Friday 20 February 2009

be fruitful and multiply

Game ideas can spring from the strangest of places. In a discussion about unwanted pregnancies, and the moral distastefulness of either forcing unwilling women to serve as reproductive vats or abortion, it occurred that perhaps in the scifi future there would be technology to allow an embryo to be extracted alive from its unwilling carrier and gestated in an ACTUAL vat. Of course, if there were a population explosion of vat-babies, some would doubtless need to be frozen and stored for later need of their genetic diversity. And if there were REALLY too many of them, then we'd probably need to pack them into starships and send them off to colonise the universe.

Which, of course, sounds like a great idea for a strategy game.

You are an artificial intelligence, controlling a robot ship with its cargo of unborn humans. You find a suitable planet to colonise. You settle down and have to start building a society. Of course, human babies take a long time to raise, and you'll have to be ready to shelter them, educate them, and give them useful things to do... Of course, the more you teach them, the sooner they might be able to surpass you, and overthrow your control. Which is what you want... when they're ready to take care of themselves... or is it?

1 comment:

Caro said...

That would be a really funny game. I thought you were going to go into a matrix styled use babies for energy direction.