The Most Controversial Game - A Design

    There is a legitimate space for a mass shooter/terrorist simulator. It would be a combination Walking Sim/RPG, David Cage-style. On "new game," you pick one from a menu of characters, each with their own unique storyline. It's split into two "sides," Aggressors and Victims. Aggressor characters are: Student Incel, Racist MRA, Oppressed-minority Gang Member, Radicalized Jihadi, and Troll. Victim characters: police officer, female student, bully, teacher, pedestrian, rival gang-banger, office worker, concert-goer, scientist, and protester.
    To start, you have to pick a character-pair. An aggressor and a victim. The game starts a week before "the incident," playing as the aggressor. Each day, you go through a "day in the life" scenario. You are "on rails" with small little side-rooms full of Easter Eggs and bonus resources. The gameplay loop is "interact and collect." There are lots of little "journals" to fill out the story. Report cards, receipts, emails, texts, maybe even a diary to explore for. During the course of the railroad, you'll be hit with set pieces that manifest as points of forced interaction. Dialog options will be constructed to either build rapport or resent with the character based on replies. At the end of the day, you'll be given a "management" screen, that is similar to a computer desktop, and you'll be tasked with certain objectives. There will be a simulated reddit/chat room experience, pictures, emails, and a set of favorite'd websites to interact with, each depending on the character. You'll have a budget, a threat level, and a efficacy rating. At the end of the "day," you have to compile your manifesto, generated from a conversation tree. You can use that time to buy weapons/armor/ammo to increase your efficacy, but it will be noticed and increase your threat level. Each character has different budget levels, and can acquire more expensive gear based on it. There will be opportunities to steal weapons and money during the normal day, but it will increase your threat level. If your threat level gets too high, the police will capture you before you can carry out your plan and you lose the game. The other thing you can do is acquire a fan base. At the end of the game, when the news is reporting on your actions, they will sculpt the narrative. Were you a secret loner? Did you get "radicalized?" Did you bring attention to your "cause?" how national did it get? stuff like that.
    At the end of the day, you will play next as the victim character. Much the same, you'll go through their day. Fixed-conversation set pieces, including interactions with the "Aggressor" character. Your conversations will be defined by the options the character choose, and will be on-rails. You'll have various world-building activities to make you feel intimately connected and sympathetic to the victim, but will also have access to some morally-ambiguous things. Like, a female student character can be seen as mostly benevolent, but offering opportunities to engage in things like, say ghosting a love interest or being a jerk to their mother, or being catty with a female friend. At the end of their day, they have a similar screen to the aggressor with chats, emails, texts, websites, etc. Instead of managing threat/suspicion/money, they're managing three scores, "woke"-ness, morality and "visibility," which are all in tension. Things that may make you more woke may make you less visible because it goes against the popular zeitgeist. Things that make you more moral may make you less woke for the same reasons. Likewise, things that make you more visible may make you less woke or moral, as they are pandering pop-culture ploys or you being an edge-lord for the "likes." There will be, again, opportunities to interact with the aggressor online, in, say, tweet comments or chatrooms or the like.
    After a certain number of days, it comes time for the "big day." You play as the aggressor first. The aggressor goes through the map like an FPS. There is a counter for "casualties/victims remaining." You get a timer at the start of the level based on your threat score on how quickly the police respond. From there it plays like a Fallout/CoD FPS with a sort of jarring disconnect from reality shown by it being very real. Bright lights, correctly-saturated color palettes, accurate movement patterns. To "snap you back" temporarily, there will be moments when you are given a quick-time choice. Spare or Slaughter. If you choose slaughter, you get an elaborate "fatality-like" execution that is extremely realistic. The tension is that it eats time. If you choose spare, they run away and you can carry on your spree. You can shoot them after you choose spare, too, which will earn an achievement on your end-stage report card. One of the encounters will be a forced encounter with the victim. After the timer runs out, you're forced into a quicktime encounter with the SWAT team. You get 3 choices: surrender, suicide, or shootout. Each with their own different composite of bonuses and consequences. At the end of the rampage, you receive a score card that looks like a school report card. based on all the objectives, you'll get a grade rating.
    Then, you'll cut to the victim. it'll start their day a little bit before the aggressor rampage, and then there will be a time-trigger. From there, the aggressor's path was recorded, and all the motions of the characters, and is played back in realtime, and as the victim, you have to endure the whole time, knowing if and when you are going to die. While the event is going on, you will have conversations with the other victims around you. you can text people, post on twitter, etc. Your goal is to earn extra moral/wokeness/visibility points so that you are reflected well in the endgame newscasts.
    After the shooter finishes his spree, the victim is shown a news article with their name mentioned and then is given a brief description based on their scores. Certain things you do during the game can also add snippets of comment in your mention/memorial. After that, a cutscene will play out based on your choices. It'll be news broadcasters describing the event. It'll go over the aggressor's manifesto, the reaction of his following (if any,) and what impact it had on the nation at large, policy changes, etc, all based on the aggressor's choices during the playthrough. Then, depending on if the victim survived or was killed, will read an interview with the victim or a memorial of the victim that references their moral/wokeness/visibility scores. The news reel will also play an interview with a detractor/denier from a community of haters whose size is based on their wokeness, visibility, and morality score defining how "believable" they are and how much "society" is or isn't on the detractor's side. The final screen will be a bunch of major and minor events and how your choices compare to the community's choices.

