In post 116, chamber wrote: In post 107, FakedBlogger wrote:
Last but not least I'd ponder the mechanics of the game and what makes it fun and challenging to come up with a hybrid form between forum mafia and mmorpg that lasts something like 1 year/game. It would have to be dynamic in a way that favors the individual to choose strategically whether to be part of organized crime, law enforcement or be a neutral citizen to maximize one's success and gameplay in a way subjected to evolutionary laws to assure an axiomatic balance.
If you are going to troll at least do it on your main.
I'll stop posting immediately upon confirmation that my input is unappreciated, I wasn't trolling though. The idea of unshackling mafia, in a persistent world mmo manner while still maintaining a forum format, has been dodging negative selection from my mind for quite some time because I keep catching creative whiffs of potentially awesome gameplay.
Chances are there's a more realistic, complex, fun and rewarding way to simulate the manifestations at the individual level of the informed minority vs uninformed majority dynamic, true to the spirit of mafia as envisioned by that Russian guy, who said that you might as well replace "mafia" with "KGB", and that it's a game of understanding Stalin's regime a little better.
Finding it is a question of rehashing and re-imagining elements that have proven successful and fusing them bearing the philosophical exoskeleton mentioned above in mind. I'm thinking skill training (education), wild but domesticable economy {supply-demand, currency, raw materials, jobs (in industry, research, production, protection), corporations} a-la Eve Online, because first some self-sustaining virgin habitat needs to be established for the mafia to infiltrate, for it to be profitable for a mafia to emerge in the first place.
I'm afraid the level of abstraction in current games might prove too deep to have any future.