Thinking about how the raw gameplay of ‘move your blip to avoid other blips’ always seems to get a ‘kill or be killed’ narrative layered on it. How can this be changed?
Direct inversion: You are given reason to want to Not Kill. Imagine you are playing Pac-Man, but instead of being killed by the ghosts when they touch you, you kill them – and it is seen as a bad thing. Perhaps you may have similar penalties as ‘losing a life’: everyone goes back to their starting point, and you can only do it three times. Perhaps you lose 25% of your score. There would need to be some reason everyone wants to be near you, despite the fact your touch is deadly.
Another inversion: ‘Throw blops to keep other blips from touching your blip’ is pretty much always cast in ‘killing’ terms. How can we change this?
Throw blops to turn other blips into your friends. Slowly the game would change, from throwing the right blops to befriend each particular blip (pink blips love pink blops, horses love apples, seahawks fans love blue/green, cops love donuts…), into moving your immense horde of blips around. Until the camera had pulled back far enough that the individual blips were impossible to make out from the group. I imagine eventually you would fill the entire zone, and to do anything interesting you’d have to zoom down and pick one blip to go through a tiny gateway into the next zone; repeat with variations until the designer runs out of interesting ideas for gameplay and/or scenery.
To the first part of this particularly: Back in 1982 or so, there was a game called Bump’n’Jump (from Data East, I think?) – a slightly-ahead-of-its-time demolition-style game where the core gameplay was to bump other cars into the walls of the course.
Buuuuut… there was an easter egg in the game, where if you went an entire level without destroying any other vehicles, you got a 50,000 point bonus for the level – roughly 3-4x what you could achieve through ‘normal’ means. This meant that there was an entire (and substantially trickier) second game embedded in it, where the goal was to avoid all the other cars on the road rather than to ram them. And frankly, that was a much more interesting game than the original.
And that’s one thing that games don’t do nearly as much these days, in large part because it doesn’t scale and it’s not ‘cost-effective’ – providing entirely alternate play styles means that you have to either (a) make playstyle not matter much to outcomes, or (b) accept that no one chunk of your playerbase will see all the content you’ve created, and both of those have legitimate issues with them. But for games of that sort – action/action-puzzlers – it’s IMHO an underutilized arrow in the quiver.
Oooh, good point. I was so elated when I’d manage to get the pacifist bonus in Bump & Jump. I feel like that’s left a mark on me; every single idea I have for a video game tends to have the idea of a pacifist bonus in it.
(Sometimes modulo things like “killing the one person the mission is about assassinating” of course. Give me a stealth system and I will make a few attempts to kill absolutely nobody except for load-bearing bosses…)