HOW TO DESIGN A PROTEST VIDEO GAME FOR THE MARKETPLACE

“Do You Want to Play a Game???”

The voice rings out in the video arcade. Of course you do. What else? Stand around while others play? Wander outside? Of COURSE I want to play a game.

After a few dozen Billenia in the Void, you’ll start to wonder what they’re DOING in there, in the CREATION, and you’ll downscale into the world just to cop a peek, take a quick look, but WARNING, there is a definite danger here — GRAVITY.

As you look into the world, you’re pulled down, down, down, into it, and the next thing you know, BANG! There you are, incarnated again. It’s that magnetic gravity pull that does it every dang time, and you’re sucker enough for that gimmick that you fall for it again and again and again.

It’s kind of like FACEBOOK. There is no “I think I’ll just take a quick look at it.”

One second later, you’re HOOKED and you’re off on some wild-ass goose-chase through a series of postings, each one more incredible and weird and fascinating than the last, until four hours later, you emerge, exhausted and thoroughly winded by the unwitting slavery to fascination and curiosity.

Is the internet evil? No more so than electricity or the telephone, but like electricity and the telephone, it can easily be TURNED to evil, and one of those evils is definitely FACEBOOK.

I categorically never LOOK at FACEBOOK, as I would with the Medusa or any other horrific creature of fascination and enchantment.

FACEBOOK is perfect for robots. It requires a LOT of maintenance and repair.

Like any other immortal Being, I’m always ready for a game, and a worthy opponent. Only once in a while does a major player come along to oppose me in my relentless drive toward The Perfect Game.

If there IS a Perfect Game, I haven’t invented it yet. I don’t know who has. I’ve seen a lot of very good games that were darn near perfect, but that doesn’t score the bulls-eye.

A strutting, slimy, boasting and bragging peacock like Donald Trump is a COMEDY TARGET that’s Made in Heaven, so to speak.

A COMEDY TARGET needs to be ROASTED until IT’S NOTHING BUT ASHES.

Okay, so last night, I invented a game that I call “OVAL OFFICE FART-CASTER”.

You’d lob or place or direct or cause to appear a sort of virtual fart, with what I call a Fart-Caster, a virtual expression of the actual Fart-Caster that I make for sale as a curiosity and practical joke in my online comedy & magic stuff.

OVAL OFFICE FART-CASTER VIDEO GAME

“Oval” refers to the regular roundish non-circle — generally most folks know what we mean by “oval”. What else would YOU call it? Okay, so I made an office in the shape of an oval. This is not uncommon in 18th and early 19th century architecture, and is VERY common in ancient architecture, particularly Greek and Roman public buildings, the kind I used to design for nobles and royalty, back in the day.

Ah, those were the days, when nobles were noble, and royals were royal. You don’t get many despots like that nowadays. You youngsters don’t know the sheer joy of living under the Emperor Nero, or Caligula.

Haw, haw, you never knew what they were going to do next. One day, they’d be out there feeding the masses, the next day, they’d order their troopers to massacre the first-born.

It makes life so EXCITING to wait for your local despot to press the WAR button. I LOVE it when you wake up in the morning to a mushroom cloud.

For you, it means the end. For me, it means another goddam term paper.

I love history, but I hate the names, dates and places thing. I’d much rather just get history by FEEL, if you know what I mean.

There are so many people, so much has happened and in so many places at so many times, it’s just impossible to remember them all, so I don’t.

I just concentrate on the people, time and place that I really find fun and exciting. Why NOT find some excitement? You’ve got ALL OF ETERNITY to play with, so why not add a bit of fun? My kind of fun happens to be meditation. Wanna make something of it? That’s a VERY esoteric bit of backstage humor, which I think will fly over the heads of most.

Come to think of it, who wants revenge? There’s no money in revenge. So forget about Oval Office Fart Casting.

How about a video game that encourages folks to use StarGates to escape Trump Amerika? Why fight it? Just get the fuck out of town!

Leave the scraps behind.

But — if you’re a wage-slave, stuck at a nine-to-five job five or six or seven days a week, barely make enough to just return to work the next day, barely feed the kids, barely make the payments, barely have a minute to yourself, you probably aren’t in a position to just pick up and start your life over in another country, right?

Who has a million bucks in their retirement fund these days?

You can bet Donald has an escape route planned, probably ending up in Putin’s Witness Protection Program, in case things go very wrong, and he’s prosecuted for his violations of the Constitution and the Law.

“Oh,” snorts Trump, “Those SO-CALLED JUDGES again! What the fuck do they know? I’ve bought and sold judges like them!”

YOU might end up in jail for the rest of your life for saying something like that, but not Trump. Like all despots, he is above the law. He is THE Donald, and won’t ever let you forget it!

You haven’t got a spare million bucks? Okay, so you’ll have to find another, less uprooting and more affordable way to escape.

Have I got a StarGate Portal for you!!!

Not just one, but a bunch. In this game, you learn to SPOT STARGATE PORTALS and you also learn HOW TO USE THEM to move around from one Dimension to another, one Lifestream to another, then you apply that in your Home Dimension, what you laughingly call “The Real World”.

