We need a game where you’re an invisible ghost who can walk through walls, rattle the shutters, knock vases off mantles, create abnormally chilly spots, and so on. When a family moves into your house you can try to communicate with them, or chase them off, or protect them, or rearrange their wardrobes. You might intercept the kid as he creeps back from the bathroom at night, or sneak up behind the mother while she does the dishes alone during the day. You can eavesdrop on their nervous conversations about whether you exist.

I’d love to play a game where in the middle of a job interview you realize you’ve gone deaf, so you have to interpret the interviewers’ body language and facial expressions and guess an appropriate reaction: nod grimly, chuckle, shake someone’s hand, stand up briskly, sit down, etc. If you manage not to infuriate or confuse them too badly, you get the customer support job.

Or a game where you just did something really awful, like cheated on your spouse or hit a cyclist with your car on a deserted road, and now you have to decide how to own up, or whether to pretend nothing happened, but either way you have to deal with the consequences when you go back to your life. Or maybe you’re a Buddhist who starts as a dung beetle and must ascend the karmic ladder over successive lives to reach Enlightenment.

You’re Santa or the Easter bunny. You must deliver presents across the entire globe in a single evening by flying at nearly the speed light while solving the traveling salesman problem. Or you can control the weather. You are the weather. You draw things that come to life. You run a restaurant or a catering company, and everyone is always smoking weed, and… I dunno. Something.

There’s a stack of grainy black-and-white photos. You must travel into the past and identify the moment each photo was taken, without disrupting the taking of it. Or you can see into the future. Literally. Within your vision cone, you see what the simulation calculates that location will look like in days or years, you can dial in the depth. Maybe the game is about city planning, reintroducing endangered species or planting vines that erode buildings to ruin.

You’re a modest-looking girl, and you want to seduce the hot dude at your dead-end job. It’s different every replay. One time you become his confidant, but he complains about some other chick. Another time he seems really into you, but you realize he just wants you to cover his shifts. You sorta hook up, but he’s always totally obsessed with himself. You get along perfectly, but he’s afraid to commit and does something lame so you’ll break up with him. You realize his confidence is a façade, and he becomes clingy and suffocating. Eventually you turn gay.

A fantasy puzzle game with homoerotic tension. Maybe it involves dinosaur cowboys riding large, brightly colored worms. The Wiimote controls your worm-rope. You can make them “Giddyup!” or “Whoa!”

Two phases. In the first you control a great nation, and you must legislate the operating parameters of the justice, education and economic systems, etc. If you don’t stay on top of it, you’ll be replaced by someone who panders more to powerful interest groups. In the second phase you switch to a disadvantaged youth struggling to raise his lot in the nation you devised in phase one. Back and forth.

You are a fashion guru who spends 99 percent of the time between shows totally wasted, so you have to design every outfit at the last minute with whatever happens to be laying around the studio. All of your models wind up looking like aliens, monks, clowns or banana splits, but no matter what you do, your work is unilaterally adored and praised.

We need games that trust the player to think for themselves, to exhibit patience on occasion, pick up on subtle cues, use their imagination and get something out of the experience even if their ego isn’t being furiously masturbated the entire time. We need these games to have richer interaction than dialogue trees, or matching three, or finding the right pixel. We need a game about being a daring photojournalist trapped in a mall full of zombies where the help text is large enough to be legible.

I suppose we need more games about racing expensive cars and about slaying the most griffin pups on the Flamey Plains of Gragragnarg, and of course we’ll never get enough of that one bad stealth level that makes us quit forever. But maybe we don’t need quite so many new games along those lines.

It would really mean a lot to me if you could help. If making games isn’t your thing, maybe you could sometimes buy games on principle? Voting with your money is one of the most powerful ways to direct companies towards the types of games you’d put on your own list.

Thanks,
Randy

Randy Smith is a lead game designer at EA’s LA Studio. His current project is a collaboration with Steven Spielberg.

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