Design Concept Fusion

I was thinking yesterday about one of the real draws of Roleplaying games, both of the in-person at a table and guided by computer types... for me, Exploration is a huge hook. it's not solely RPGs that I enjoy it in, however - Any game can grab me with the slow introduction of new intriguing maps, or a change of the visual palette tying a new region together.

From there, I wondered about what it would take to create a game about exploration. Some already have, but these are niche titles in many ways. A hell of a lot more people know abotu the existence of Modern Warfare 2 than, say, Journey. But the step beyond that... There is a strange place where Little Big Planet, Journey, and Dragon Age find a confluence, and that sort of shared creative world for role playing games has really existed since the beginning, with multiple authors contributing novels and modules to worlds like The Forgotten Realms.

An exploration game with a shared universe of user-created content sounds like just what would scratch this particular itch, and I began to think about the tools and my own creative process for RPGs. Even with tools like Neverwinter Night's GM's tools, creating worlds that stand up in a modern game system is hard, as many many maps and mods from Counterstrike to the tens of thousands of not-quite-popular Little Big Planet maps attest. The success and failure of such a game then, would probably rely on the usability and power of the toolsets that all of those common creative minds building new places to explore have to use.

And then, I wondered, what if this creation of new terrain was pitched as a game in itself, just abstracted? Imagine a tool that creates worlds for Third-Person explorers which begins with a tower-defense style map, where instead of enemies like toughs, hordes and flyers, you have abstracted player types that you need to place features to entertain. Different 'minigames' could handle different levels of detail for newly explored places, latching onto the sort of interest in terrain and design which lead many of us to turn backyard mud-pits into hotwheels racetracks, or an unconnected pile of backyard refuse into a potential gravity-driven marble track. I'm not sure what the details would look like, but using open-ended minigames to create content for fellow explorers seems like a fascinating way to continually expand a world to explore through the guise of a game.