Overview

These are multi – media on-line role player games. We hope to develop new forms of this type of game that use the latest technological developments from the World-Wide Web.

Often in the form of adventure games. A text-based example describes a scenario : You are in a forest. With possible actions. More highly evolved are battle games.

The variants being proposed use a Multi-Media archive, a community server with mail redirection. It may have the form of a treasure hunt, as might be played by children.

This treasure hunt game is often educational. Children are asked questions, solve logical problems, perform tasks.

Monetization

Of course, these games have to generate revenues, these will come from

• Marketing Data
• Own-brand Novelty Products
• Referral fees
• Advertising revenue

Marketing data and the novelty products are original sources of revenue. Referral fees and advertising are conventional sources of revenue used by many websites.

Marketing data is extra to cookie and account data. In the course of playing the games, players reveal their marketing preferences: they might prefer Rock music to Jazz, Vodka to Whisky and so on. All of these can be collated and used by marketing companies.

Novelty products are items that are advertised within the games and are produced or supplied by the PtT enterprise. Novelty items might be well-known items that have been re-branded; for example, a left-handed cork-screw might be sold as the “Excalibur Cork-screw”; or a time-release safe as the “New Year’s Eve Safe”.

Other novelty products include educational credits. If a player is able to successfully complete a game, they can claim that they have a skill. These might be: a foreign language competence; a knowledge of a specialist topic, such as 19th century Gothic literature; contemporary Iranian politics; Anti-Vaxx and immunology and virology; Ukrainian history; healthcare principles, alcohol and drug usage and abuse, and other behavioural illustrations, how not to behave.

As an example, a behavioural game might be Don’t cancel me. This would present scenarios where players make moral choices with the aim that they do not transgress new social norms.

Pull the Trigger – PtT – Business and Technological Dimensions

Given that overview of the ideas, we propose a family of these on-line games called PtT: this is abbreviation used for Pull the Trigger games; Pull the Trigger is one of the early games developed and it inspired this concept so its name is used as the identifying acronym.

PtT has a technological (or technical) dimension. Principally, it uses social media for interaction. The abbreviation PtT-T is used to tag technical statements.

A PtT Business dimension, PtT-B, will be used to denote the game-play and strategy of the games.

PtT-B – Some Business Ideas

The basic structure of the game is the Treasure Trail or Escape Room, but this can be extended by adding a Fantasy Football (stock trading) element: the game players buy and sell assets that respond to events.

Events can be taken from the real-world or game-world.

Real-world Events are football matches, stock market prices, world events, local events.

Game-world Events are derived from game play, a player (or group of players) might be given a challenge, groups of players generate a policy, have an election, make a collective decision.

Reality TV concepts, Semiology and Psychology Experiments will be used to make simple children’s games interesting for adults; and these concepts will help to produce more illuminating Marketing Data. Semiology is used by a technological mechanism of Deontic Substitution – this replaces names and events from well-known stories with the names and events of the Players and the Real- or Game-world respectively.

Many other simple games can be added: Memory, the card-matching game; Uno, the card reactions game, Snakes and Ladders, the card games: Happy Families and Trumps, the party games Bodies Bodies Bodies, Musical Chairs and Pass the Parcel.

PtB-T – Some Technical Ideas

The medium for interaction is a bespoke social media site – the early prototype uses Mastodon¹ . This will be peopled with Bots and People antagonists who interact with the protagonists – the Players.

The most recent Language Model technology will be used . (Language Model is the preferred term for ChatGPT and other AI expert systems.)

The Narratives of the games are taken from classic literature and will use Deontic substitution [endn]https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-deontic/[/endn]. For example, the story of Dracula can transformed into an adventure game by transforming the events of the novel into a directed acyclic graph between the characters who are replaced by Bots and Players, and, within that model, the names can also be transformed and thus players would not immediately be aware they are re-enacting the story.

More Insights

Deontic Substitution

This is a shorthand for: the substitution of free variables in a Deontic Logic.

Before the terms within this phrase are analysed, it is best to begin with an example. The theatre director Jonathan Miller is known for revisionist stagings of classic drama and opera. He famously re-imagined Rigoletto set in the Little Italy of New York in the 1950’s. ².

There is a production by Miller of Carmen which displaces Bizet’s historical setting of Seville in the 1820’s to the Spanish Civil War and the film director Otto Preminger directed Carmen Jones, 1954, which is set in World War 2. Stephen Sondheim’s libretto for West Side Story, 1957, is the plot of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, 1597, which itself may have been based on a story by Matteo Bandello, (c. 1480 – 1562).

So the director make substitutions of place, the characters may have different titles and names and because we intend to use Players for characters, the Game will need to manage the plots and the events generated from it.

Aspects of a Novel by E M Forster. This analytic book gives dimensions for a novel. Forster was so general in his analysis, it applies well to drama. A novel has A Narrative, a Plot, Characters, Themes, Resolution.

Narrative is the history “Boy meets girl. Their child is called Orestes. His father Agamemnon is killed by Clytemnestra who remarries Aegisthus”

Is the basic story of The Oresteia. On which we construct a reality using Plot. Plot provides mechanics and reasoning from which a morality. This allows Themes to be introduced.

Each statement of the Narrative is given a justification. “Boy meets girl because his father demanded an heir for his kingdom.”

The heir is then Oréstes and because he is the heir to his father’s kingdom. When he learns of his father’s death.

And Themes of loyalty and inheritance have been introduced.

It is possible to deconstruct many novels in this way.

Characters is an Aspect. Each character in the Narrative and Plot has an archetype. The relationships between them characterised by another relationship archetype. The Oedipus Complex played out between a narcissist cis male and a trans girl.

The Resolution is some contrivance that an audience and the players can be rewarded with minimal dispute.

And we want a PtT MMORPG to be as satisfying an experience as a novel, or a television drama. Using technical innovations, to present a form of an escape room challenge.

1. The Open Source Twitter https://joinmastodon.org/
2. See the New York Times article for a discussion of Jonathan Miller’s and others’ re-inventions of classic opera.