Healing can already be fun in MMORPGs but it fails to be a truly attractive craft because healing remains a reactive task. You can be the best healer on your server but your talents are worthless until someone actually decides to bring harm to one of your friends. As players, we find it more attractive to be pro-active – that is, to bring death in the games offered today – than to be reactive, just because we would generally rather be a force for change than a force for un-change. Right now, healers are un-changers and therefore their role will be perceived as secondary. The healer is not constructing anything, he is just un-doing destruction.
A healing game, if it spawns ill NPCs, will still relegate the player to such a role, except that the system is not out of whack due to other players breaking it, it’s just out of whack, period. Maybe the solution lies in a “health improvement game” where the NPCs spawn in a relatively normal state but the player can improve their conditions by a number of ways:
• Find resources for a better nutrition
• Educate
• Not only cure the occasional ill NPC but also try to eradicate the illness itself
• Improve conditions of the habitat
• Relocate NPCs to more suitable areas

This way, the player would be a healing force FOR CHANGE, not just maytag man of the human body. It feels better to be Louis Pasteur than just another ER technician.

But I suspect that the emotional undercurrent of, say, fighting a plague, is probably sufficient conflict for many people.

True, but remember also the reward element. How many people would play a game like that without sufficient baubles to collect? Obsidian Fungal Eyeballs and Bone Worm Calcium Upchuck Chunks would go a long way in enhancing such a game. Without any form of PvP, this game could also be made in a levelling system. Cheaper, easier to control, etc.

Other things that would enhance the game, and the cost…..

Blood ships-shrinking ships to go into the body with. Exciting, level based capabilities, and talk about instancing. John Doe, hey, instance!

Jewelry making, for those Obsidian Fungal Eyeballs, etc.

Health clubs, watering holes for the players, show off those collections, and don’t be an instance yourself.

Yes, I do think a game like this could work for a percentage of the market. And at this point, in a cost vs. “out there” way, it could be pretty productive. Even moreso than DDO.

It wouldn’t be what I want, but there could well be a market.

Nice post Raph. It comes down to expectations i guess. Why do we get much of the same in the genre? Perhaps it’s because we’re used to it, and as such become overly critical of anything that varies from what we are comfortable with. Do we see doctors and nurses as heroes in the real world? I’d say we don’t as much as we should, and so it might be hard to convince people that ‘The Healing Game’ has what they’re after. A quest to prove themselves a ‘hero’, at least in their own minds.

Mike Townsend, i need to play that game. It is something that burns within me and one day i will play it and all will be good with the world, may that day come soon for all of us.

Michael Chui said, “We require conflict … in order to survive, but conflict is precisely one of the primary things that make it hard to [survive].”

I’m not certain that “conflict” can be described as inherently negative (or positive.) As I wrote, conflict is a basic element — component — of human nature. Through conflict, we experience.

The premise of my reference to conflict is that successful interactive experiences enable learning through immersion.

How would The Healing Game enable learning through immersion?

The basic element of human nature is conflict.

I think the basic element of human nature is survival. This is where we come from, and it was through a competative nature that we won that little game, along with other tools…umm…. at hand.
Conflict is only a responce in some situations to competition for survival. And now that we’ve moved well past just survival and into comfort, out instincts are still there, still driving responces, even when survival isn’t in the equation.

Human cognition is pattern-seeking and pattern-driven… At this level, we can describe any idea as “cliche” and “boring”. Now we return to the premise of A Theory of Fun: learning is entertainment. This leads me to believe that successfully fun game worlds provide players patterns that enable learning in a unique manner, and thus enable our chemical processes to induce entertainment-related emotions.

The drive to learn, however, is not the only factor that affects our behavior in a game world. Pride, ego, ignorance, fear, apathy, etc. — these individual attributes can affect whether the patterns for learning provided in a game world are arbitrarily “fun”.

I agree. But I’d like to point out that the element of surprise is key here. Surprise trips out trigger. Is causes us to laugh, such as in shock humor, and it causes us to pause everything else in respsonse to a surprise. In this sense, the patterns which are truthfully always present, are tricked into play. Surprise isn’t something new, it’s something that’s out of place and unexpected. The first element in surprise is “Is it a threat”. When it’s not, we are happy. (This can even be related to shock humor, by the way.) If it’s not a threat, the next element is, can we use it for better survival. And comfort is better survival. Value is better survival.

