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[Nidis]

Ok ...Ok.

Stay with me here. First post.

Here's a very brief overview of the story. In the technology and pollution saturated future, people have become entirely infertile. No one has given birth in 6 years, and scientists see no end to the birth drought in sight. To assist, they create a computerized machine capable of inseminating and seeing-through the rapid birth of new born babies for the purpose of recolonization. The global population has dwindled to under 1 billion, and the future of humanity is placed in the hands of the Venus II Female computer and its control team.



In the middle of the picture is the playing field. You load prospective mothers into the Venus II and press the "Inseminate" button (not shown, I forgot) to plant a growing baby. You tap the left and right arrows to send a ripple down the left and right walls to push the baby out at the bottom. The longer it takes to get the baby out, the more the mothers health (bar shown at the top) deteriorates. Tap the space bar to send a large ripple (a PUSH) through both walls and give the baby a big push, but it'll also hurt the mother. Once you've gotten a baby out, they'll administer drugs that relax the mother and heal her, and shes ready for reinsemination.

The first mother placed in the Venus II was a huge surprise to scientists. They found out that all the radiation and pollution has turned human bodies into chemical and hormonal warzones! Inside the prospective mothers is a vast array of diseases and fleshy oddities that are out to prevent human reproduction. You can administer antibiotics throughout the birthing that temporarily fight off the nasties, you must be quick and ready to get the baby through danger. Like in real life, the baby will slowly grow over time, making it more difficult to reach the end safely without damaging itself or the mothers birth canal walls.

When the baby comes out, depending on how soon you got it out and how much damage it received, you'll be given a summary of what it goes on to be. If you get a baby out quickly, healthy and fully-grown, it's likely to become a doctor, surgeon, scientist or other intelligent professional. If you damage the baby a lot or the mother has a hard time, the baby is more likely to become a clerk, football player, poet or bludger.

The better babies you give birth to will have optimistic outcomes on your environment. The more scientists you give birth to, the better antibiotics they'll develop for you to fight off diseases and dangers. The more artists you birth, the happier your other citizens will be and the more productive they'll be. There are 5 categories of profession in total:

Arts
Science
Business
Hospitality
Trade & Services

Giving birth to a baby of any profession has its upsides, and lacking in any one kind will ultimately cause problems. As you give birth to a diverse and organized society, you will witness the planet slowly return to fortune in the background. The population is much higher, the professions of recent babies are frequently much higher and productive. The murky orange sky has turned to a nice blue, and the broken dilapidated buildings have been replaced with brand new Hospitals and offices.



- Should a baby become so damaged, it will die. Careful!

- Should you let a mothers health run out, she will die. Careful! There are only limited mothers available (which act as lives).

- Should you be lucky enough to spot a baby girl in the birth canal (they will look different from other babies) and get her safely to the end, she will become an extra mother!

- After each baby, the birth canal will get slightly more infested with danger and get a little bit longer to navigate.

- Lots of scientists will be able to make lots of new research discoveries, try to aim for those big babies!

- Every once in a while, you'll get a mutant baby. Kill it on purpose! (without damaging the mother too much)

- Bonus game - Baby pinball!

This idea hit me today on my way to class. Politically correct? Not exactly, but I dig it. I don't intend to make it though, immediately anyway, I can't program T_T I just want to see what people think, from a design perspective. Would you play it?

[William Broom]

Sounds like a cool idea to me, but the whole civilisation aspect seems like it's not very well fleshed out, and a little unnecessary. What is the point of having artists to  make the population happier? If I were you, I'd make it so that all the professions have an ability that feeds directly back into the main gameplay.

