Sunday, June 17, 2007

A new Myst genre?


I have just finished playing Riven; it belongs to a genre of games where you are required to complete the game objective by exploring, making deductions and solving puzzles which come on your way. You are all alone in the entire game-play and there aren’t many characters in the game who can help you. Needless to say, that it can not be liked by everyone and there are only a handful people who could finish this game entirely on their own without even once looking at some hint or other. It’s too difficult, to the point of absurdity sometimes, to be solved by a single person alone. I feel proud to declare that I looked up for help on only three instances, which I think is quite an accomplishment.
Once I had finished playing, I felt whether it is possible to make an even difficult game – ¬ not in the sense of puzzle solving but puzzle making. If you are familiar with the story-line of Myst/Riven, you know that someone, like Sirrus; Achenar; or Gehn, gets trapped in a surrealistic world and makes devices, machineries, locks and codes to escape that island. The player’s objective then is to decipher the codes and understand the machineries and then come back.
The objective of the new kind of games would be to let the players play the role of Sirrus/Achenar/Gehn or someone else who is initially trapped. With nothing to start they will gradually build the machineries and codes to survive in that island. This should involve understanding the physics of that world and the mathematics behind them. Maybe even involving calculus and differential equations, of course, it is going to be far difficult than the Myst genre and only those having high-IQ and knowledge of advanced mathematics would be able to solve it.
The game should not be available in retail store, instead, I suggest having a qualifying test for users to buy this game; the potential players should be tested for their basic knowledge, their aptitude and IQ and then only be allowed to buy the game. Once they are qualified, the game’s CD/DVD should be sent to their home directly. The media should have a unique ID which should map the media to their respective users, so in case there is a piracy then the company can track the ID with users and hold the user guilty for distributing pirated copies.
The users who demonstrate their exceptional intelligence by successfully completing the game can be listed on Cyan’s website where recruiters and head hunters can view their profile and find candidates who are exceptionally intelligent, highly motivated, and, can work in a challenging situations to get out-of-the-box solutions.