Relating this to healing, our minds tell us that making friends is a form of better survival. Making friends reduces the possibility of conflict, which is a threat to our survival. So, healing can be a tool in new alliances, which is a good thing. Healing, then, is a politically motivated thing based on survival instincts. But often, in our more advanced state, it’s extrapolated into a zone of comfort involving our place in a social structure. This social structure can go beyond our own, and into the political realm of alliances.

With all this said, how would a game purely involving healing, but without the conflicts that make healing desirable, draw? Not well, I think, in comparison. Most of all, it lacks the basic survival mechanism.
Without threat, healing just seems out of place.

Another way that this could work within the context of the traditional hack and slash model, is to allow for actual diplomatic interaction with the mobs. Spend enough time healing wolves and they and their pups become friendly/invite you into the pack. That could be a way that a druid/ranger type gets an actual meaningful pet. It’s not just some spell, you earned it. It’s death might mean something too. Likewise, the new lair of orcs may require a guild meeting. Do we go in and slaughter them? Sure there’s the phat lootz, but if we go in with our diplomats and healers (supported by tanks in case it all goes wrong) we could have a new place to rest and allies. The players could start by healing the sick and going on quests to build sanitation, forges to get the orcs out of the bronze age, teach them magic, etc. Not to mention the secrets the orc could teach us. Of course this opens up a lot of design space… Can this be fun/work if there are other players actively in there hacking and slashing? Probably not in a purely PvE game, but in PvP, perhaps. Then your thug types have something to do. They help defend the orc community as you help them advance rapidly. Also with PvP that would open up a reason to want allies/safe places to run. While the aggressive players/PKs have to rest in corners out of the path of hostiles, you can take the shortest route through the local areas and even have NPC combat support. It would open up the world for players to make REAL changes. If you move the orcs out of the bronze age and into the iron age, their warriors would become more powerful (higher level MOBs as the server matures) and the actual geography might change (well there’s a forge object in the dungeon now, not huge, but still – we did that). It opens the game up to 100% pacifist play. I don’t want to fight, so I work as a solo player to befriend every NPC. At high levels, I have guards throughout every zone and if a group of players wants to pass peacefully through a tough hostile area, they can come to me as an intermediary to make the request on their behalf. Heck that’s a game that I could see my Quaker mom wanting to play!

I’ll go you one further, like DeLong says above: how about a disaster-relief game based on FEMA (no jokes!)? The Dept. of Defense (perhaps through DARPA) could fund the development of a MMORPG with various natural disaster or terrorist attack scenarios. Then they’d see how the players respond and use it to develop strategies. Use the intelligence of the swarm to help you predict responses.

Hi Raph,

Have you looked at Seed? It kinda fits your description. It’s in closed beta right now.

http://www.seedthegame.com

The premise is that the players are in a giant tower on a distant planet, delivered there by a colonizing ship. Many things have gone wrong, though, and the tower is constantly breaking down and people keep catching diseases from the world outside, which is very hostile.

It replaces standard combat with building repairs. Repair jobs spawn and players get “access points” for fixing them, which they can spend on better tools.

There is also medical research content planned, but i don’t think it’s implemented yet.

I thought this was a fascinating idea so I started kicking around what this MMO might look like — but the result wasn’t what I expected. Here is my high-level concept doc for the new MMORPG, “Doctorson Call.”

The world is the human body. You create a character that is, essentially, an immune system “good guy” — a white blood cell, a benevolent parasite, an antibiotic — there are many potential character classes.

The skill/talent trees? I don’t know — find a resident who can type 80 words a minute with two thumbs and uses the numerical keypad for half the characters in his e-mails, and you’ve found your technical consultant.

The number of “enemies” are as legion as human wounds / infections / illnesses. The newbie zones are simple stuff — splinters, sprains, a headache. Then maybe broken bones, fevers, and on up.

The zones are the parts of the body, which seems great. Come on, who wouldn’t love to travel from one region to another surfing on a blast of arterial pressure?

The “big boss” fights are easy too — smallpox, polio, the Black Death, AIDS… and whatever new nightmare we can dream up.

But guess what — I just thought myself around in a circle to kill, kill, kill again, except that now it’s malevolent microbes instead of malodorous Orcs. Is it any different at the end of the day? And maybe that’s the point of this blog posting?

If we accept conflict as the basis of character and plot, the simplest way to generate it is to make White Hats and Black Hats and then let loose the dogs. Ever since the first days of storytelling, that’s what has worked to hold audience interest.

