Eli Dupree @elidupree@mastodon.social

(If you want to incentivize that kind of play with actual game mechanics, here's one way you could do it: Make it an MMO with meta-progression. In each game, there's an audience betting on which side will win. And if you win as town, it only rewards you with meta-progression if the audience was actually betting on the mafia.)

Bad game idea of the day: A Mafia/Werewolf variant which is so unbalanced that the town would normally win 100% of the time. The real challenge of the game is that the town have to play badly on purpose in order to make the game fun, and then the players get to debate whether someone was doing anti-town things to make the game fun, or whether they doing anti-town things because they were mafia.

Bad game idea of the day: A fast-paced combat game where you play as a critic. You don't control any of the combat – the main gameplay is watching fictional players make mistakes and die, and then you have to point out what they should have done differently.

Bad game idea of the day: A physics-based VR game where you have a messy pile of stuff on your desk, and you have to keep stacking more weird-shaped objects on top of it without knocking anything over.

The game keeps saying you'll unlock a chance to pause and reorganize everything, but it keeps getting delayed. It only actually unlocks after everything falls down and makes a huge disaster.

Another variation on the "you want to dodge into an attack" concept:

In many games, getting hit is doubly bad because you both take damage and get knocked back, possibly interrupting your current action.

Bad game idea of the day: A game where your enemies' attacks only knock you back if they MISS. If you get hit, you only take damage.

In some games, you can fall any distance and not get hurt. In other games, you take damage if you fall too far.

Bad game idea of the day: A game where you take damage if you fall too SHORT a distance.

You know how a lot of games have huge damage numbers, like in the thousands, just because it's cool to have big numbers, even though that means a difference of one point basically doesn't matter?

Bad game idea of the day: A game where the difference of one point DOES matter because the damage inflicts different status effects depending on its prime factorization.

Bad game idea of the day: You play as a deus ex machina – a god who watches humans being cruel to each other all day, and then steps in at the last minute to give them all their just desserts. You earn points based on how much the audience agrees with your judgments.

Bad game idea of the day: A Stanley Parable-style narrator breaks the fourth the wall to complain about your choices, but this time, the premise is that YOU are the game DEVELOPER, and the narrator is a disgruntled player who erased your memories and forced you to replay the game to endure all of your frustrating, unintuitive game design.

In a lot of games, if you dodge an attack at just the right moment, you get to perform a powerful counterattack.

Bad game idea of the day: a game where if you dodge *into* an attack at just the right moment, and get hit for maximum damage, *then* you get to perform a powerful counterattack.

Bad superpower idea of the day: You can look at any piece of writing from any language, and instantly see a reliable translation! The catch is that the translation explains the ENTIRE cultural context of the text, making the translation thousands of times longer than the original text. And no matter how hard you try, you can't figure out how to skim it for the most important parts.

Bad game idea from my dreams last night: You're having a fast-paced conversation using predictive text, but your character is a bigot. You have to quickly form coherent sentences from the available prompts, while dodging the prompts that make you say bigoted stuff. (If you say anything bigoted, you immediately lose the game.)

Bad game idea of the day: Your character has the supernatural ability to detect which people are Evil. Primary game mechanics are about working at your boring office job while mentally coping with the knowledge that some of your coworkers are Evil.

Bad game idea: Feminist Saboteur. In each level, you get hired by a corporation you're targeting; from there, your task is to identify a few key womxn who are doing extra emotional labor to keep holding everything together. Once you've identified them, you recruit them to leave by offering better working conditions at your own organization. The corporation collapses behind you, and you move on to your next target.

Bad game idea of the day: You manage a team of engineers who are obsessed with automating things. You can't do any engineering yourself; your task is to make the other engineers more efficient by noticing and preventing when they are about to waste effort automating something when the automation takes more work than it's going to save.

Bad game idea of the day: A variation on the "sandbagging tournament" idea. This time, all players are trying to win – they're just trying to LOOK like they're playing badly while they do it. Audience members place bets on the players as the tournament goes on, and the players lose points whenever too many people bet in their favor.

Bad game idea of the day: A shooter game where you can shoot enemies "en passant" by shooting a location they just ran past.

TV show idea of the day: Some authoritarians command an intelligent robot to enforce the law "impartially". At this point, you might be expecting that they encode their own biases into the robot. However, in THIS show, the irony is that the robot is extremely woke, and interprets the law in the most subversive way possible. The comedy of the show comes from the authoritarians desperately trying to redefine the law to *actually* support their biases.

You know how, in some tournaments, you could get an advantage by entering multiple times, so the organizers try to ban one person from entering multiple times?

Bad game idea of the day: A tournament where there is no actual game, the goal is just to enter as many times as you can without getting caught.

(Optionally, it can also be the players' job to try to catch each other.)

Bad game idea of the day: You're in a room in a public building and you don't know which door goes to the place you need to go. The game mechanics center around managing your stress and embarrassment after you try doors and find that they are locked or go to the wrong place.

This bad game idea brought to you by the ubiquitous "this door is locked" interaction in CRPGs and such.