Meta Casual Game: Please Help Me Think This Out

I got so annoyed by Facebook game popups that when I tried to post a YKTTW about them, I got told to calm down because I wasn't being objective enough. (They were right.)

I'm still trying to calm down, and to that end I'm channeling my annoyance in a new direction: a potential meta-game that uses the various oddities of Facebook games to tell some sort of mind-bending tale. I'd like you to help me with this, throw some ideas my way.

Part of what got me thinking in this direction was a recent quest from Cafe World:

• Cook Chips & Guacamole 10 times
• Spice 5 friends' dishes
• Collect a rare item that'll (it seems) pop up randomly through no effort of your own

Reward?

• Access to Fullscreen Mode

......

When you're parceling out gameplay mechanics as "quest rewards," it's clear that you've run out of ideas.*

So here's the ideas I've come up with so far, few as they are:

Items from Nowhere

Basic FB game mechanic: Certain freebie items can be gained indefinitely, but never given to oneself, only to friends.

Where do these items come from??

At some point, perhaps early in the game, it would be discovered that when you asked a "friend" for items and they later arrived, this would be without the friend's knowledge or input. Tracking down the source of the "freebies" would be a major quest chain.

Random Items from Nowhere

"Collections": As you're doing normal game chores, random items pop up and automatically sort themselves into collections, like The Janitor Collection or The Manure Collection. You expend no effort whatsoever to locate these items, and in fact cannot try to locate specific ones, even if you've got fifteen pieces of poop from a piggy and zero from a chicken so far.

Never mind some of the insane choice of items: What am I doing asking all my friends for String when I've just collected eight pieces of the stuff that's just sitting in my chest (but is a slightly different sort of string and not actually good for anything besides a pittance of experience or a cherry tree)?

Meta-wise, perhaps the main character (you!) turns out to have some version of kleptomania or... compulsive hoarding. Can't clean out the barn without collecting all that poop, giving it a good washing and shellacking it for the mantlepiece. Neighbors think you're weird and try not to talk to you for very long.

Popups

Every time you switch screens, FB makes you close half a dozen popups (advertising other parts of the game).

I'm thinking there's gonna be some, I dunno, demon or monster or djinn who's actually throwing these popups at you in an attempt to waste your time, reduce your attention to more important matters, maybe even hide things that are going on in the background (Change Blindness: By the time the popup goes away, you won't realize that something temporarily hidden by the popup has vanished as well).

I expect it would be kinda fun to turn popup-killing into a minigame at some point. The demon throws popups at you and you try to get a lot of them out of the way fast into order to do something important like click on a button they're hiding.

I also think something you do at some point should stop game popups forever. Because they are annoying and prolonging the annoyance will not be fun for long.

Forced Tutorial

Make it seem forced, but be actually skippable, if you pay attention and try to click on something the tutorial isn't gesturing at (perhaps a little fairy hiding near the edge of the screen). The skipping thing pulls you over to another section where the fairy explains how things are going wrong. Perhaps with the tutorial continuing to play in the background, obscured.

Similarly, some games continue the Forced Tutorial aspects through dozens of levels (possibly the whole game long, who knows?) as the game forces you to e.g. build a certain structure in order to advance up the quest chain (even if you can afford better structures, they won't count) or locate and combine certain items in order to wallop certain baddies in certain ways.

I could see the little demon guy trying to destroy your economy through pointless waste. Possibly a great lesson on non-free economies. Speaking of which:

Artificially Constrained Economies

Do something meta with the way the games prevent you from sharing items.

Example of how it works: The 1-for-1 trade limit in Restaurant City ensures that newer players catch up with older players only because there is a level cap... old players may have five million ingredients, but they can only trade for your fifteen, and while you're using up those tradables on recipes, the older players have nothing on which to use their masses of ingredients.

Plus there's no way to negotiate 2-for-1 trades except with a "junk ingredient" (I'll trade you 2 items for 1 item and something else you don't care about), and trading money works only via item gifts, with a painful 2/3 loss if you buy something and then transfer it (the other guy sells it for a third of what you paid), even worse (8/9 loss) if you sell a bunch of stuff and buy one big thing to send just to save yourself the hassle of five hundred individual packages.

I'm not sure where to go with this for meta. Possibly a lesson in government-controlled economies, fascism, socialism, something like that, via what the NPC economy is doing. And a black market area that allows you to trade more freely but at higher risk and higher cost.

So... any more ideas?

edited 2nd Jul '11 4:42:43 AM by Kilyle

Add "notifications" whenever the player does anything. Walk a step? Notification. Click on a button? Notification. You see what I'm getting at here.

Also, spread it on Facebook as "the next Farmville".

Oh man... "The Next Farmville"... the comparisons of new bad games to old somewhat better games is far worse on Facebook than I've seen anywhere else.

Or how about this: I was on my mom's account the other day, and noticed an ad on the side for a Bingo game. Which had this underneath it: "(my name) played this."

And all I could do was stare at it, thinking not just "No, I didn't" but also "Wait... how many times has Facebook lied to me about what my friends play?"

I think this'd tie in with the "your friends are playing... no, they really aren't" idea for the parody game. Although I'm not sure about any possible privacy problems that could come from putting your friend's name up on a game they've never played. Hmm.

ETA: Maybe some early quest would let you get rid of a certain type of notification. Or perhaps you have to "collect" a collection of every type of notification in the game. Have you ever been on Kongregate and played that Achievements game with a little blue elephant who gets Achievements for such things as "figuring out how to walk left" or "figuring out how to jump"? It's hilarious and somewhat in the vein of what I'm envisioning here, although I'd like to be a little more subtle with mine.

edited 4th Aug '11 5:32:27 AM by Kilyle