Maybe the platform for the Healing Game is closer to a “toy” game (e.g. The Sims), where you’re messing around to see what you can do, than it is to standard MMORPG diku stuff.

Perhaps in the near future cheap MMO development platforms will permit all sorts of games to flourish that explore other aspects of conflict. I’m dying to see the first MMO based on raising rebellious teenagers, or freeing India from British rule, or negotiating business contracts with extra-terrestrials. All legitimate situations of conflict and yet all resolved (ideally) with minimal, rather than maximal, bloodshed.

Raph,
Yep that’s the one Food Force. For those that are curious, I’d highly recommend NOT installing it. It forces an install of certain elements that took me forever to clean up after I was done and thoroughly buggered up a bunch of stuff on my PC. It’s fixable, but not pretty.

I disagree that a healing-based game of the sort described would garner any sort of large following. As someone commented, it might appeal to a niche of people who find the “doctor” role appealing, but might not find the larger audience that war-oriented games find. In my opinion, “killing” as a basis for MMORPGs and other games is not exclusively a bad thing, or even a thing indicative of the violence of contemporary culture. If anything, it participates in an ancient tradition which glorifies battle.

From The Iliad, to medieval poetry like The Battle of Maldon, to Arthurian legends, to twentieth century fantasy novels, readers and listeners want to hear stories of mighty heroes and warriors. The trope of the epic battle, the us versus them or good versus evil fight, has such a powerful hold upon Western consciousness that it would be difficult or impossible for a game which is simply an inversion of that trope to catch on.

A “healing” game is merely the other side of the same coin: it’s akin to someone becoming a Satanist in order to reject Christianity, not realizing that both participate in the same mythology. Only something genuinely and completely different (and here’s where commenter’s references to Katamari Damacy are quite relevant) could both be satisfying and avoid feeling like a pale imitation or knee-jerk inversion of tradition.

For what it’s worth, I’m a twenty-something woman, and I would without question choose a game of orc-slaying over medical care.

While it’s not a CRPG, there is a tabletop/pen & paper RPG that starts from the same sort of inversion you’re talking about here: Dead Inside.

Taking the idea that the core concept of most RPGs is “kill people and take their stuff,” I designed “>DI around the idea of “heal people and give them your stuff,” throwing in a mystical/spiritual take rather than a medical one (since I was more interested in the spirtual effects of healing and growth than the simply physical).

It’s been fairly successful as a nanopress RPG, which is pretty neat.

CU

I think it’s a great idea. I played COH for almost a year. My main was an Elec/Healing Defender. The first few months were really fun. I found it much more rewarding to help other players than go beat up some purse snatching NPC. Other players knew they could count on me to make them more effective and in a way I was a power bonus with a cape. If things started to go bad I was the last one out, making sure everyone was at least standing. The thanks I got from my team mates for pulling their butts out of the fire just in time was real, not some scripted response from a bot, and it was rewarding.

Unfortunately, after a few months the type of players changed in COH. Players switched to solo play and only teamed to produce as much firepower as possible and the blind rush replaced tactics. Communication slipped to SMS style bursts of gibberish and the city was filled with ‘Heros’ that had no backstory with random names and even more random costumes.

By the time I dropped out of COH the advancement model was still narrowly focused on how much damage your hero can do. As I remember it from comicbooks, superheros spent alot more time saving people and each other than killing mobs.

This has already been done and I’m not talking the Trauma Center game already mentioned earlier.

Everquest 2 had a worldwide event where there was a plague that affected everyone. The event was to find the cure and involved a lengthy quest that at one point made it so you were immune and then eventually could make friends immune and finally your server was cured. It went over much like a sheep off a cliff. It did not so much fly as plummet. Though I will say a number of people did find it fun. One could make the argument that once it was discovered that the worldwide plague was merely an annoyance, the pressing need to cure it became not so pressing.

Most top raids in EQ2 involve a form of curing in that it’s not just heals but you have to actively cure various types of affliction from the tank and the rest of the raid or else everyone dies. I can see that would be more of the same type of heal tank in combat mechanic though and won’t press the point here.

Sorry to sound like an EQ2 Fanboi, but it’s my drug of choice and what I know best.

