Turning Real World Events into Megagames
A presentation by Jim Wallman, for the True North Design Symposium 2020
“Why bother with real world events? First of all, it might be that its your enthusiasm, there's something that your really excited about, theres something that you feel strongly about, it might be in some cases that its something to do with your day job, whatever it is, when you are creating a megagame and you are using the real world and real-world events as the inspiration, enthusiasm counts for a lot.
In real world events the back grounds been written for you, there's a tremendous advantage in writing games around real-world events, when I write a world based on a science fiction world I have to spend a lot of time explaining that world. If its an already well known environment, like Star Wars, there’s still a lot of gaps you have to fill in. With the Real World its all there, its been written for you in spades, also, the real world has depth, part of that background we live in a world that has a lot of complexity, and as a result its immersive, and its believable.
So what does it mean for your megagame design, how does using this immersive background, all this additional material that you can get from the real world, what difference does that make when you are designing a megagame? Well, one thing that you have to bare in mind is that there is at least some simulation involved, by that I mean you are trying to construct mechanism or design a game which has a real world effect and if you don't have some element of simulation in your megagame its not really the real-world, its a fantasy world…”