SAN FRANCISCO -- At this year's Game Design Challenge, three game industry veterans answered the question, "What do you get if you cross a dolphin, a dog and some bacteria with a videogame?"
The Game Design Challenge, now in its fifth year, tasks three designers with creating a game that fits a set of criteria that's usually a humorous take on a current topic in the gaming community. This year's challenge: to create an interspecies game, is a "riff on opening up new markets," such as the casual gaming audience.
The trio of veteran designers tackling the challenge this year were Brenda Brathwaite, who's perhaps more famous for her interest in sex in videogames than for her work on Wizardry; Steve Meretzky, now a senior designer at Blue Fang, but one of my personal heroes for his work on games like Leather Goddesses of Phobos and Planetfall; and returning Design Challenge champion Alexey Pajitnov, who "literally needs no introduction." (He created Tetris.)
The Challenge had three rules:
- The game must be playable by a human and at least one other species.
- It can't be an ordinary game that's simply being played by an animal. "So no special hardware that lets a cat play Quake."
- Special hardware to let the animal play the game was allowed, but it can't be the point of the game. (Unusual controllers were last year's challenge, after all.)
Pajitnov went first because, as he put it, he had "a very modest idea and very awful presentation." His concept was called Dolphin Ride, and, like most of his game ideas, was simple yet clever. It's a team-based game, meant for a dolphin and two humans, one playing navigator and the other shooting.
The dolphin would be outfitted with a harness that had two virtual cabins on it, one for the navigator and one for the shooter. Each cabin would have a camera and transmitter so that the players could see the dolphin's environment as it swam around.
Balls of varying point values would be virtually superimposed on the images sent back from the cameras. The navigator would guide the dolphin towards the balls, and the shooter would take the balls out with the paintball gun that was in the shooter cabin. The object of the game was simply to amass more points than the other dolphin/human teams by destroying balls.
Pajitnov made it clear that the guidance system would have to be something that wouldn't harm the dolphins, but he was a little fuzzy on just how it would work.
Steve Meretzky had no interest in sparing the nonhuman player in his game Bac Attack; in fact, its destruction is a key element of the gameplay. A device called the TrayStation points down at a petri dish crawling with bacteria. This becomes the terrain for a medieval-themed strategy game in which you must use your available resources to build things like castle or moats, or research newer, better stuff, like "moats on fire."
The TrayStation will translate the moving bacteria colonies in the dish into invading armies, attacking your settlement. The amount of damage they do depends on your defenses, but the TrayStation gives you an unfair advantage -- it constantly shoots deadly microwaves at the petri dish, eventually killing off most of the invading forces. Those that survive, explained Meretzky, "have leveled up."
Bac Attack didn't entirely make sense, but Meretzky figured that the mutated bacteria that reached the level cap would be worth a fortune to the biotech industry. The crowd also got a kick out of the ad copy he came up with: "The game that makes germ warfare available to the whole family. The game that puts the fun back in fungicide.The world's first massiviely microplayer game, Bac Attack."
Brenda Brathwaite knew she had a tough act to follow, but she brought her A game, and a hundred dogs, too. She described her game, OneHundredDogs.com, as "an interspecies Facebook ARG," and yes, she's already bought the domain name, in case you were wondering.
The ARG starts in 50 cities around the world, issuing both owner and dog-based challenges to participants. Dogs might have to follow a scent trail to a particular spot in a park, or their owners might have to locate a specific building in town to complete a challenge. Brathwaite said it was important to her to fit the game to suit the way a dog naturally plays, as opposed to trying to get the dog to play in a way to suit the game.
Finishing challenges earns players points; at the time that this phase of the game ends, the player with the highest point total in each city becomes the Alpha Dog for that city, and becomes one of fifty virtual dogs in the game.
Of course, that's just half of the One Hundred Dogs of the game's name. The other 50 dogs show up via Facebook invites. Complete the challenges laid out by Dog FiftyOne, for example, and you'll earn a Friend invite from Dog FiftyTwo, who will in turn point you in the direction of Dog FiftyThree.
The game continues in this fashion until the players get to Dog NinetyOne. Even once his challenges have been completed, no invite from Dog NinetyTwo arrives. Only when the entire network -- the Alpha Dogs and the social networks they've created in their cities -- bands together will they be able to find those last nine dogs and achieve the full one hundred.
The judging was left up to the audience, who used their applause to vote Meretzky the winner. His prize package included a stuffed elephant and some rather fetching bunny ears. Brathwaite, the runner up, received a plush bird and a cat outfit, while Pajitnov got a pig nose and a stuffed spider for coming in third.