“Is this the Real Life? Is this just fantasy? Caught in a landslide, no escape from Reality.” That’s what Freddie Mercury of the rock group “Queen” thought, but he was wrong, there IS escape from Reality, plenty of it, and your world, the one you call “Reality”, is just one of them, and they were all designed by me.

Laugh if you will, we’ll see who laughs last.

DESIGNING A PROTEST VIDEO GAME:

I’m not the type of game developer who hits and runs. I could easily have made a game such as “Dump on Trump” where you take a dump … you get the idea.

Or you could design a game called “White House Tipping”, similar to cow-tipping and outdoor toilet tipping.

The marketplace might welcome a game that featured Trump-like Cabbage-Heads that you’d hurl at a wall, busting the wall wide open.

Maybe you’d think of a game like “Royal Flush”. I won’t go into the details, there.

Another possible game about our current cultural and social scene is the one I came up with as a protest.

In the end, in my game, “Escape From Trump Amerika”, you escape from the misery of Trump Amerika, leaving ONLY Trump supporters behind to occupy the territory. Who wants it, if you hafta share it with THEM???

Of course, if they eliminate EVERY FOREIGNER from Amerika, they end up with NO physicists, NO doctors, NO brilliant mathematicians and NO imaginative and lively educators.

That would suit most Trumpers very well, indeed. They don’t like brainiacs and rocket scientists. But those dumb Asians and Russians CULTIVATE ’em, don’tcha know???

It’s a pretty gray and grim world they make, just like Mordor. Rip up all the trees and pour concrete, put up steel girders and glass. Gosh, that would suit Trump real well. So at his command, you drive out or destroy all eggheads and nerds. Jeez, that makes a really smart population, leaving just the crust, doesn’t it?

Holy toledo, how long will THAT last against hundreds of nations all competing to be the very first to actually apply the full alien technology that “accidentally” fell into their hands back during Hitler’s World War II??

Gosharootie, this is going to be fun!

Okay, so I didn’t make any of those revenge games or upheaval games or battle games or killing or fighting or destroying or blowing up games.

I made a very simple maze game.

You simply get up out of your armchair and WALK briskly out of Trump Amerika, in my video game.

You walk and sometimes take a boat, to and/or through, a series of StarGates that you have to locate and learn how to spot, identify, set destination, activate and traverse them.

The map keeps changing, so you can’t get “Maze Bright”. You’ll never know which configuration of map you’re in, and the map itself won’t help you.

You can’t see where you haven’t been, and the journey is NEVER the same twice in a row.

If you DO happen to shoot anything, it’s strictly to open a door or reveal a treasure or a key, or the occasional unstoppable Alien-Dominated Zombie or Zombie Boss.

Are there monsters? Sure, there are, if you want them, but they’ll all be in your head. The only shooting you’ll do is, as I said, to open a door, get a key, level up or find a treasure or get a few zombies out of the way while you pass through.

I could easily have made it into a shooter, but I didn’t. Want to know why I refused to make it into a sure-fire hit? Damned if I know why. I guess I should make it into a shooter, if I expect any downloads at all, sigh. I did put in a few zombies to slow you down a little.

The public NEVER buys a non-violent 3-D game.

Take it from me, I know that marketing secret all-too-well, having put the SAME GAME up for sale in two forms, one violent and the other nonviolent. Guess what? I never had a SINGLE DOWNLOAD of the nonviolent game, while the violent version got THOUSANDS of downloads.

Commercial success with our gaming engine? We chose not to go that route, and our engine has never been used to create commercial games. We were one of the three first 3D game developers, on the Amiga platform, as a matter of fact, predating all the others by months, with our very own engine and physics, which we still use today.

Marketing a video game requires a LOT of killing, even if you’ve just committed Grand Theft, Auto.

VIOLENCE IS the name of the game, especially in Trump Amerika, the Land of Fear & Hate, and the sooner you recognize that sad fact, the easier it will be to accept that if you’re the nonviolent game type, you’ll never make the Big League.

Okay, so where does that leave us? It leaves us with a super-violent zombie killer game called:

“Escape From Trump Amerika”

How much is it? Where can I download it? Can I play it on my laptop?

Those are all questions that I’ll be only too glad to answer, once I’ve designed and gamed out and thoroughly tested the game. I haven’t even made the starting map, yet, so I can’t answer any question except “will it be violent?”

Sadly for my marketing team and any possible large audience of appreciative parents, I’m ashamed to admit that the answer is a resounding “No!”, except for a few lousy zombies, and they don’t count, anyway, except to another zombie.

But don’t despair, because — even though there is no killing — there IS plenty of SHOOTING, and LOTS of DYING!!! The zombies don’t die — they’re undead, remember??? But they can lie down awhile, to let you pass.

You’ll find Tiger Pits, Lava Pits, Tar Pits and Apricot Pits scattered about in there, along with all manner of things, all of which are AFTER YOU or AGAINST YOU or BLOCKING YOU, including dozens and dozens of zombies, dogs, creatures of the night, horrible vicious hungry denizens of the dark, waiting to kill you and eat you.