[Nidis]

I did, actually. But then it felt like I was just fleshing out flesh (without reaping many foreseeable benefits) so I decided to just keep the more arcadey-aspects of it until I can come up with a good use for them. Essentially though, the background will be a kind of SimCity style reflection of your progress that you can't directly change. From my post above, the idea is given that the population just increases. Ideally though it would fluctuate, people would die of old age and disease and what-not and having the right balance of professions would prolong the average lifespan. Population takes the place of a 'score' here, big winners would have thriving cities in the millions with plenty of researched drugs, healthy happy citizens, etc. But yeah, a lot of kinks to be worked out from one half-hour tram ride with a notepad.

[increpare]

Don't forget to include a super-difficult DUCK MODE.

[DjangoDurango]

This idea makes me... uncomfortable. Especially the whole "You gave birth to a girl? Great! Another baby factory!" part. That's probably 'cause I am a chick. And never want to give birth. And find the very idea of pregnancy disgusting. Especially forced birth.

I think it's an interesting premise though because there's two ways to look at it. I think a lot of times when men think of this scenario they get this sort of idea, where you're saving the human race and it's a heroic action. And when women think of it, particularly pro-choice women (and especially childfree women) you get something more like The Handmaid's Tale. (And what with the motions made towards birth control recently and the nature of McCain's recent statements regarding Roe v. Wade, not to mention the ball of epic fail that is Sarah Palin, this premise comes up a lot with the pro-choice crowd.)

I think this is a viable idea for a game and you should go through with making it. I also think you should put a little more thought into it, though, lest you find yourself receiving hate mail on a consistent basis. I happen to know of a particular LiveJournal community who, if they should ever catch wind of this as it is, would shit bricks over it. And that community has over 10,000 members. I think you should at least read The Handmaid's Tale. It's a short, little dystopian thing. Took me two days to read it. It actually has about the same premise as your game here, right down to pollution likely being the cause of all this, but with a lot more religious overlording.

I know you know you know it's not politically correct (and that shouldn't be an issue here) and I'm pretty sure you're not really trying to say this is how this situation should go down, but sometimes those things don't translate very well.

So yeah, think about it some more. No need for this to turn into a pro-choice Muslim Massacre.

Unless, you know, the Controversy Compo get the thumbs-up. In which case, this would have a pretty good shot.

EDIT: Sorry, I exaggerated. childfree, last I heard, had 1000 members, which I mistakenly remembered to be 10,000. They actually have just under 6000 now.

[Nidis]

Duck Mode - fraking check. Maybe I'll name the difficulty levels after the amounts of twists in typical species fornication.

Human - Easy
Panda - Medium
Shark - Hard
Duck - Nightmare

As far as controversy is concerned, I can't really sugarcoat this one. It's just a funny idea I had for a game, there's no intended double meanings or symbolism going on. The very idea would harbor buckets of hate mail from that kind of crowd in any iteration, its the kind of thing that just seems worse and more incorrect the longer you think about it and try to rationalize it. If I come up with a better way of explaining the story/gameplay/using-women-as-stock side of things that isn't detrimental to the idea, I'll totally implement it. Games are just for kicks, like movies. In fact if this was a movie, consider it Surf Nazis Must Die - intentionally bad.

Thanks for bringing that story to light though, I'll check it out. And Dallas 13 is a champion 

[agj]

DUCK MODE.

Hooly carp.

[DjangoDurango]

Oh, I don't think you should sugar-coat it necessarily. I think there are ways you could go about it without starting a major shitzkreig over the game, at least with the reasonable ones among the crowd (most of them, surprisingly).

One way involves making the game darker and more serious. Perhaps have instances where some of your women try to escape/kill themselves and you have to find new ways and ensuring they can't. Some women would be docile and easy to maintain; others would be more difficult. This adds an element to your management gameplay as well, in addition to the manipulating what occupations your children will grow into.

Another is to simply make it more obvious that these women aren't simply slaves to the state and are signing up for in vitro, which really isn't too difficult to imagine. They're doing it now, even without the pollution. Considering that most women do seem to want children, it seems most of them would be all over this, were this the situation and this the solution. You'd have plenty of lives, if a slightly less dramarama of a game, since using new female births as more lives wouldn't make sense in this context.

