5 new game ideas that explore changing players’ minds about (climate change, energy, politics, etc.)
- A game about exposure to harmful chemicals in our environment. Players would have to handle decision making and learn how difficult it is to avoid microplastics, PFAS, and pesticides in everyday life. The goal would be to reduce exposure by making informed choices.
- A game that simulates the impact of addiction to social media and being on our phones. There are applications that use the same addictive methods to positively motivate users to adopt better habits, maybe this game would be more from the perspective of the developer, similarly to how the McDonald’s game forces the user to consider the ethics of what they’re consuming. The player would work against a character’s attempts at productivity, maintaining relationships, and sleep, rewarding them with dopamine, to illustrate the impact of these algorithms.
- A game that explores changing a player’s mind about AI. Players take the role of an AI model that is being developed and must make fast paced ethical decisions that train the kind of responses you can generate.
- A game that addresses the concept of propaganda and political media. I’m not sure how this would work yet as a game, but I like the idea of challenging the current political climate since everyone seems to be positioned against each other.
- A game that changes a player’s mind about reality and makes them question their perception of others. The players would be exposed to a range of other characters with different personalities and backgrounds, maybe based on observable traits like that of the Myer’s Briggs personality test. The objective would revolve around finding similarities with other players and reflection.
Rewrite of endless game idea (from week 1) now made into a persuasive game:
- ‘Pire: lets you build and evolve an empire, and as natural disasters happen, the empire falls and keeps going, pick a time period.
- Antique-coon: A tycoon game that allows you to get more items as the years progress, there will be more and more items to sell, hence it never ends
- Star Sailor: A planet exploring simulator with randomly generated planets to explore and gather materials from
- Minimum wage simulator: Work at a restaurant to get out of debt, never ends
- Charon: You are the person that takes people across the river to the underworld, allowing you to talk to people while you sail across.
Rewrite of ‘Pire: Players build and evolve an empire in different historical time periods, but the overuse of natural resources leads to potential collapse. This theme would emerge later in the game, exposing how unsustainable expansion and poor environmental decisions can cause the fall of an empire. I would consider historical factors such as the collapse of the Mayan Empire to add to the persuasiveness of the game.
There are a lot of strong directions here, but what stands out most is how many of these ideas flip perspective in a way that makes the player complicit in the system. The social media addiction concept is especially interesting from the developer side, ie having the player actively undermine someone’s well-being for engagement feels like a really effective way to make the impact more tangible than just simulating phone use. The environmental exposure idea also has a lot of potential, especially if the decisions feel constrained, since that reflects how difficult it actually is to avoid those things in real life.
The rewrite of “Pire” is probably the most developed concept here. I like how the environmental consequences emerge over time rather than being the central mechanic upfront, it mirrors how those issues tend to be ignored until they become unavoidable. Overall there’s a clear theme of systems influencing behavior that ties everything together really well.