In the light of games such as Second Life and The Sims series, there's obviously a big market for games allowing you to create a persona in a virtual world - allowing you to live and do things you wouldn't be doing in real life. Surely you haven't missed out on the popularity of MMO's in general, such as Everquest and World of Warcraft - although these focus more on the unreal, the concept remains the same.
The latest game that recently caught my eye in relation to the above topic of MMO's and life simulating games, is this one:
Game: Football SuperStars (PC) Release Date: TBA
Football SuperStars is a football-based MMO that lets you live the life of a footballer, on and off the pitch.
It's basicly a game, allowing gamers from all over the world to create their own persona, in this context a football player/soccer player - in which you will be able to experience the whole aspect of being such a star - from only being a talent, to growing in both skill and fame and ultimately joining up with the bigger clubs, playing in the biggest cups and tournaments - joining your national teams and so forth - but in addition to this you'll be able to experience the happenings outside of the sport as well - if you're successfull, usually money follows, and with money you could truly have fun. The thing with this game isn't graphics at all, it is the possibilities within - games who attract players based on their real life dreams sounds to me like having even more potential than those basing themselves on attracting players based on their 'fantasies' more like the ones mentioned above (EQ, WoW etc).
You could see these types of games truly branching out - it would of course be in the light of something more and bigger than Second Life - allowing players to truly be what they'd like to be, but a game like that would have to maintain an unbelievable level of depth. Seing as there are so many professions to cover, and so many activities to implement. If they were to make this less of a huge undertaking, then they could create a basis world, and add professions/activities based on how many people wishing they had that possibility - eventually the world would grow. Areas I'm sure could prove interesting to a lot of gamers would be the ones of the Emergency units, be it Police roles, Paramedic roles, Firefighter roles - imagine a game like the Football game above - allowing your character to apply to the police academy, training for the physical exams, becoming a rookie patrol officer - and if you'd like accept promotions and so forth if you did well in your job - next to this you could have the social aspects of interacting with other players also playing in similar roles both on the job and off.. Having the sims elements and such next to the actual 'job experience' would round it off to be a realistic game. You could go from a smaller apartment to buying a house lot, to starting a family (NPCs) IF you wanted to - perhaps if you did well, you could be asked to join the local SWAT team, and if you did well there you could possibly be asked to join other groups. At the very beginning in the police line of professions, you would simply patrol with a senior perhaps AI, officer and yes, do police duties in the fictious city/world - various duties like perhaps patrolling the streets on foot or in a patrol car - doing speed tests with a laser, doing car chases or chases on foot - handling hostage situations, robberies and murders - as well as assisting other emergency professions, like keeping the NPC crowds/press away in large fires/car crashes or other emergencies that could occur in this fictious city. The more players joining, the more players would take the places of NPCs manning those roles before they are taken by the players, or you could risk having a huge city with 100000 police officers, and 1 paramedic and maybe 0 firefighters.. To make things in the city functional even with player choosing one profession over another, NPCs could man those roles - but never as effective as a player could potentially do the job - this would make playing with good players a better experience than interacting with AI all the time, which of course would be a more limited social experience, which relates to that of course different professions have to cooperate at times to save people or to do well on a location, depending on what equipment and training they have available. A police officer 'could' be able to keep someone alive for a short while, or do CPR, but to get someone up and running again a paramedic would be needed. Players could get calls from their Dispatch radio, and sign in to the 'missions' if they are available. Players could radio in if more help is needed on-site.
What about the situations where you aren't needed? Perhaps there's a hostage situation taking place a bank, obviously the police units are there, everything from regular cops to SWAT - while they have their job cut out for them with securing the bank perimeter and taking interviews from witnesses, and so on (regular cops), SWAT have to review the plans of the bank at hand, which would be provided upon accepting the hostage mission, and create a plan for extracting the hostages safely. The depth of such a 'Emergency'-unit type of game would have to be immense as the simulations of most aspects would have to be in-depth and detailed as well as non-linear and as well as very sporadic and challenging while at the same time allowing players to experience success at their job without it being made too easy - in this case perhaps players would fail a lot, or perhaps some players who enjoy ruining for others would be held accountable, in that players that accept the missions would see if one of the other players who's signed up for the bank job have a bad history of career events, and be able to vote him off the mission to reduce the chance of him ruining the job for the rest of the players. What of the paramedics choosing to accept the mission? They'd have to stay on stand-by outside the bank in case hostages, robbers/terrorists or police are injured in the goings on - they could also be asked to take care of witnesses or do crisis psychology work for those who might be panicking - this could basicly be done like a mini-game of conversations and reading body language as well as other aspects of choosing what to do with these persons next - if you find out they need further help, you'd have to send them to a shrink (NPC) and give them the post-trauma help required.. as this would go outside of the paramedic duties, you just have to let them know that this is needed.. if you send someone there who doesn't require it then you wouldn't truly be doing your job etc.. situations like these; a lot of people enjoy helping others; you could be helping kids (NPCs), old people (NPCs) or traumatized police officers (NPCs) on-scene that are suffering but not always physically. Often you would be given the role to patch someone up somehow, drive them in your ambulance etc.
You could have the opportunities to apply for detective/narcotics/internet crime squad positions within the department if you didn't like the car chases/hands on action risks presented in the regular police career line.
To illustrate, perhaps this game could be viewed as a 'The Sims'-online'ish type of game only in first/third person with 1 actively directly controlled avatar/persona within the game world supplemented by the game Emergency experience (emergency4.de/en/) - where you keep the social aspects based on what you do off the top - but - in this context you'd experience a lot of fun and what's more realistic/exciting/horrific/even boring happenings when/if you decide to take on a job career. If you wanted you could make a mess out of things, not even getting a job, or doing wrong/bad things while working - but risk getting fired or even put in jail as a consequence. In the light of this doing the attempt of copying how we do things in the real world, it would have to make people accountable for their actions, and truly reward players actually doing well in their chosen professions; living a good life in your chosen dream profession.
A thought worth exploring if nothing else.
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