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[linger]

I'm still working out the exact mechanics, but this is a concept for an ideal game that's been taking form in my head. Basically, I want to design a game where doing good in the real world positively effects the game world. The setting is a fantasy world loosely connected to the real world, like Narnia or Fantasia from The Neverending Story. Suffering in our world spawns monsters in the game world. By doing good acts, like donating to or volunteering for charities (I'll have to work out exactly how this is quantified later...it might just be by self-reporting of the player. People can lie if they really want to), you unlock skills and equipment which you can use to fight those monsters. Now, you don't have to do that sort of stuff like the game, but some of the game's challenges can be quite difficult to do without those boosts. And if you fail those challenges, it can lead to negative events in the world's story, and even permanent deaths of characters in the world. But if you are able to succeed at those challenges, you can slowly change the game world from a harsh and deadly place to a more beautiful, happy world.

I want to capture the coziness of games like Animal Crossing or slice-of-life visual novels, but having it be more than pure escapism. The player can sit back and enjoy the world they've created, and not just think "I created this...through grinding or skill-free choice making," but "I created this through real work with a positive impact."

Does this idea sound crazy, or interesting?

Some other more nitty-gritty mechanical thoughts I have about the game:

• The player can only play the game about 1 hour each day. The player gets X Quest points, which let the player fight battles and other mechanical events, and Y Rest points, which let the player watch story scenes in a visual novel format (this is the cozy part). It resets every day at around dawn. It's not like Animal Crossing, though, where you have to play each day...time is just frozen in the game world when you're not playing it.
• The battle system I'm planning is a hybrid between JRPGs and CCGs, where you build a "deck" of actions for each character. One of the main reasons for this include giving character advancement more granularity (it's easier to give a single card than a skill which the character has permanent access to). Also, I think it might be important to make the combat system more based on consumable/breakable items than traditional "leveling up" tied to characters. The real world good needs to give you items, which are eventually used up, instead of character leveling which sticks around permanently, and would eventually make the battles trivially easy.

Also, I'm sorry if it seems like I'm sticking it to Animal Crossing in this description. I've never actually played it, and I'm mostly just reacting to my conception of the game.

[valrus]

Re: quantification, I've noticed that various sites (e.g. Humble Bundle) seem to be using the PayPal Giving Fund as their charitable backend, so as to let their users choose which of [some large number] of charities to donate to, without having to maintain their own charitable database.

For your own purpose, you could have the possibility of charitable microtransactions having a thematically relevant effect on the game world.  E.g., donating to a sea animal charity results in more friendly sea animals and fewer aggressive sea monsters, donating to certain sorts of foundations (e.g. literacy) allows buildings in town to open (e.g. libraries) where you can do or get or learn beneficial things, etc.

I wouldn't limit people to playing by a time or points system.  Rather, have the amount that you can reasonably do be limited without also doing Good (however you want people to do that).  For example, there might be once-a-day activity in the Library where you get a useful spell or card or resource, but the library only stays open for N days after you've done a relevant Good.  Doing a bunch of Good means there's a lot of things to do everyday: lots of places to visit, cards to collect...

It'd probably be a good idea for you to play Animal Crossing, btw.

[Muz]

Actually what I'd do is virtualize the problem.

Like let's say there's a village out there suffering from lack of clean water. People are getting sick and so on.

You can then have a virtual village that's suffering through an apocalypse and lack water. By giving real money, they build a real well, which shows up as a virtual well. You can also share and invite friends to donate to this cause and help you fix your virtual village. This would be really awesome as a Facebook game.

It might also link with the real villagers and you'll receive thank you letters and emails from them.

Of course, this is something that would require hundreds of millions of dollars to do, so maybe it needs to be abstracted more.