Conspiracy Theory Game

Authoring General Design Discussions
1

I’ve been thinking that a conspiracy theory might lend itself well to an IF game – it would be fun to watch the evidence unfold. For example, Roswell, though that seems too obvious. Or any of the many government conspiracy theories that abound and are reasonably well recognized.

I don’t want to repeat anyone else’s idea – has this been done? And if so, with what conspiracies?

2

13 views and no comments… maybe I’ll take that to mean no one knows of one right offhand…

3

I’m sure they must exist, but if you make a game about JFK’s assassination by the Illuminati, or the alien from Roswell escaping Area 51, I don’t think anyone’s going to go “Hey, she’s ripping off [GAME X]!”

Originality and innovation are only a means to an end. Quality and craft are the most important parts of any game.

4

I don’t know of any off-hand, however:

Quickly Googling ‘“interactive fiction” “conspiracy theory”’ brings up a couple of references to The Plant, by Mike Roberts. One now-defunct website suggests Little Blue Men, by Michael Gentry, as well. Searching IFDB for “conspiracy” offers up Project Delta, by Emilian Kowalewski (which isn’t even IF, strictly speaking, and which received terrible reviews). Caveat: I have not played any of these games.

That seems to be pretty much it, unless you count The Cabal by Stephen Bond, which is a big rec.arts.int-fiction in-joke about accusations that Graham Nelson and a few other IF aficionados were trying to control the IF community.

5

Huh. I actually been trying to make an IF game (reminiscent of Floor 13) where you play a secret police agent who tries to keep conspiracies hidden, and troublemakers quiet.

A conspiracy game would sound nice, but would be difficult by nature because conspiracies tend to try to stay hidden, planting red herrings along the way. I’d probably be too lazy to solve those puzzles.

6

Strictly speaking, this is not correct. Node-X adventures are mostly a subgenre of Interactive Fiction called multiple-choice textadventures, also known as CYOA. Just to clean this up.

7

You would probably be too lazy to solve those puzzles, I can’t tell. None of the less, you could write the plot in such a way that there are no or only a few red herrings included.

For example, you could use a structure like this:

  1. someone is found dead in a crime scene
  2. player works for the police and has to investigate
  3. first investigation concludes that it was suicide
  4. player finds hidden clues for a conspiracy
  5. second investigation concludes that the person was murdered by someone
  6. player finds more clues to prove his conspiracy theory and find the murderer
  7. game solved.

As you can see, one red herring is being used here. First the player is being convinced that it was suicide, then he finds out it was murder.