Ludomancy

These days I am hacking out a prototype for a concept I had in mind for quite some time: a game about being a psychotherapist. I’ve always been fascinated by the resolution of some clinical cases carried out by professional psychologists, as well as the more mundane interventions some sensitive people make with the people they love, even with no formal education.

Whether the game is going to be enjoyable or not, I do not know at this point. I have a vision on the experience I want to achieve, and some interesting ideas on how to achieve it, but the execution is demanding details I am still struggling with. I wanted to share some thoughts and insights on this process I’m going through while attempting to build something unusual…

My Drive

I admire empathic people. Empathic people have a strong perception and sensitiveness that allows them to resonate with the emotional states of others. I also admire wise people. Their wisdom allows them to understand the rationale behind other people’s drives and behavior even if they are unaware of it.

We are lacking in games with mechanics based around wisdom or empathy. Games about people’s troubles, their weaknesses and their way to deal with life. Games that reward sharp gut feelings. Managing to get an empathic person to use their skills in the game successfully is my goal: I want to prove that a game like that can be done.

The Challenge

Shrink is set in a psychotherapist setting. Patients seek help to deal with whatever they are making themselves unhappy with. But their cooperation is limited as they will block things out, lie, and refuse sharing stuff that could be critical for treatment. Psychologists use their knowledge of the patient’s life, some general laws that apply to most people, and put themselves in the patient’s shoes to attempt discovery of their drives. But their job is mostly an informed guess.

Therefore, Shrink is about guessing. The information you need to do those guesses is not intrinsic, so the game does not present you all the information. You will need to fill in the holes using your real-life intuition (though no hard psycho-nerd stuff is required to play).

But the execution poses some problems:

• Disarming logical approaches: I don’t want players to brute force the patient to win or allowing solutions that don’t imply making an honest, intuitive guess. This is quite hard to achieve with the current design, since the patients are hand-made and the solution space is still small. Still seeking a good solution to this.
• Hellish level design: By “level” I mean “patient”. Designing a person’s life, their drives, situations and memories while at the same time making sure that their psyche is challenging enough is unlike anything I dealt with before. It has the same problem as adventure games…something that makes sense for me might not for most people.
• Keeping the laboratory germ-free: I want to stick with the initial idea of making a game about empathy and not a game that just includes some usage of empathy. Still, I feel tempted to add some known mechanics like resource management and puzzle solving. This is because the blind spots in the design are making me feel lost and insecure. Fighting back this temptation is the hardest bit of doing this project.

Now I’ll go back to continue working on the damn thing. I’ll post about the actual design soon, together with the prototype demo.