Many of the most popular game genres tap into the primal urges that stir in our hindbrains. I’m talking deep evolutionary structures, honed for millennia: hunting , gathering , killing , fighting , fleeing , and perhaps the most powerful, arranging similar items in neat rows . Even sex makes an appearance from time to time.

And shopping.

Cue back story: As a young geekling, I was a huge fan of an obscure little game called Dungeons and Dragons . Your forgiven if you’ve never heard of it before. It was an archaic thing, played with pen, paper, funny dice and imagination. Nary a pixel to be seen and you could play the entire game without even owning a computer.

When we weren’t busy selling our souls to Satan to learn actual magic spells , we’d roll up characters and go adventuring. Or that was the plan anyway. Frequently we’d just sit around rolling up characters, and then go shopping to outfit the characters for the promised adventure. With our starter gold, we would sit for long periods of time debating the merit of 50 feet of rope versus a lantern, some wooden stakes, or do I go with the leather bracers*? A cask of oil…definitely.

Shopping is a powerful stimulus, and it doesn’t even matter if it’s real.

Which brings us back on topic: shopping in games. It’s everywhere. From buying Fake Moustaches in Lego Star Wars to the ubiquitous vendors in MMOs, from the mech-parts shopping in Armored Core to basic notion of leveling in RPGs (shopping for skills). As I think about it, fantasy role playing games are about as close as we come to pure shopping games, shopping for equipment and spells, paying with gold, shopping for skill increases, paying with experience points. And then a bit of killing and looting thrown in. You know, to finance the shopping.

From a marketing standpoint, it’s probably easier to sell a teenage boy an RPG (which after all, shares the same initials as “Rocket Propelled Grenade”) than it is to sell them a fantasy based shopping simulator (FBSS).

But that’s just what’s on the menu today; a game with shopping as the primary mechanic.

You’ve been hired by a minor executive in a small company to be his personal shopper. The holidays are coming up, and he has a number of people he needs to buy gifts for. They are all tricky clients, and the right gift will help bring in a lot of business. The wrong gift, well it doesn’t bear mentioning.

Success brings you monetary rewards, and you must spend the money to improve your appearance, the right clothes, a personal trainer, a new car.

The more you succeed, the more your services are in demand, you gain more and higher-end clients with every trickier shopping missions.

I see the client interaction taking place in a comic-book style, where the characters don’t animate, but slide in and out of frame, and zoom independently of the background plane. Like a polished animatic.

The shopping itself happens in a variety of formats. You begin with a top-down map of your town. There are a few store icons on the map, and perhaps a mall. Your apartment also appears on the map.

Clicking on a store takes you inside, and opens a standard shopping interface. The visual representation of the store gives you a feel for the quality of the goods inside.

The more you explore the city (perhaps starting on mass transit), the more shops you discover. Sometimes pleased clients will tip you off to new stores in out-of-the-way places that carry better merchandise.

You also begin to receive catalogs in the mail (accessible through your apartment). The catalog has its own unique interface. As your status increases, new catalogs show up. Shipping time may be a factor.

As you begin your climb, you trade in the subway for a car, which opens up more shops. Perhaps their is a time element that includes your travel time though the city (rush jobs require better time management). You upgrade the apartment to a condo in a posher part of town, and new areas are opened for exploration. The condo becomes a house, the house a mansion. You may hire assistants to help with the less challenging clients.

I imagine a character creation interface that would only allow you to create plain looking characters, and you would steadily invest in their appearance throughout the game, better clothes, makeup if appropriate, plastic surgery.

What’s the win condition? Dying rich and alone? A philanthropy phase? Power over death itself? This isn’t a “message” game, is it?

-game over-

Thanks for reading another action-packed installment of Design a Day. For background on the Design A Day challenge, take a peek here and here.

It took us the longest time to figure out what bracers were. It sounded like something an elderly warrior would wear; “Son, hand me my Leather Bracers, my Lumbago is acting up.”