I won't be put out if you choose not to go either of those directions (it's your game after all (I personally think the first would be more fun, but I like management games where you have to pay attention to more than one thing at a time)). Those are the some that I figure won't result in you spending the rest of your internets like Danny Ledonne, having to explain yourself over and over again. Games are indeed like movies; you have to be careful with what you say because it is an artform and as such, even if you're not trying to say anything, you are saying something. I mean, Custer's Revenge, amirite? Sure, it was full of kicks, but good god the drama of it all. Although...

I kinda want to see Surf Nazis Must Die exist now.

What are you making it in, by the way? Is that Flash?

And... I tried to find you a diagram of duck reproductive systems for a more realistic DUCK MODE, but I could only find those of non-rapetastic canvasback ducks.

[William Broom]

I don't see what's so controversial about forcing women to give birth if it's to save humanity from extinction.

[DjangoDurango]

Really, it'd be slavery. For women like me, it'd be going directly against my wishes for my own body and my own life. Essentially, the government would take my body from me, force it into all sorts of horrid conditions, and then make me push something I never wanted out of a tiny hole that is my vagina, ripping it to shreds in the process. Pregnancy is downright awful and much more stressful on one's body than most people seem to be aware of. Donating eggs is horrible too, I hear, but it'd be better in this scenario than outright forcing a woman to carry something like that, especially against her will.

It's a lot scarier a thought when, in this situation, you would be the one at the mercy of everyone else. Men don't have to worry about this, do they?

[Chris Whitman]

Maybe the analogy isn't entirely accurate, but asking what's controversial about forcing women to give birth 'for the species' seems a bit like asking what's controversial about asking an underprivileged class to work long, grueling hours for no pay 'for the society.'

[William Broom]

Maybe the analogy isn't entirely accurate, but asking what's controversial about forcing women to give birth 'for the species' seems a bit like asking what's controversial about asking an underprivileged class to work long, grueling hours for no pay 'for the society.'

Well, I don't think that would be a good analogy if Nidis made it clear in the storyline that enforced birth was necessary for the continuation of the human race. Though the more I think about it, the more that sounds like a weak/easy way to do the story. A better option would be to take it in the other direction and make it dark, with a dash of irony. Make it ambiguous as to whether the process is really necessary. Is it, say, 'give birth or we die out', or 'give birth or our economy falters because all the other countries are running baby farms'?

The downside of this is that some people might be turned off the game no matter how good the gameplay is, because they don't like the idea of playing on the 'bad side'. I don't just mean people who would get righteously outraged about it - more like you feel squeamish about it. For example, I think Muslim Massacre is a very interesting piece of art, but I wouldn't want to play it for very long. Or a different example - I like the paintings of Francis Bacon, but I wouldn't want to hang one on my wall.

[muku]

EDIT: Sorry, I exaggerated. childfree, last I heard, had 1000 members, which I mistakenly remembered to be 10,000. They actually have just under 6000 now.

To be fair, this community seems quite militant about their viewpoints; a lot of what they write I see as being potentially offensive to people who do want to have children. So if these people were to start a huge outcry about a game, that would somewhat reek of bigotry to me.

To be clear: I am generally pro-choice, and I agree that forcing women to reproduce, even if it was for the survival of the race, would be akin to slavery. But we are talking about a game here, and games, like any other art form, must be allowed to deal with controversial subject matter. Censorship is a terrible, terrible thing, and self-censorship for the sake of what you think people might think of your creation is no better; perhaps worse, in fact.

[DjangoDurango]

A better option would be to take it in the other direction and make it dark, with a dash of irony. Make it ambiguous as to whether the process is really necessary. Is it, say, 'give birth or we die out', or 'give birth or our economy falters because all the other countries are running baby farms'?

I like this idea.

