Mundane Fantasies

Photo by Muffet

It occurred to me as I was talking with Alex Vostrov last night that many of the games we make are realizations of wild fantasies: Traveling through space, being a secret agent, slaying demons, being a war hero...

Acknowledging that human fantasies will always be a rich well of storytelling inspiration, I wonder why games always drift to wild fantasy? Where is the mundane fantasy of telling off your boss, or of finding a date for Friday night, or of winning the cheerleading competition? Yes, fantasies which aren't resolved at gunpoint.

There's clearly lots of victory and satisfaction to be had in these scenarios, and I could probably argue that they naturally speak to the human condition better than wild fantasy.

It also got me thinking about other media, and there even the wild fantasies tend to be not about what the character does, but rather about who she is:

A movie about an assassin doesn't have him pathologically mowing down 10,000 people throughout the film. Instead, the protagonist sometimes kills one or two people, and spends the rest of the film hiding their reality from their spouse, or running away from their former employers, or dealing with guilt over the innocent person they killed.

Likewise movies about programmers or tech support rarely have characters programming or talking on phones -- maybe in montages -- and instead spend the whole movie watching the characters play pranks on each other, or get shuffled around the country by burly mercenaries.

In other words: in many of our most popular stories, the character is engaged in a mundane fantasy, and that fantasy isn't even really related to who they are or what they do! And yet we persist in creating accurate portrayals of the non-humanistic parts of the most implausible scenarios.

Even in casual games, where these mundane topics are sometimes addressed, the treatment is so sterile. Take Diner Dash, a very popular general-audience title about owning a diner. Except it's not about owning a diner, it's about mechanically waiting tables. If it was about the fantastic experience of owning a diner, there'd be snarky employees, and that one annoying customer who ends up being a millionaire, and you'd be balancing your work life with raising kids.. Or at least there'd be lots of lewd jokes using pieces of raw chicken.

Because those are the human aspects that people really care about, the ones that reveal human nature.

I challenge you to think about mundane fantasies for your next game. I also challenge you to think about the human aspect of the fantasy, and not fixate so heavily on the mechanical aspect.

Comments

[Sasha]

Your comment about the employee at the diner and what a mundane fantasy game might be reminded me of biz RPG I played recently. Have you heard of Profit margin? It might interest you. http:\\profitmotivegame.com

Don't think the games finish yet though...

[Graham Jans]

Hey Sasha

I actually know one of the guys working on Profit Motive, and it was infact an inspiration for this post! :)