All this, without any violence. Just the occasional zombie, like I said.

Having already admitted defeat on the violence front, I’ll now proceed to launch into the project, starting with CONCEPT, to wit:

• Okay, I’m escaping from Trump Amerika. How much do I have to know in order to start playing the game? Can I learn more as I go, as things develop in the gaming cycle?
• The player finds himself or herself in a situation in which SOMETHING must be done, something specific, such as springing a trap or opening a hidden door, otherwise all other actions and directions are blocked. It’s a small total trap with no apparent way out.
• Once this hidden door is sprung and the player is out of the initial Holding Cell, we should give the Player some sort of spell or weapon or key or something.
• There should now be an upgrade of the character, however slight, such as upping the money, magic or life.
• Now we need to further the plot just a bit, get the character moving, so we’ll need an NPC to give directions and provide a specific short-term QUEST, such as find a key, release a prisoner, discover a hidden cave or cavern — that sort of thing.
• Something exciting needs to happen right here — possibly a challenge, maybe a water pit or slime pit with a narrow bridge or a jump.
• An ACTIVE threat needs to happen here, maybe a descending ceiling or an ever-widening gaping hole in the floor?
• This is the point at which there must be a turning, a choice of paths.
• Once you’ve made a choice, the universe starts spinning out alternative realities, and that carries over with shamanic quantum magic into the “Real” world in which you live your daily life.
• NOW maybe you could shoot a zombie or two.

Once you choose a path, there will be several alternatives. You will never be sure which one came up in the random selection pattern, so there’s no way to know what’s ahead.

One thing you know for sure, that each of the various StarGates you encounter and learn to find, see and open and travel through will be different in many ways, but the same in one important feature, which is HOW THEY WORK.

Where they go and what they do is always a challenge — you can get some impression of this by watching “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure”, when they time-travel around in the time-tunnels.

This is pretty accurate, as is “Defending Your Life” and “Beetlejuice” in the sense that they do portray very clearly some of the attributes and conditions of the Between-Lives State.

Want to go to Heaven?

You really want to go to Heaven? It’s only good for the climate. The company is lousy. You get party mixes. On the other hand, if you feature hanging out with losers like Elvis Presley and Johnny Carson, you’ll like Heaven.

Myself, I’m happy where I am, wherever that happens to be. I got a LOT of time on my hands, all of Eternity, and it doesn’t much matter what’s happening now. Eventually, it all washes away and we start over again.

I kind of like that starting over.

The very beginning of Diablo II was the real meat of the game, the rest was all window dressing, and you get to start out weak and helpless. I like that in a game, video or otherwise.

OBJECTIVES OF THE GAME

From my perspective and with my intention, there are a number of possible “objectives” of the game for the Player:

• Get through the game from the beginning to the end.
• Learn how to FIND or LOCATE StarGate Portals.
• Learn how to SEE StarGate Portals.
• Learn how to OPEN StarGate Portals.
• Learn how to SET or SELECT StarGate Portal Destinations.
• Learn how to TRAVERSE StarGate Portals to a Destination.
• Learn how to CLOSE a StarGate Portal behind you.
• Get out of Trump Amerika one way or another.
• Teach others how to escape Trump Amerika.
• Open the Path to Wisdom.

There are of course more levels on which this game operates, all of which are beneficent and I hope helpful to the oppressed masses who must suffer under the rule of a vicious, violent and vindictive dictator, which is today’s Amerika, like it or not.

You may NOT like it very much and might even be ashamed to be an Amerikan, so you MIGHT be tempted to play the video game, which means 99 cents more toward MY Escape Plan!

In the game, you will learn how to actually activate REAL StarGates, and learn how to REALLY use StarGates to escape for REAL from Trump Amerika.

You’ll also learn how to take out a roomful of zombies.

Don’t wait until it’s too late. It might be too late already. You may not be able to pass the borders in either direction without getting shot.

LEARN THE LESSON OF THE WALL. What do you get when you cross the Trump Wall with a Mexican? About half-way.

Don’t fight them. Fighting is stupid, base and animalistic. No need to fight. Escape from Trump Amerika! Get out now, while you still can! Leave them to fight each other, for they surely will.

Meanwhile, ESCAPE FROM TRUMP AMERIKA!

DOWNLOAD MY NEW VIDEO GAME TODAY!!!

Uh, oh…It’s not READY today. Okay, well, if I ever get it out there, please consider downloading it and telling others about it, all right?

In the meantime, I’m going to go now, to amuse myself by making a level or two. I’m planning a number of very challenging levels. None of them qualify as “easy”, not even the very first one.

As a matter of fact, that first level will be sort of a test of how serious you are about completing the game all the way to the Final Boss??? FINAL BOSS??? Yeah, there’s a Final Boss in every level.

But wait — if there is no shooting — except for an occasional zombie, how can there be a Final Boss in a SUPER-VIOLENT NON-VIOLENT 3-D SHOOTER??? Who said there was no shooting?

Well, I guess it’s gonna cost ya 99 cents to find out, pardner.

See You At The Top (that’s where I’m writing the level)

gorby