So to recap, some ideas from here already:
CONCEPTS
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Events in a story that will impact future players of the same story. This could lead to a story that grows and changes over time. Might be interesting to come back to it and see how things have changed. One idea that springs to mind is the idea of players having an opportunity to change societal or governmental policies that change the tone of a game’s playthrough and perhaps what means are available to progress through it
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Almost-real-time strangers. As you play through a story, other people may do things in some parallel existence to the story which will affect you. An alternative take to this would be if the data comes from some novel source besides another IF game, like… idk, a stock-ticker
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“Choose their own adventure”: Two (or more) stories are played side by side. Not only are your own choices remembered, but at certain intervals, the other player(s) choices will begin to affect the outcome of your story, also.
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Each player a role: Multiple players take on the different roles of a single story, and cross paths occasionally. The game is replayable because when you play with a different group, things will turn out differently.
IMPLEMENTATIONS
- One hosted game with a single save file that tracks historical data (This is a Real Thing That Happened)
- Two+ hosted games that can write and read from a hosted data file (Vorple samples)
- Local games that require the user to transmit data (could be a save file, but easier on the player would be a simple text code to input)
- One local game where the savefile itself is passed from player to player, round-robin (like a hot-seat game). No external data files or codes required.
Some pretty cool ideas, so far.
Edit: Sorry, don’t want to double post again. So here is where things could get really weird. I would hope to take elements from existing games (social games, board games, etc) and apply them to some of these concepts. Could be anything, like diplomacy, eye spy, telephone, assassin, etc. I feel like there are some simple and fundamental game “mechanics” out there that might work well with some of the above concepts. I’ll think on this more; it’s starting to get good, I believe.