DiMarzio on 31/12/2015 at 14:18

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Not an idea for a whole game per se, but an idea for psychologic horror "trick" or so. Anyway...

The last night was a weird one. I'm currently on a playthrough of Thief 3 and up next is coming the Cradle mission (I haven't yet started it). I have never got this far in the game before, so last night I kept seeing these nightmares of the mission. Yep, nightmares of a mission I have never played or seen, just heard of some bits here and there. Like my mind was trying to prepare me for what's to come. I saw (T3 spoilers ->) the Hag (though she was a bearded man :D) and I saw the orphans. It was all some really scary shit.

On topic starts here:

So I woke up and couldn't get sleep and it got me thinking. The bearded guy looked a bit like my father (but not that close that my mind would have done it on purpose, I think), and it got me the idea: what if the player would see a picture of their father, in a horror game. I don't mean the character's father, I mean the actual player's father. Or the picture of any other person the player knows. Give a second to think how you would feel. All of a sudden, in the middle of your typical gore/ghost/mental stuff, there it is. Once I got the idea, I was pretty much done with sleeping that night.

Now how to do this in a game. The place you find the picture of your acquaintance has to be somehow scary. It can't be just lying around, it must have some meaning. And since surprise is the best weapon of fear, the player must expect to see something of meaning, but have no idea what. It also has to be in the "revealing part" of the story (if you know what I mean) to have the best effect. It can't obviously be a real part of the story as it would make no sense, but just a little trick to scare the hell out of the player. I haven't yet got very good ideas, but it could be something like: you look through some pictures of deceased people or patients of a mental institution etc. and there it is, your dad. I know, not very original, but share your ideas if you get any!

I think the player's father would be the perfect acquaintance for this, as he is usually very close person, someone you look up to, and someone you regard as a role model, a symbol of strength and integrity. Or that's at least the case with me. Mother or any other relative would also work, but it would lack the strength symbol asset. Why it is important, is because of the idea of breaking that strength. If your father isn't doing well, are you going to be? But I think any person, the player cares about would work. Or the player himself/herself.

Now the execution is where this idea crumbles. The game has to
A) acquire a picture of the player's acquintance
B) know this acquintance is close to the player
C) know this acquintance actually is in the picture
D) get a good picture, preferably a portrait
E) do it in secrecy
F) do it all without violating anyone's privacy.
Now that's a lot of work for the AI to do alone. Face recognition technology exists, but it's way out of scope for this. The best idea I got so far is to ask the player to connect their facebook to the game, you know for social networking or some other bullshit, and once the profile is connected the game can go through the public information and get the photo. I can't come up with any other viable idea. The game can't go asking the player like: "Hey, where in your hard drive you keep your portrait pictures of your relatives?" For demo purposes this can of course be done manually.

But what do you think? Would it work for you? Has anything like this ever been done before? In any genre or media? Acknowledging the audience is of course a common trick (fourth wall break) but has the audience ever been injected into the media? Is it even acceptable, would it cross some boundaries?

PS: As of yet, I still haven't played the cradle mission, so please don't give any spoilers.

DiMarzio on 31/12/2015 at 15:46

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No

henke on 31/12/2015 at 17:07

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I guess the most doable and non-lawsuit-invoking way of pulling that off would be to have one of your friends set up the game for you before you start playing. And it would probably be pretty freaky if you didn't see it coming, yeah. :)

Nameless Voice on 31/12/2015 at 18:12

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Reminds me of a really stupid idea I once had, many years ago, for a game* to randomly open and close your optical drive.
Just because it can.

Extra fun when you get lawsuits for breaking optical drives behind closed case doors.

* The scary part was that I was actually thinking of doing it in a Thief mission, which really shouldn't have that kind of power, but does.

Nameless Voice on 31/12/2015 at 19:49

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I was thinking your game might raid the user's hard disk and try to find photographs that it thinks might be usable... but really, even ignoring the fact that a lot of people would consider that an invasion of privacy, there's just too much that could go wrong there, depending on the kinds of photographs that the user keeps on their hard disk.