A glimpse at my ENJMIN application Project.
The Theme
That year’s theme was Wadjda, a Saudi Arabian movie by Haifaa al-Mansour. The first movie shot by a female director in this country and an ode to youth freedom. The interpretation was free so we could make anything we wanted from this theme. For game designers, we had to write 20 or so pages to explain our idea and explain how it was new and refreshing.
A ubiquitous game that is played on Tablet, Browser and Smartphone for a great immersion. The idea is to write Verses in a Holy Book, a set of rules for your people to react. With two other players you play the role of the Prophets who are in charge of writing your interpretation of the Transes received from above. The game was a questioning about interpretation of scriptures, the role of thinking leaders and an experiment about artificial intelligence at a big scale.
Players sit around the tablet to receive a Transe. When they are ready, they open their minds and launch the video. Many feedbacks will be sent to them in a regular pattern : visual, auditory and vibratory feedbacks through the tablet. Each player is in charge of one sense so the message can be broken down more easily. Once the Transe is over, the players have to gather their thoughts to translate using a cloud of words what they’ve just seen, heard or felt. After doing so, they write this Prophety inside the Holy Book of their people to change the way the react in the world.
This part is the active part of the game but it’s only to create something bigger you can observe through your PC monitor. Your people, guided by your Holy Book, interacts with the people of others players all over the world and live their lives according to your writings. They can be anything you want them to be but you will have to discover what make them warfaring, peaceful, prompt to trade or expansionists through assimilation.
This project was a good experience for me because it was my first experience in actually writing a game design document. Looking at all the variables, the features, verything in the game, trying not to forget an exception or a huge part of the game is a tideous but passionating work that is the heart of game designer’s life. I wanted to make something never seen elsewhere, something for tablet in multiplayer but with very few interactions with the devices, meaningful decisions over a complex AI and long-term managment. I think this project will always stay in my to-do list, it may seem quite undoable, not really the type of game people are waiting for but I’d really like to give it a try.