On the subject of forced birth for the good of humanity, one might argue that a society that feels the need to enslave its women to save itself doesn't deserve to be saved in the first place. Most women in this situation would jump at the chance to get pregnant multiple times if given the chance anyway. No need to make it mandatory. But that's social science, not gaming.

To be fair, this community seems quite militant about their viewpoints; a lot of what they write I see as being potentially offensive to people who do want to have children. So if these people were to start a huge outcry about a game, that would somewhat reek of bigotry to me.

I think most of them have the right to be a little bitter. The very idea that one doesn't want to have children is a foreign concept for most people, so they get a lot of "militancy" for it. Compared to some of the stories on there, ranging from mildly annoyed friends to people being outright disowned by their families, I lucked out. My parents are cool with it, my dad just thinks I wouldn't actually be able to get an abortion if I should find myself in need of one. It makes sense some of the childfree might be a little angry though.

It is primarily a rant comm, so there will obviously be ranting. Though I've actually seen several "nice" posts in the last few days, praising good parents and kids.

I'm not suggesting he censor his work either; I'm suggesting he think about what he's doing. That's all. I approve of this game existing, even as the idea is right now, if only because Nidis will almost certainly learn from having made it. I just think it may be better if he thinks a little more about it. It's not that it's about people having children that I see the problem here (I think you'd really be hard pressed to find a CF person who doesn't want anyone to have children at all, save for the VHEMT types), but that they are being forced to. That is the worst nightmare of practically every CF person, especially women, who have to undergo all of the real work of it. I wholeheartedly think games should venture into controversial area. But I don't think they should do so without some heavy thought put behind them.

[Movius]

The gameplay idea sounds no better or worse than the typical game. It would all depend on how well you executed the idea, how creative your level design was, etc.

Assuming no terrible technical fuckups, I would probably play this game if it were presented with plenty of black humour. I don't think you could get anything "serious" out of that storyline.

[Nidis]

Oh, a ruckus!

Really, it'd be slavery. For women like me, it'd be going directly against my wishes for my own body and my own life. Essentially, the government would take my body from me, force it into all sorts of horrid conditions, and then make me push something I never wanted out of a tiny hole that is my vagina, ripping it to shreds in the process. Pregnancy is downright awful and much more stressful on one's body than most people seem to be aware of. Donating eggs is horrible too, I hear, but it'd be better in this scenario than outright forcing a woman to carry something like that, especially against her will.

It's a lot scarier a thought when, in this situation, you would be the one at the mercy of everyone else. Men don't have to worry about this, do they?

Well, no, therein lies the gag I guess. It's the impartial attitude the game has towards its own bad plot, its a piss-take in every sense of the word. Pregnancy and giving birth is this insurmountably painstaking and emotional process, so what better way to honor it than drag it through the mud? Its kinda messed up even discussing the ethics that might be going on in this fictional society, is it right to plug womens vaginae into a big computer and force rapidly growing fetuses out? Well, honestly, not really. I'm sure there would be other more female-friendly options out there to consider in the face of extinction. For the purpose of a B-grade management/arcade game though, it sure sounds funny. Imagine playing this game and then trying to explain the premise to your friend, while keeping them assured its a respectable game.

Again, I can't really promise I'll make this game, I'm no programmer, I'm just a designer looking for feedback on ideas. Flash might actually be a good platform for it, being easier to code and such than C++ or something. If the idea gets improved on and I refine the management side of things 'til all the pieces are in place, I'll think about it.

And Surf Nazis Must Die is a real film by Troma Entertainment. It's as bad as it sounds.

[Movius]

this description is much more promising

[Smithy]

Women have babies, sometimes.

..
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POLITICALLY INCORRECT STATEMENT.

[Corpus]

Know what would be going against my wishes for my own body and my own life? Conscription into military service, if there's another major and/or worldwide war.

In bad times, bad things happen. This is why they are bad times.