Three Ideas

There isn't enough room in Twitter for this thought. That's the nice thing about blogs.

Games combine several disciplines to make a unified work. Of these, only the rules are unique to game design. So what does an "artistic ruleset" look like?

Idea 1: Clockwork Universe
Inspired in part by the comic Unicorn Jelly, by Jennifer Reitz. The game-world is a complicated clockwork of moving and static parts. It is in constant motion, but always in a deterministic, mechanical, and eventually repeating way. The player is the only non-deterministic element, and even minor interaction with the system causes ripples that eventually destroy the world.

Idea 2: Strife*10
In the game "Cursor*10", the player has ten tries to get to the top of a tower, collecting as many points as they can along the way. Each try is timed, and at the end of the time limit, they go "back in time" to try again with the help of their previous try. "The Company of Myself" uses a similar mechanic.

Make this into an AOS/RTS game: The player controls a hero with certain abilities, and every time a timer runs down, they go back in time to act alongside their past self.

Feynman Variation: Instead of jumping back to the beginning, time could loop back-and-forth. At the end of a period, time reverses. Your old-self goes backwards, un-doing everything, while your new self continues on in normal time.

Idea 3: The Abstract Game
I've been thinking for some time on how to make a completely abstract game, where the rules exist as the primary means of understanding the game. This idea blossomed into a Wario-Ware sort or thing, but with more continuity, and more abstract. Rules shift over time, or based on certain actions, but with a certain narrative continuity to them.

Mozart's sonatas are a major influence of this idea, since they are completely abstract and have a definite formal structure, but they are still engaging.