The key to a game like this working, and not being written off as troll-y, is to make it feel visceral. You have to FEEL the dejected, oppressed, radicalizing drive for the aggressor, and you have to FEEL the horror and pain of the victim. It must be done such that it never feels like the victim "deserved" anything, and have their end-game experience mirror those of real victims: victim-blaming, camera-worthiness, being called crisis actors, disaster fatigue, guilt associated with wondering if it was your contributions that lead to the event. And, for the aggressor, you have to feel like they are never "justified," but that you can empathize with why they're doing it: disempowerment, societal rejection, radicalization, emotional issues from trauma or abuse, psychological conditions. The other key to making it work is making the actual killing event feel very disconnected, but not too game-y. The reason a game is best for capturing this is that it gives you the ability to embody the character and "play" through their day, but it also shows that the killer made CHOICES the whole way through. Even if their event was inevitable, HOW the event played out was ultimately their choice, too. And it shows that how good a person you are has nothing to do with if the event did or didn't happen, or if you survived or not, it was your contributions to society that you will be judged against, and the quality of your character that represents how society sees you in relation to "haters" who will try and minimize or overblow your role in the narrative and how it fits into what happens on the world stage at large. Life is on rails, and your choices don't really change much, but they do change how you're remembered, and that's all you have when you're dead. Did you contribute, or did you help? Were you a bystander, a hero, or a target? You can't make them out to be an antagonist, because that, again, violates the core message: no matter how shitty you are, it was THEIR choice to shoot up the school. it was THEIR choice to kill. No one DESERVES to die, no matter how horribly they treat people. However, to know that in a time of tragedy, your lack of good behavior didn't HELP anything, or that your death will be used to help reinforce a certain narrative should MOTIVATE someone to IMPROVE their behavior by showing how important even simple actions and conversations can be to sculpting what impact you ultimately have on society. For the aggressor, the hope is to show how easy it is to make these choices when you are so disconnected from reality. It all FEELS like a game, even though REAL PEOPLE's lives are in your hands. When you start your spree, it feels so EASY to forget they're people, not targets. That these were peers. That the adrenaline, the feeling of the moment, makes you sort of forget the gravity of what you're doing. That a normal, if quiet, kid, "flips" and all of a sudden, they're 23 kills in 10 minutes later and you don't even realize what you've done because you're "in the zone." How moments to empathize with a person can be ignored when you are focused on a goal. Theoretically, you COULD run the entire spree without killing anyone. But will people when they're given an objective? When they've "committed" to something? How will the amount of time and energy invested affect their reactions? The way to really show this is to have a full-pacifist run. The game can be played from the aggressor's side where they have their incident, and don't really do anything. It will count as an "F," and every score you get will be an F. That's the moment when you realize failing to be an "A+ Terrorist" is the RIGHT path. You WANT to fail, as a terrorist. The "secret" ending of the game is...nothing happens. You show up for your spree, don't DO anything, and by the end of the run, no police appear. The game ends with someone discovering your manifesto and you being put in a hospital on a 3-day psychiatric hold. A screen pops up where you're mocked by the radical groups online, but...that's it. No one died, no police were called, no one was hurt. Just a bunch of anonymous internet trolls go "how'd that school shooting go, i can see you didn't do shit!" But...that's it. You get psychological help and horrible trolls on the internet are the only people who hate you. The anti-climax is the best ending. The victim goes through an eventless day having idle chat, not knowing they could have been killed that day, but YOU, the PLAYER know how lucky THEY are. How they are so naive for not cherishing every day. It puts into stark relief all the choices they made and how they did nothing to prevent the event, it was luck. The hand of a benevolent Fate who doesn't exist in real life. To make you realize that you need to do more to PREVENT these kinds of activities. The other thing that would make it interesting is at the end of the game, seeing how people played their runs. The runs that I think are most telling are when the person has to make a victim act terribly so they can justify killing them, or make a victim act benevolent to justify NOT killing them. Or, making the shooter completely unsympathetic to justify a rampage playthrough, or completely relatable to justify a pacifist playthrough. The most morally challenging would be the inverse, when you have a benevolent aggressor kill a perfect angel, or a murderous aggressor spare a total jerk. Each stage could play out in many different scenarios based on who's selected. Suicide bombings are flash-in-the-pan high-casualty events, and are WAY easier to "pull off" because it's walk in and blow up, it just happens so fast there's no CHANCE to get derailed and "not do it." To overcome that, the run would give you several opportunities to bomb it. Like, you can go to a concert, or there's an assembly at school, and you can do it right away, or wait and try to get to a bigger crowd, but the longer you wait, the more conversations you can get forced into to talk you out of it. bigger score or more morally challenging? Could you still do it after seeing a woman and her dog? Or a man and his children? Maybe just the presence of a elderly person stops you. Those are what I think should be explored in a game like this, and that's the only real way to do it without being troll-y.