I hadn’t invented real life this time. Thanks. Gonna have to work on this.
***
Alrighty you got a second sure you do now just give me a moment of your time and I promise that if you’ve heard of THIS idea for a video game before I’ll eat my hat to shut myself up and never darken your dork again, this I swear.
It’s PvP, total free-for-all, all teammates permitted and all backstabs possible. Everyone can hurt everyone and everyone can’t work alone so you need to learn to trust to get anything done but the possibility is there. It’s sort of balanced because you’re all playing almost the same character type, but sort of imbalanced because of the uncontrollable start seed. Every weapon you can think of is usable, but consequences for just opening up on everyone are huge, and-
Wait THAT’S real too, AND it’s only the way total psychopaths think of the world?
I’m sorry, so sorry, so damned sorry. I won’t bother you again, I swear.
***
Hey listen I know I said I wouldn’t bother you again but WOW you wouldn’t believe this idea I had, listen, you’ve got to listen, it’s revolutionary, it’s impossible, it’s the best thing you’ve ever imagined or heard or dreamt.
It’s an idea for a video game, and it’s a platformer. An old genre, but a goody: and the best part is, it’s totally customizable in difficulty because it’s all about BALANCE. Very little jumping, not much parkour, but an infinite number of burdens you can take on that make just moving an exercise in groin-clenching teeth-gritting brow-sweating risk and frustration. The more you pile up the greater the rewards, but the rewards need you to keep up that weight, and the longer you sweat it the heavier and more tippy and burdensome the responsibilities get, and which will break first your will or your back or will you finally break free and reach the next level? It’s a bit rpg-elementy in that you get more powerful if you’re higher level so it’s easier but-
Oh come on, surely THAT can’t be real life too! Well, if you say so, you say so, and you’re right. Shoot.
See you later.
***
I know you’re busy these days, but this is too good to not share. You deserve to be in at the ground floor.
It’s a puzzle-solver, an absolutely diabolical puzzle-solver. Anything is a problem, anything is a solution, there’s a gradient to how well you perform – and this is the good bit: you’ll never know precisely how well you did! You’ll be left to piece together feedback gradually over time to find out if you’ve been getting the right answers or not, and even then you’ll never quite know if you found an optimal route or just stumbled along into a dead-end means-nothing conclusion. The big secret that we can’t let anyone in on is that everyone gets the same ending, so it’s more about the journey than the destination and it teaches you a valuable lesson about treating arbitrary goals as more important than the satisfaction of the moment which is pretty cool if-
…no dice, huh?
No dice.
Well. Easy come easy go. Thanks for the help, you’ve been a real huge assist here. As usual.
***
Okay, okay, okay, I’ve finally got it: this idea is so simple, so brilliant, so straightforward that it almost isn’t a game at all: an idle game.
You sit around, and you can try to do things, but those produce the same results by and by as hoarding your slowly accumulating points and using them to buy things that should make it easier to do things, and you do it all to make an arbitrary score value go up – which is diabolically determined by the same points you must spend to make it go up in the first place. When it goes up there’s always a new goal. It chews up your day and makes it slip out of your hands and you go to bed unsatisfied and craving more, always more, sure that there’s something you missed, some trick or complex strategy that could’ve sped up your progression and finally brought you to the top of the pinnacle of-
ARGH!
COME ON!
FOR THE LOVE OF PEAT AND BOGS!
Is there NO video game idea that some MORON hasn’t already made into REAL LIFE already!?