I battled with this for quite some time now. In the beginning, this game was about breaking a loved one out of prison, then it changed to somewhat of a heist game. Neither one of those ideas is a great hook for a student game though. Both of them are still in the ranged of AAA titles which is something that this project does not want to exactly be. After all, this is the opportunity for this team to make a game that we all care about. In previous meetings, I had everyone think about what they would want to steal in the current world. Read ON!
Some people confessed to a Fight Club where our player's aren't stealing anything but rather destroying something which would essentially be a delinquent "Robin Hood" action. Others discussed the notion of our players being members of Anonymous. Anonymous - the infamous hacktivist group - is currently waging war on the U.S Justice Department due to the death of Reddit founder, Aaron Schwartz, who presumably took his own life to escape dubious charges against him for downloading JSTOR articles at MIT. These two things speak to us, not so much from a political standpoint but from a concept point of view. The fantasy of taking on an establishment that affects people's lives in some way and destroying it, has powerful connotations to it.
I stewed on these things for a few days, having long conversations with teammates and a particular professor about how to harness these things. After hours of talking, one theme floated to the surface and resonated with me considerably - You are recent college graduates breaking into a fantastically demonic version of the U.S Department of Education with one goal: destroy all outstanding student loan debt for everyone throughout the world.
Myself and others really liked this theme as a hook and a way to make the mechanics of our game sing. We even decided to poll other people about their feelings on a game about this subject matter. Nearly every person dug it quite a bit - it just grabbed them.
So there it is, the thematic wrapper for our game. We still have some massaging to do but it is a fantastic start.
Back to work!
Andrew
The Theme for Our Game
