Untitled Committee Game

This is the idea for the game that wanted to be my second entry for Game Chef 2006. (Ingredients would be Committee, 2 hours, Ancient, Emotion. Since this is not an entry, I’m ignoring all that.)

Basically, the players start as a Committee of Ethical Values or some such. One player proposes a societal concept (like, cybernetic consciousnesses in cyberspace, or occupants of a long term space station, or an alternate Renaissance, or even untrained sex therapy workers) and then the group as a whole develops a system of laws, or an ethical structure or some such. The system has to be written down.

Then, each player gets a chance to break the system. They present a case – perhaps to a Council of Judgement – that’s specifically ambiguous under the system as codified. The Council votes secretly on whether the conduct is correct or not, along with the element of the code that supports or condemns the action, and the presenter gets points for wildly disparate results, while the Council gets points for unified judgement.

Rules would probably be along the lines of who can say what to whom. Probably Judges can only address the supplicant directly, and no sneaky leading questions.

Scoring notions:

• Supplicant gets Support x Condemn x Articles Cited
• The Code gets MAX(Support, Condemn)² x Judges

Which should score high for the Code if Judges agree, and higher for the Supplicant if they don’t. If a Supplicant scores highest, then that player wins, but the Council loses.