S. Gress: Gamifying the history of science!
This was supposed to be my entry for the Game Off jam. You can check my poor prototype here.
Theme: Leaps and Bounds
Definitions:
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Leap:
- A leap year
- A jump
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Bound:
- A boundary
- A great leap/jump
This gives us: Jumping from a leap year to another, after jumping over obstacles and breaking boundaries.
Our genderless character S. Gress mysteriously [TBD] comes into existence at the non-existent year 0 B.C. (maybe it serves as a "How to Play" level?).
Gress can only explore leap years (levels), and progresses in each level by jumping (as in, a platformer) through the stage.
At each stage there will be hints to a specific scientific or socioeconomic limitation in humanity's knowledge; the game symbolizes/represents this limitation as a physical obstacle at the end of the level (read, boundary) that the player needs to break in order to open the way for Gress to make a great jump to the next level/year.
The player breaks these boundaries by guessing and googling the problem (with the help of visual/textual hints), and typing the 'event' that happened in that given year that changed the situation or overcome the problem (see examples).
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S. Gress = Scientific/Socioeconomic Progress
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Maybe about 20 levels exist, highlighting 20 important leap years/events in the recent human history.
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The goal is reaching present day's "level of consciousness" (this has a New Age vibe to it lol).
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The player is expected and encouraged to search on the internet and solve puzzles by linking to relevant Wikipedia articles.
The player can either enter a relevant article's title or paste a link to it.
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Idea: When the player submits an answer, the game should query Wikipedia to get its metadata including its Wikidata id, which will be hashed and compared to a stored set of acceptable hashes.
Why? So that the player won't simply check the code to see the correct answer (it's a nerd's kind of game, after all).
Also, and most importantly, so that the game becomes a little bit future-proof (in case articles are rename or merged) and to support multiple languages (like, although I use English, I sometimes get and check search results in French). -
Idea: Autocomplete user's input using Wikipedia's titles and descriptions. Computationally expensive and too complicated...
SETTING: 'Gress' jumps into the 1859* stage. (* it's not a leap year but just go with it)
SCENE: A giraffe has a short neck. This giraffe follows the player as they progress through the level. The giraffe stretches its neck to reach trees that get taller and taller. The giraffe stops at the boundary of the stage, blocking it with its neck. (this is a famous example of Lamarck's theory of evolution)
.-------------------
| head
| *
| *
| *
| *
| Gress Giraffe
.-------------------
SOLUTION: "On the Origin of Species" or "Darwinian Evolution" stops the giraffe's neck's length that was acquired during its lifetime, from being passed from parent to offspring. At the end of the level, there won't be any boundary. Now you can make your 'bound' to the next stage. Happy, humanity is progressing scientifically!
.-------------------
|
|
|
| head
| *
| Gress Giraffe
.-------------------
SETTING: 1984 was a leap year.
SCENE: Gress jumps over rising and falling bars (of a chart, of course) that change as news headlines (text, appearing from a radio or a newspaper). Bars have persons' names. Headlines read something like, "FACEBOOK ACQUIRES COMPANY-X", "FACEBOOK FACES LEGAL CHARGES", "SCANDAL ON FACEBOOK", etc... The bars near the boundary (or maybe just anywhere along the way), you can't jump over the last bar because it's either too high or the previous bars are very low.
.-------------------
| <NEWS HEADLINES>
| DD
| DD
| DD
| AA DD
| Gress AA CC DD
.-------------------
SOLUTION: Mill's Principles of Political Economy as in
Up to Mill’s time, partners shared full liability for losses, including any personal property they owned—obviously a strong deterrent to the founding of worker co-operatives.
.-------------------
| <NEWS HEADLINES>
|
| DD
| BB DD
| BB CC DD
| Gress AA BB CC DD
.-------------------
See "Timeline of scientific discoveries" on Wikipedia.
1672 – Sir Isaac Newton: discovers that white light is a spectrum of a mixture of distinct colored rays
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Plays in dungeon. Passes open doors with symbols/pics with matched colors. The last door contains a colored symbol and a white symbol under some white light. The play think "How can I color the white one? How to split the white light to different colors?" That's the solution.q
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NOT CLEAR: Gamify it with plants under white light ("Grow light") as obstacles; and the white light is "split" into different colors, each color affects some specific plants affecting their growth and thus providing a way for Gress to progress maybe.
1848 – Lord Kelvin: absolute zero.
- Playing in the microscopic. "Bars'" movement depends on the temperature (in C°). The boundary must be 100% stable for S. to progress.
1892 – Dmitri Ivanovsky discovers for the first time a virus.
1896 – Svante Arrhenius derives the basic principles of the greenhouse effect.
- Jumping over pieces of melting(?) ice. Iceberg blocking the way.
1912 – Alfred Wegener: Continental drift.
- See prototype's second stage
1996 – Roslin Institute: Dolly the sheep was cloned.
Inspired by Danganronpa's truth bullets that breaks lies and allow the conversation/debate to progress...
Also, now that I think about it, it feels like that Words Story's ad (not the actual mobile game though) I keep seeing on Instagram.
I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm not really into history, and not sure what events are really important and what actually caused some things to change (as in Example 2)
djalilhebal - CC-BY