This game is about a freestyle rap artist friend of yours who has been murdered. In order to find their murderer and expose them, you enter the underground world of freestyle rap competitions, only to become engrossed in its workings. As you start to win battles against real-world opponents, you get offers in the game from recording companies and sponsors in order to gain money and notoriety. In-Game Money would allow you to purchase beats from the online game store as well as songs uploaded by other players, bribe in-game characters, and could once in a while be worth special offers for real-world stores. Notoriety determines how much money you are worth to defeat in a rap-battle. The more battles you win, the higher your notoriety goes. Higher notoriety earns you more in-game offers from recording companies and would let you into upper-class real world parties based on players of the ARG. So, for example, a club could be rented out for the night and players would have to present the bouncer with their in-game profile on their iPhone/Pre to prove how high up in the game they are, and only people with a high enough notoriety would be let in.
Since ARGs often require some kind of real-world interaction and not just snooping around on the internet, the idea behind this is that you'd actually have to partake in real-world, freestyle rap battles. The game comes pre-installed with beats to rap over. The game automatically detects when you are finished rapping and enters Applause-O-Meter mode, during which the beat continues but neither you nor your opponent may rap for 5 seconds. During those 5 seconds of Applause-O-Meter, the game detects how high the decibel level gets from the applause in the room and scores you accordingly. The louder the applause, the better you did. In the battle screen, the game allows players to login to their accounts on a single iPhone/Pre and displays their name when it is their turn to rap. Alternatively, players can fight in the "Simple Battle" mode, in which they login, and the DJ is responsible for simply pressing the name of whoever won. This mode works on more of an honor system on the DJ's part, but it allows for DJ's to use their own beats and not the ones that come with the game and more leniency in applause time.
When not battling, players manage their career and continue to search for who murdered their friend. Players can manage their contracts with the in-game recording companies, can record and upload songs to the game's store using the in-game beats which players can purchase using the game's money, read through the story and fictionalized criminal records of NPCs in order to solve the mystery. The game also gives players invitations to real-world parties when one pops up and allows them establish a crew based on their phone's contacts and other players' user-names. A bigger crew means higher notoriety.
The appeal of this game is the real-world interaction. To play this game you must participate in real-world rap battles, as this is the fastest way to earn money and notoriety. If you want, you can just read through the story and play it as a basic ARG, but certain parts that reveal more info will require you to have a certain amount of notoriety, and unlike in-game money, this is something you cannot buy with a credit card. In a way, you are writing your own story while solving another one, and even when the pre-written story is solved, your story continues. Even if your story starts as an alternate reality, it is possible that if you really become good enough, it may not be so alternate after a while. This is a game that because of its non-violent PvP, ego-boosting applause-o-meter, and real-world events could become really immersive.
Wow, haha.
ReplyDeleteCrazy idea there.
I like how it fuses what seems like some social networking elements in.
Thing is, though, it seems like a lot of this probably wouldn't work in practice.
Like take the applause-o-meter idea... In my experience it's very hard to tune something like that just right. (And yes, I did try to rig one once!)
You usually either get both sets of applause maxing out (giving both players 100% scores and resulting in a tie) or too low and neither one registers high enough to get much of a reading.
I suppose it comes down to what the iPhone has for microphone tech and how well you can adjust the sensitivity... maybe even dynamically. It's a tricky situation either way.
Also, are you fully considering what it is to make a game where players have to freestyle rap... apparently without assistance?
Freestyle rap is tough as hell to learn and as Darius points out in his article on rap games most people don't have much of a clue as to how rap lyrics are constructed or performed.
I've been trying to learn how to do freestyle rap for the past 4 YEARS and I haven't come all that close to being able to do a battle.
Keep in mind ARGs only last so long. Most players won't have the time to learn how to do it even slightly before the game would be over.
I guess since none of it is real and it's all just a game players could cheat and bring in pre-written stuff and try to rap that as best as they can. Sort of goes against the spirit of the thing though (again, see the article Darius wrote, with the parts on rap's relationship with authenticity.)
But getting someone to actually freestyle ain't going to happen without epic amounts of hilarious fail unless they already could freestyle rap going into the game.
The number of people who can do that are rare, and I'll take a wild guess and assume most wouldn't likely find out about an ARG, let alone really get into one. I listen to some pretty nerdy rappers so I'm willing to accept that what I said was stereotyping and there are exceptions, but I still doubt (because you have to couple that with the fact that freestyle rapping is pretty intimidating to learn and/or try for the first time) that you'd have much going for you as a player base.