Stateless

This is a draft for a game that I wanted to build, but probably will never have the time for.

If you are interested in realizing this, please contact me.

Intro

50 years into the future, as the corporations tighten their grip on the citizens of the earth, the lawless high sea attracts heros of all kind. An evergrowing, improvised raft is forming in the pacific ocean, creating a parallel anarchic society of fugitives, dreamers and disillusioned revolutionaries.

Fictional and non-fictional popular characters can be found in the bars and hideouts. Leave the cruel world behind and dock on to the gigantic raft to explore it and engage in deep conversations with your favorite movie stars, video game characters and philosophers.

Conversations

Isn't it sad that interesting characters from books, video games, movies, series and other media only have an impact on you while you engage in that media, but stop doing so when you're done? How often has a character fascinated you, taught you about life, or given you a new perspective?

This game leverages these emotional connections you created with those characters in your past and gives you a chance to reconnect with them.

The conversations are curated by the users in an open, wiki-like database. This allows hardcore fans to geek out about their favorite characters and write scripts for interactions that are as close to the fictional person as possible.

In order to avoid spoilers, the characters might ask you whether you watched a particular movie or read a particular book, and adjust their responses accordingly.

As the game grows through the expansion of the conversation database, more characters are added, and more raft pieces are docked on. One can watch the raft grow over the years, and this would incentivize players to keep coming back to the game.

Setting

The raft is an inhomogeneous, steadily growing place with sceneries ranging from shady corners to colorful luxury apartments. Much of the conversational gameplay might happen in bars, but eventually, this is up to the imagination of the users who build the world.

The characters may come from any time and place, and can be fictional or non-fictional. There needs to be some plot device that allowed characters from other times to enter that raft.

The world is set 50 years in the future, allowing for intellectual conversations your favorite characters about problems that the world is facing right now, and will face in the future.

The Name

The name "Stateless" has two meanings. The first is that the raft on the high sea on which the game takes place does not belong to, nor has to obey any state. The second is that the game itself is stateless, as in, there is no saved state at all. This game is not about making progress, but about having conversations, which can be repeated and skipped as desired. One can leave the game and join back on any device to resume where one has stopped before. It is not addictive, only inviting.

Switchable Front-End

Since the game mechanics is minimal, and the conversation data, map data, and other game definition files will be in ubiquitous formats, it can be plugged into any kind of front-end. Here are some possibilities:

• It can be a 3D world with cozy interior decorations, starry night skies and sparkly plastic swimming in the ocean. Eventually, we can add voice acting.
• A SNES-RPG-like top-down view for a nostalgic feel
• ASCII graphics similar to the classical rogue-like games, or dwarf fortress
• A text adventure in a console, the browser, or on a smartphone app. This boils down the game to the essentials without losing the depth.

This makes it incredibly accessible to players on any device while still making a state-of-the-art gaming experience possible.

Possible Problems

• The conversations you'd have would be "in a vacuum". Often, interesting topics emerge during interesting activities. In other games or movies, characters give their opinion on the various events that are happening. Here, it's more like talking with a friend in a bar about the old times. This has to be navigated well.
• Conversations that are stateless imply that the conversation partner can not be influenced by the player. One can not gain their trust, convince them of anything, and so on.