Ceci n'est pas un jeu vidéo

Because it is about one ("jeu vidéo" means 'video game', it seems obvious to me but I speak two Romance languages and dabble in three others, so plainly my conception of "obvious" is not that of a normal decent person with a life).

Also, this: best t-shirt ever. Oh God, the geekiness.What is fascinating is, the original, which was apparently supposed to be so deep, immediately had me say "Right, because it's an image of one." I mean the first time I saw it, at the age of 19. And I had not yet cast aside my humanity and become an oni for the sake of philosophy; I was just acquainted with the concepts "sign" and "referrent" and the distinction between them.

Anyway, I was blue-skying about what I'd do if my as-yet-unpublished SF book were made into a videogame (which is putting the cart before the domestication of horses or invention of the wheel). And I had some neat thoughts, things one might do in any video-game. I won't ask for a royalty if someone reads this and uses one of these ideas, all I ask is that they agree to work themselves to death (if necessary) to make my game, when the time comes. OK actually these ideas are just cool, use 'em if you want. Credit'd be cool, though, as would making yourself my game-making thrall. I promise I'll let you wear a one-size-large brass collar.

• The fact one needs a tutorial at the beginning of a game is often rather lame, have you noticed? I mean, you're generally some grizzled space-marine or legendary mercenary (do I mean Solid Snake or Samus Aran?); the only hero I can think of who justifies his learning curve is Link, because he always starts out a normal boy.
  
  But that's the thing. Since Link's learning curve is justified by his youth, why not double up your tutorial with a prologue of the character's early days, and give us some backstory exposition while you're about it? I'm sure someone has done that before, but it seems like such an elegant solution I'm surprised it isn't overused.


• Has anyone ever combined an RTS with a karma system? I was thinking if I was gonna make one for my SF book, set during the war, it'd actually use a two axis karma system: morale and honor. Too many RTSes use a mechanistic "models on a map" theory of warfare; what if you have to think of the guys as actually living people? Let their morale get too low, by throwing them away or bungling too many actions, and your men's combat effectiveness drops—and if you order them to do things they consider repugnant, they might mutiny.
  
  In my SF setting, the two axes would work differently for humans than for the felinoids; giving the humans orders that lower your honor-karma would just drive their morale down faster than anything else, even complete and utter clusterf...lunks, while lowering your honor too much with the felinoids would result in a loss condition. Namely, you get fragged by your own disgusted men.


• Has anyone ever tried to combine FPS with 3D brawler? I had a thought that one could definitely pull it off, though it might be a bit wonky in practice.
  
  Basically, using the trigger/shoulder buttons puts it in FPS mode, where the bottom shoulder button, or trigger, fires a weapon or grenade, while the top reloads or jumps. The D-pad, in that mode, is used to switch between weapons. Touching the four buttons (ABXY on the XBox, ◻△O✕ on the Preste) switches it to 3rd-person fighting game mode, where the D-pad and four buttons work basically like Tekken (e.g., the four buttons are mapped to the four limbs, and can be combined for special moves). I think the shoulder button that doesn't reload still jumps (the other one switches to FPS mode—you'd probably be able to disable some of 'em, since switching things merely by clenching is a common trouble in video games).
  
  In my setting, the characters would have a set loadout of weapons, rather than battlefield pickups, a bit more like Team Fortress than Halo. But maybe one could ask allies to share ammo (and AI characters always have infinite ammo, we're not monsters). It'd probably work a bit like asking a bot-medic for a heal, in TF2.


• I'm sorta intrigued by an idea of giving each segment of a story a unique POV character, and letting each of them explain their world as they see it. In my setting, for instance, some human characters I thought of were a US Marine, whose POV would include reflections on America's changed status in the 24th century, as well as a much more skeptical attitude toward the UN; a guy from some other English-speaking country's "national cadre" within the Peacekeepers (I thought maybe a black South African with an Afrikaner accent, since that happens to be my favorite non-American accent in English), who gives a less critical view of the UN but also gives a more ordinary "poor bastard in the trenches" viewpoint (Marines are not normal soldiers, call one a soldier to his face if you doubt me); and someone from somewhere else, perhaps with his dialogue in some other Earth language, with subtitles, who's an elite powered-armor trooper (possibly female?), who'd give the perspective of a "super-soldier".
  
  The felinoids whose POVs I'd thought up include a rank-and-file trooper, or possibly even one of their activated reserves, who gives the "keeping the Vikings from burning our fields" perspective; an ordinary "sergeant" type who's trying to keep his unit alive while carrying out his missions, who gives the career-but-not-elite soldier perspective; and a pilot of one of their "starfighters", who gives the "super-soldier" and elite perspectives—but not, really, the hotshot-pilot one, 'cause their pilots are knights. I think maybe the female POV character on the felinoid side will be a medic (though "battlefield ambulance" is uncomfortably similar to "escort mission"), to give the noncombatants' view of what being attacked by barbarians is like. I had considered an electronic-warfare tech, but I'm not sure if there's a way to make hacking and cryptography fun, in a video game, without throwing realism out the window.
  
  One thing I thought would be amusing would be for the humans' campaign to go first, and for each of the POV characters to realize, to a greater or lesser extent, that most of the things the UN was saying about the war were bogus, and that not only are the Peacekeepers committing the atrocities, it's because of pacifism that they do it. And then to show that nevertheless, fighting the war is not necessarily wrong—it'd take deft handling, but for all their preening nobody really does deal with the moral ambiguity of war. Just because your side is in the wrong, doesn't mean it's wrong for you to fight for it, anymore than defending a culpable party from a lawsuit is immoral for an attorney.


• A thing I was watching had a guy wondering why Arabs are the default enemies in so many FPSes, and uh, maybe for the same reason you usually fight Germans and the Japanese in World War II games? Well, Arabs and Persians, really, but the point is there is nothing more contemptibly PC than the Western Terrorists trope, and consider how contemptible PC often is.
  
  But it occurred to me, the way you avoid having that dehumanize that ethno-religious group is, you have a realistic portrayal of the difficulty involved, that civilians are often caught in the crossfire—and maybe you have to subdue them nonlethally. (In a game, that's awesome. In real life, if you are a soldier and someone attacks you, you do whatever you have to do to make them stop. It's not pretty but it is how you stay alive to do your job. You do still sometimes have to move civilians who don't want to be moved, though.) But I could definitely see incorporating that into the felinoids' campaign of my never-gonna-exist game, because they do have rules about not killing civilians (also their armor can shrug off someone throwing rocks like they were spitballs), and having to subdue enemies nonlethally can be interesting.