On a non fanboi related area there was a UN game not too long ago that showed you… er something, basically very non-violent, emergency intervention in feeding people, refugee camp set up, etc… The game itself was annoying as snot, poorly programmed, so simplistic that even if it was aimed at a very young target audience they’d have abandoned it out of boredom very quickly. However the core concept was very good. Find refugees, tag them for pickup/transportation, drop food (from the back of a moving cargo plane), a little simcity type thing going on at the end with a build a refugee village in such a way that it can sustain itself after 10 years (or some time period)…

I’d love to see a real development team pick that up and code it. Someone like Chris Taylor of Gas Powered Games picked that up and made a serious RTS style game out of it could be really really interesting.

I am a fifty year old woman. I have money and time on my hands. I WANT to get into gaming…but the titles and themes out there seem so bloody and death focused that I’ve been put off. But this game I could play! I would love to see adventure and mystery mixed up with something that didn’t end up an alien gore fest. The mystery solving and (shh…learning) would be wonderful.
My demographic has been totally ignored. And we are out here. We don’t need it dumbed down or prissy, we just want games that aren’t only about guns and killing mutants.
I was so excited to see this on Boing Boing that I came here to add my voice. Please make this game!!!

Many, like myself, who take the healer role in MMO’s do so not because we’re ‘playing a healer’. We do it because we enjoy the support role. We enjoy helping other players, not the act of surgery, or diagnosing an illness or creating a new cure.

I’m going to have to agree with this, and make it more complex — I originally played healer classes in EQ because the actual game play seemed richer, e.g. there was more to do. I also liked being in a support role, but it really wasn’t because I have a “will to heal” in a game per se.

I think the other posters are spot on when they say that simply changing the dressing on the same old mechanic doesn’t really change anything.

But I’ll expand the idea a bit — I’m down in New Orleans right now, sort of as a hanger on to a small study being done and man– it’s hard to come up with the right words, but I could see a skill based game based on a larger theme of disaster prevention and recovery. It could have a crafter component, direct helper roles, healer roles, organizational roles.

If you tie in terrorist attacks, it might actually have a broad enough appeal to make it actually publishable.

I Love this!!!

I always play healers and would love a more customised PvE system in games!!

The more I think about this idea, the more I love it.

Start with a premise: The world is broken. People are dying of sickness, of war, of famine. Things are falling apart. The world needs a hero, an army of heroes–not to kill the monsters, but to *fix the world*.

Now give the players the ability to do just that: To cure the sick, to overcome superstition and hatred, to stop the wars.

If that isn’t the most sublime piece of wish-fulfilment ever, I don’t know what is.

DAMN. Someone make this game. I’m serious.

The real answer is that people are bored with killing and healing alike.

When you change the paradigm to give people somethinng they really care about online, you’ll have your new ballgame.

we make money not art occasionally features alternative games, not the usual combat/car chase type stuff.

I play a EQ Cleric and have railed for years at the blindsightedness of the designers regarding the class. We exist for one purpose only…to keep the tank alive while he battles down the monster-boss. There has never been an instance where we win by “healing the monster to death.”

But I’ve often said, “Really…how hard would it be–even with the realms of EQ–to turn that on its head occassionally?” We don’t need an entire new game based on the concept, just work the idea into the existing ruleset…and it’s not really tough to do.

Instead of beating down the boss, what if our job was to *HEAL* him back to full health. But, of course, he’s afflicted with some hideous–and fast–wasting disease so we’d have to heal him, cure him, heal him….etc… to get him to full HP. BUT…there’s a hoard of semi-tough orcs (or whatever) trying to stop us from doing that….and for a change, it’s the tank’s job to support *US*! The tanks have to kill the orcs in order to protect the clerics so we can cast the spells that heal the boss so that he can live and give us our final reward.

It’s really not that tough of a concept, but MMORPG “designers” can’t imagine a move away from the kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, and for variety kill-some-more mentality.

So shouldn’t the gameplay mechanics and the game’s fiction be more interelated?

For example, I find that when a song’s lyrics match the tone of the song’s music, the song is more powerful.

Can this be applied to games? I think so.

To continue with the healing/combat theme, a game with the mechanics described in your post has a different tone, I believe, than the healer fiction you’ve created for it.

The gameplay itself should capture the spirit of healing, as well. I think this could be achieved in MMOs better if death was actually death.

So I suppose the question is, do the gameplay mechanics of combat systems capture the spirit of combat?

stuffedinjar said, “Wow. Another brilliant Koster idea. No wonder your eyes are brown.”

