Were getting near the end of Asymmetrical representation week here at the Chrome Cow. Yesterday I verged on Insanity , today I drift into Paranoia.

There are two movies that I think capture the essence of paranoia; John Carpenter’s The Thing, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (the 1950’s or 1970’s versions, I like them both).

There have been recent attempts to bring The Thing to the game space, and with good reason. It’s a closed room mystery, with a small cast of characters, in a great, moody setting. I was considering Body Snatchers as the narrative, but The Thing just maps too damn well.

Using this as a backdrop, I propose an online multiplayer game similar in some respects to the party game Mafia/Werewolf. Each game begins with one player as The Thing. The game ends when all Things or Humans have been eliminated, or everyone is dead.

The Thing has a fairly rapid conversion attack, but early on is very weak, so the attacks must be performed discreetly.

Things get a constant count of how many Things and Humans there are in the base. The humans get none of this information. Human’s win if all Things are eliminated. The Things win if at least one Thing survives. The humans achieve a Pyrrhic victory if everyone is killed. To kill everyone, the base’s life support and communication equipment must be destroyed

The twist: if a human is attacked by a thing, it takes a few minutes of game time before they realize they have become a Thing (not every attack by a thing makes a successful conversion). During this time, they continue to perceive the world as a human, but are fed false information. If any human attacks them, they perceive they are being attacked by a Thing. They are fed false cues to arouse their suspicion that other humans are Things, and must be attacked.

The game supports voice chat, and pop-up messages that give the status of critical mission equipment, medical, generators, communications. If a Thing can get alone with one of these pieces of equipment, he can sabotage it, or cause it to send a false alarm, to lure people away from groups. Humans can repair or sabotage equipment.

The gameplay I imagine is a group of friends playing on-line, half things, half humans, each trying to maneuver each other to reveal their true nature, to convert or kill, never knowing who is really who, trusting not even their closest friends.

That’s some quality paranoia.

-game over-

Tune in tomorrow for the exciting conclusion to Asymmetrical Representation week!

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.