Short version: The second of 20 game design pitches, written in response to a list that my friends threw together in an effort to stymie me. This week, the theme is “growin’ dudes”.

Brave New Clone - Executive Summary

A lot of people worried that the advent of cloning would bring about a terrible social upheaval, as people made more perfect babies. Stronger muscles, faster brains perfect hair, perfect skin, perfect teeth. What would this new master race of designer humans make of their frail creators? They needn’t have worried. Why make perfect people, when you can make perfect employees?

Brave New Clone (BNC) puts the player in charge of the HR department of a large multinational called DollyCorp. At DollyCorp, human resources is a cradle to grave kind of thing and the main function of the HR department is to grow and educate the future workers, while seeing to the spiritual well being of the current crop. Meanwhile, the corporation as a whole must respond to the constant pressure of the marketplace, not to mention attacks by the competition. Part business tycoon game, part The Sims part science lab, BNC is sure to please the more cerebral player in a tense test of their planning and nurturing skills.

Unique Selling Points

• Make your own clones! Use the latest in high tech genetics to customize your workforce.
• Nurture your flock. The needs of business are many and stringent. Prepare your clones for their future careers.
• Plan for the future! The more you can anticipate the needs of your business, the better you can prepare your clones and the less you’ll need to *shudder* hire outsiders.
• Dominate the world of commerce! Whether it’s making widgets or acting in feelies, together your clones form a team that can make you so much money!

Setting

BNC is riped straight from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. With the advent of genetic engineering, society has discovered how to make people who will be content with their lot in life. Society is rigidly divided into five castes — Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon (with each caste further split into Plus and Minus members). All members of society are trained to be good consumers in order to keep the economy strong and are expected to be involved socially; spending time alone is discouraged. Companies have found that the most efficient way to manage their workforce is to grow them themselves. The player controls one such cloning farm (or should I say “cloning firm”?).

Though there is only one world government, there is plenty of conflict in the intra-firm arena. In this era of hyper consumerism and hyper-capitalism, the player holds the keys to the future, in their crop of carefully grown children.

Gameplay

BNC is at its heart a software toy. Similar to games such as Sim City and Creatures hidden under the hood of its cutesy exterior is a robust economics and genetic simulator. Wrapped up in a fantasy package, the player is encouraged to fool around with both aspects of the game, delving as deep into one or the other as they see fit.

Cloning

The cloning aspect is fundamentally an artificial life simulator. Given goals set by the scenario or the player, they must carefully grow, birth and then care for groups of clone children. Getting the mixtures for the initial conception is only the beginning and a lot can happen between fertilization and the little clone’s first job. Activities in the cloning gameplay include:

• Mixing genetics, customizing your children’s features and personalities.
• Ensuring adequate mixes of drugs and nutrients in the vats.
• Creating and maintaining the play gardens.
• Balancing education, bumping children up and down into plus and minus categories as needed, teaching about sex games and preparing them for their future roles in society.
• Giving out Soma.

Of course at all times, an eye must be kept on the bottom line. Over or underproducing the right mix of Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons can lead to great financial losses for the company. And of course, budges are always limited and lower than you’d like them to be.

Human Resources

Shepherding your flock of clones is fun and all, but in the end, one must bow to the needs and pressures of glorious industry. Without a successful and profitable enterprise there can be no budget for the cloning gardens.

Managing the business is a whole other task, requiring cunning, guile and a great deal of foresight. It takes time for little clone workers to grow to an age where they can begin working at the firm and the face of industry shifts over time. The prudent manager plans ahead, ordering the right numbers of Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons, looking ahead by 12 years. In the event of a miscalculation, clones can be hired from other companies (at considerable cost) or if all goes well, perhaps some surplus human resources can be sold off to others.

Truly, the future is bright in this Brave New World.

Some Notes

First off, I’m not entirely happy with this game design. I think that the core idea is good: a software simulator set in the world of Brave New World where the player must actually manage the system that John the Savage hates so much in the novel. Making it about one of the most troubling parts of the society, the breeding of people to intentionally be (varying levels of) dumb and compliant really drives sections of the book home. Turning people into Sims-like toys on an industrial scale is so awesomely fascinating and revolting that it can’t help but be emotionally powerful.

The first problem comes from that strength. For this to work, for players to come face to face with the insanity, you need to get them to agree to come along with you in the first place. So you have to sneak up on them. I think that the best way to do this would be to start them off with a relatively small group of clones that they care for, over time, giving them more and more of the tools and broadening the scope until they are managing armies of clones on an industrial level. But here the second risk. Once you get people to buy into the premise and play the game, how do you turn it around and confront them with what they’ve agreed to do? Players are likely to cry foul. It would be like playing Pac Man and suddenly on level 15 Pac Man gets diabetes. Punishing players for doing what you told them to do is generally a terrible idea.

I’m also not happy with how the business sim part merges in to the cloning part. In my head, the idea of a game where you are rewarded for exercising extreme foresight is a cool mechanic and one that’s not often used in games (most games live on the reflexes to tactics edge of the scale instead of the strategy to long term planning edge). Slow growing people and attempting to anticipate industrial needs that will come 12-18 years in the future is a tough and challenging problem. Actually, it’s probably an impossible problem, which is part of why we DON’T have breeding programs and definitely why we shouldn’t be teaching grade six kids to use specific productivity software instead of teaching them to think.

I like the idea of creating a simulation game that allows players to explore for themselves the themes and consequences of the world created by Huxley and similar works of art. Imagine a 1984 game. But the other half of the problem is that these are dystopias. They aren’t meant to work!

How would you make a game out of Brave New World/?