Was that a sarcastic jab at Raph, EverQuest 2, or brown-eyed people in general? If the latter, I take offense! En guarde.

taorist said, “Looks like something the UN/Red Cross would probably support.”

Paul said, “Actually the Red Cross would probably just add you to their list of computer game companies they are wanting to sue for using the Red Cross symbol without authorisation…”

The correct response to a legal threat by the Red Cross in that context is, “Let’s develop a Serious Game to help train Red Cross agents for field work.” Personally, I’d really like to work on a serious game. I foresee serious games redefining our perception of “fun” in a big, big way.

Cheap Ass Games has a board game called “Kill Dr. Lucky” in which the point of the game is to find Dr. Lucky and kill him without being seen by the other players.

Shortly after the creation of the game, a variant came out called “Save Dr. Lucky” in which the point of the game was to save Dr. Lucky in sight of the other players.

Oh, hey, and here’s a link to a review of a game that already does just that:

http://www.gamespot.com/gamespot/features/all/gamespotting/071103minusworld/1.html

I think there is alot of room for this dynamic. It’s one I hope we start to see and I think is “blinded” from western thought. We like combat and destruction. If we REALLY wanted to help people Africa would be a much healthier place instead of financing weapons for defense. But that’s a political digression…

I’m all for a game based on “constructivism” (versus “elimination” or “destructivism”). I think there are examples that are proof that they can work (albeit loose examples).

Someone here already mentioned “Trauma Center” , which is a successful execution of an operating room environment as a game. It takes a set of medical tools which are effectively “weapons” for fighting off whatever happens or has happened to the patient during your proceedure. This is woven with a story to create a somewhat interesting if not increasingly difficult game.

Another DS game working on this “constructivism” principle – albiet loosely – is wildly popular Animal Crossing “series” for the DS and Gamecube. The game is definitely more “commerce-centric” but alot of the games activities revolve around an interconnectedness to philanthropy (donating things to the museum, support local business, running errands for friends) on a reward schedule. The DS finally added the ability to practically visit other towns of friends and creating a seudo “Massive” sense in that you CAN connect to every other DS Animal Crossing owner through the net (that’s not to say it’s persistant, but it’s on the right track).

The Sims is very similar in fassion without the philanthropy. However The Sims is also enjoyed for more promiscuious reasons as it’s a more adult themed game if that’s what you’re after. I’ve done some pretty horrible things to those poor bastards myself, as it’s definitely fun to experiment with those “virtual social lab rats” (afterall Will Wright is a self-proclaimed ‘Social Engineer’ ).

I think the jist of it is that there is precident for this type of thing… but lets look outside of interactive entertainment for whether such “constructivist” material is commercially viable.

How about Reality Television? I know everybody loves it! ::eyeroll:: As lame as it can be, it’s a dominant segment of television production at the moment. While originally shows such as “Fear Factor” and other such programs focus(ed) on exploitation of people for the potential of financial gain or sometimes just for the heck of it, lately there has been a polar shift by some production companies to produce more positive (constructive) content. A good example would be “Extreme Makeovers: Home Edition”. It’s a sappy formulaic show that finds people who’ve had bad luck and make a good story of their bad situation. The gereral jist is that they get a fancy new house and a bunch of awesome stuff catered to their needs. While the show is massively repetative from episode to episode it’s wildly successful (I don’t have figures unfortunately, so just take my word for it). My personal opinion is that there is an audience for constructive material. There are alot of people who want to see good things happen for the APPARENT sake of goodness.

If this padigram works on the medium of broadcast television (which has an exceedingly larger audience than games do at this point) it seems to me that such games can most definitely work explicitly because destruction doesn’t rub everyone the same way. There’s definitely a mentallity that persists in 90% of game development right now that pokes the “Kill it, Fuck it, and Eat it!” primordial ape part of the brain. I think it’s changing a little, Nintendo has always tried to move away from this as their more of a “family-oriented” company (especially NOA). There’s proof of concept all around your feed.

If someone is smart, they’ll cash in on it and maybe they too can make games and have titles like “Philanthropical Engineer”.

Yeah, this game would be unique if that would be the only theme running in the game.

Looks like something the UN/Red Cross would probably support.

Why don’t we put a dash of finding food resources for the hungry and shelter for the homeless as well? The heroes would have to deal with all the red tape and corruption around them as a normal person would.

The hero/es could be from different baackgrounds. One a philantrophist, the others would be someone from the local community, etc. This would serve as their own reasons for being in the game. It will definitely affect the way they react in the game as well.

