Chavez not overall gaming fan

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/games-are-poison-says-venezuelan-president_1

Hugo Chavez is not a fan of the current state of the games industry.

I initially read the title of this news item and thought, “Chavez, you fucker”. However, once i saw

But, not being one to turn up empty-handed, Chavez has had a solution: don’t promote these games, make educational games instead.

I rescinded my completely condemning tone. I agreed that ‘edutainment’ is a severely neglected area. Some of the projects that I have been mulling over in my head are (or could be) seen as in that direction.

The main one is TOP SECRET but a more recent one I shall talk about here.

I first aired the idea to two friends, Ed and Adam over a bottle of red wine. It was then repeated in a design club meeting at my previous workplace, SCEE Cambridge Studio.

It is a public information style game that would teach people what to do in the case of a fire in the home.

In a perfect world it would be fully 3D and full, commercial, length. But also free, of course.

It would start black with the sound of a fire alarm going off. Then the black would fade in to blurry vision. The player would then have to escape from the house.

The first time you play, unless you already knew how to escape from a burning house (and had read the control instructions), you would die.

To make the game playable, from the second go, a learning curve would be implemented.

To start, your vision would be clear and your hearing unaffected. You would be able to approach fire in a super human way. No family members would need to be rescued in order to succeed.

As the game progressed the difficulty would increase but then dip again as new factors were introduced. For instance, the first augmented help to go would be the ability to go near fire. But as in real life, soon getting anywhere near fire would almost completely disable the user. Then, that ability would return slightly as you contend with the visual effects of fire, smoke and heat. The third stage would be the introduction of the requirement to save family members.

Other factors would include larger houses, smaller houses, older houses, flats and maybe schools and workplaces.

A final element of the game would be “cheats”. This would involve the implementation of fire safety elements to your home: further fire alarms, extinguishers, improved placement of flammable materials around your home etc etc.

I envision the inventory borrowing the recent Alone in the Dark game. In that game the items menu involves the camera tilting down to show what the character is carrying in their coat. To transpose it into this game - you look down to see the t-shirts you have grabbed to give to your family to cover their mouths to help them breathe. You could also see your child’s glasses that you picked up from their desk in their bedroom so they may see better. With “cheats” enabled you could see the bottle of water and tea towels you keep specifically to hold over your mouths to cut down smoke inhalation. And so forth.

The game is at a very early all-in-my-head stage and this is the first time I have written anything about it in a digital medium. However, one day, maybe after getting a team in place, I would love to try and get government funding and then make it.

And maybe Chavez wouldn’t be too condemning of it when it came out