Dan Among Den

First...

You've been approached by VR-Box, a new home entertainment system startup, for the creation of five new videogames for their home system. They're reviewing submissions from several different people, and their offer is that, whoever submits the most 5 ideas deemed most interesting and most profitable, gets a position with them simply hanging around thinking up ideas for video games for some collossal amount of money.

The system is an immersive, virtual reality game. People playing will know they're playing, they won't be at any special risk physically or psychologically. (No more than with a regular computer game, say.) But it will look more "real" (using a helmet which, yes, works on the brain by nerve induction or something) and the system will be of course far more flexible than anything now on the market—able to handle massively online multiplayer interaction, to run marginally complex AI, and so on.

They haven't specifically chosen a market, nor have they given any other limitations: it's apparently up to you to choose the niche you think best works for the first immersive VR-game system in the world. Which five game ideas would you submit?

Careful, Gord, if you think this is going to get you some advanced market research, bear in mind that this question counts as a public release of information.

Hmmm, “most interesting and most profitable”... well, the two aren’t necessarily the same. Yes, you could try to narrow it down to those that maximize the sum of both, but I’d like to take them on one at a time. First, the easy one, profitability.

1. Max Millionaire vs. the Supermodel Stalkers of Lust, part 7: The Oral Avengers: I’ll leave it to your dirty minds to work out the details on this one.
2. Your Life: Sit around, watch TV, clean the house, play on the computer. Hey, it worked for Sims.
3. Caligula: Insult senators, fuck your sister, and get to decide who lives and who dies. Just reset before the knives come out.
4. Office Rampage: Go ahead and go postal, get it out of your system, and kill your coworkers again and again. Not recommended for team play at work.
5. Everquest/D&D/Ultima/Star Wars/ad nauseam: This is your basic stuff, e.g. slay the dragon, rescue the princess, just much more realistic. Personally, I think this one would be a lot of fun, though it’s not terribly interesting.

Now for the interesting ones...

1. Dreamscape: If this thing can be pushing on neurons, maybe it can be reading them too. Explore your innermost psyche through conscious dreaming.
2. Career Day: Get to experience the working life of different careers. It would run you through the high and low points of different jobs. Thinking about become a fireman? See the excitement and danger of a three-alarm fire along with the endless hours of maintaining equipment.
3. Vacation: You know how vacation trips go. There’s one or two short pieces of bliss surrounded by some general fun, some monotony, and some hours of hassle and exhaustion. This packages up those short pieces of bliss: the isolated beach, the mountain pass, the feel of the grass on your bare feet. Instead of a movie tonight, take a ninety-minute vacation to the rainforest of Maui. This one might be a mildly profitable series.
4. Time-travel god: You all know how many time-travel questions we get here on this list, and not all of them from Gord either. Well, let’s do it and find out just what would happen. Either fly-on-the-wall observer or hands-on megalomaniac, you can finally do more than just write about it. (The real profits here come from the toilet paper add-on pack.)
5. Live with yourself: This would be a highly custom product. An observation team (perhaps a computer) will spend time with you collecting real data. They’ll see all the things you do, the things you say, etc. They will build a model of someone who does what you really do, not what you tell yourself you do. Then when you play the game, you get to be someone else in your household and see what it’s really like to live with you. I suspect for some folks, playing this game would be a form of court-mandated punishment.

And then there’s Gord’s second question...

Long dead, you are awakened from your eternal slumber some of your descendants using a Ouija board. It's a little bit annoying, understandably, since you were having a nice sleep in the dark. But your descendants want to ask you something.

Straining to hear them, you make out the question, "Ancestor, ancestor, we live in a perilous age. We humans are capable of great good and also great evil. We need guidance, we need... we need maxims to guide us. Ancestor, wise ancestor, give us five aphorisms or mottos you think worthy of remembering throughout our lives, as we navigate the complexities and dangers of the human, and yes, the posthuman world!

Dagnabbit! I was just in the middle of... well... it’s hard to explain to you living folk, but you’ve just taken me away from something as fun as a Claudia Christian oil wrestling match.

So, you want wisdom? You want maxims? YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE MAXIMS!!!

Sorry, that was just Jack goofing with you. Maxims... well, let’s be quick about it.

1. Don’t do anything you’ll have a hard time explaining to your kids when they’re grown up.
2. Righty tighty, lefty Lucy. That one really comes in handy.
3. The paths to Utopia and Distopia look the same. Sometimes you’re going to make mistakes. Don’t be afraid to go back and pick the other road.
4. Remember that those who came before you were not gods. Yes, they built the world you live in, but they were just average Zho’s and Zhane’s trying to get by. Don’t tie yourself to a bad idea just because it’s always been that way. You have new possibilities that they never dreamed of.
5. Remember that maxims are 90% pithy writing and only 10% wisdom. It's better to rely on your own judgement.

   But I'm pretty sure about the righty-tighty thing.