Wow 1 day 14 hours…
I’m 8h behind due to the compo starting midnight at my timezone. None the less i have some first Brainstorming thoughts ready. I like to approach those Themes from various angles and pick an interesting aspect. Philosophical and by terms of motivation i wrote down some loose thoughts.
Beeing evil is nothing natural, all evil beeings were once good. Evil and Good is something everything is based on. There are several Motivations to become evil. Betrayal, missunderstanding, manipulation, overambition, deception, megalomania, power, fraud, jealousy and so on. The classic Game-Villian always has a counterpart. Alot of Games, specially the Molyneux Games, use the Theme to put Players in a moral conflict of beeing good or evil. Beeing evil has a lot of charm – money, power, the freedom to do what i want. Beeing evil means that i don’t have to follow any rules.
What also is interesting in many fictions, that the line between good and evil often is blurred. Sometimes you have to do something evil to be good and vice versa. Theres a whole new Theme opening when you think of good and evil in terms of judgement. Who decides whats good and whats evil?
Etymology wise i’ve found that the word villain itself is pretty interesting. And leads to the conclusion that not beeing Knightly implies that you are doing bad thing. And therefore Farmers are bad. Which i found kinda funny when you think of Farmville…
French villains in the 15th century before going to work, receiving their Lord’s Orders.Villain comes from the Anglo-French and Old French vilain, which itself descends from the Late Latin word villanus, meaning “farmhand”,in the sense of someone who is bound to the soil of a villa, which is to say, worked on the equivalent of a plantation in Late Antiquity, in Italy or Gaul.It referred to a person of less than knightly status and so came to mean a person who was not chivalrous. As a result of many unchivalrous acts, such as treachery or rape, being considered villainous in the modern sense of the word, it became used as a term of abuse and eventually took on its modern meaning.
Then there is one thing or sentence that bugs me since i started thinking about the Theme. Which is a Quote from The Dark Knight: “You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” This Quote opens a lot of options in terms of Game-Design and elegantly describes the dilemma of beeing someone good in the first place and then becoming evil, even tho you never intended to be the villain.
My next step is to get a playable concept, that uses this Quote as a base. I’m mainly focusing on doing something that could work on mobile and therefore i’ll try something simple with a one-button approach. I’m not sure if this is the right way to do it but we’ll see.
Tags: motivation, thoughts