Cool idea!

I wonder if this could be tied into the “real” world. Could a person use a character (avatar) to display actual symptoms? Could medical advice be properly given?

Along with being entertaining, it might be a good learning ground for working on issues associated with telemedicine, simulating emergency situations and the like.

On the other hand — give me one good reason why this couldn’t be the gameplay of a healing class WITHIN the standard MMORPG. Give half the spawns to killers and half to healers!

Well if you put it into an existing game, you’ve sectioned off a part of the world exclusively for healers. That gets in the way of group play. Perhaps as some sort of healer quest, where keeping the NPC HP bar from dropping might be interesting, but how does one do that without just mashing the heal button over and over again? Well it could just be another gather stuff quest, but I think we’ve got those already. Maybe a realtime component could require a group to gather things while the healer mashes the button to buy them time? Hmm… could work, I guess. It would be nice to see quests that require/offer multiple players (complete with rewards for all their effort). What I would love to see is a way, other than trade skills, to advance a character without violence. I’d like to play in a world where diplomacy could be a reasonable path to wealth, fame and glory.

I would agree that ‘psychological’ reasons are why we haven’t seen this variation on the diku theme before. If Frodo had been a intern surgeon who had inherited a scalpel of great power and had to go on a journey to destroy this power in order to keep it from the hands of evil, well, maybe we’d be playing a different type of game.

And sure, you could split this off as a second paradigm for play in a new MMO. However then you’d run in the problem for creating content for both types of players, one type feeling themselves slighted since they got less content than the other, etc etc.

In other words, it would solve none of the problems that are plaguing modern MMO innovation.

The greatest player cooperation and shared skill in modern MMO’s comes from needing to coordinate healing with damage taken. Although it has become old hat, we need to encourage more teamwork, not seek to eliminate it in the name of diversity. There’s no reason for alternative means for success not to be a part of the next generation MMO’s. However, changing the superficial details doesn’t address these issues.

The models and mechanics of cooperative play is what needs to change if we want to see the solution to the ‘healer’ problem. It won’t be solved by giving them the same game play that has been growing stale since diku.

Have you played the CRPG Divine Divinity? There are quests that involve elements of healing the sick. The problem with modern RPG design for the MMO platform is that plot has been forgotten in favor of kill counts. Play Secret of Mana for the SNES. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a “quest” that involves the player finding a specific number of some item or killing some number of some creature, and then being rewarded. In fact, you’ll be hard-pressed to find essays of dialogue per character encounter a la World of Warcraft. The MMORPG is clearly ladder-centered, which is why I remain hesitant to accept MMORPG titles into the RPG genre. If I wanted to play a math game, I’d pick up a copy of Math Blaster.

I’m wonder when game designers will learn from Squaresoft and Hironobu Sakaguchi that successful and effective RPG design is characterized by story-driven gameplay, not mechanics. This should be common sense given the fact that successful IP isn’t built on numbers alone.

Why not make this game? That’s easy. The game would simply be similar to what games of the FPS genre have become: demonstrations of basic components. The first-person view has finally evolved to the third-person view, which is used in every recent MMORPG. The FPS genre is now simply a platform for developing and demonstrating high-end graphics technology.

In my opinion, integrating an advanced healing system into existing RPG architecture would produce far more effective results. A medic “class” in an MMORPG that involved the features you described would be a lot more fun than a game that focused on only medics… Integration and conflict with other character classes would provide a higher volume of entertainment value since players would need to adapt battle tactics to succeed. Hopefully, in this game “success” is not defined as “Heal X number of Players before X number of Creatures invade X number of Castle entrances to allow X number of Knights to defend X number of positions to enable X number of Nobles to escape through X number of exits.”

That’s just my opinion though.

I actually wrote a blog post a couple days ago about an idea for a multiplayer online game where the avatars are residents, just out of med school. It sounds a lot like what you’re describing.

Hey, it could be Trauma Center: Under the Knife Online.

“Let’s begin the operation, everybody!”

I do think it’s possible to make healing the core mechanic of a game, though, because healing is essentially preventing the loss of something you or others value. That’s a cold definition, but still.

As far as why a game like you described hasn’t been made… I would like to believe that people would find a game like that attractive, but would they?

I too would love to see more constructive games rather than the countless destructive games that already exist. Like Keita Takahashi, creator of Katamari Damacy, said–”I [don't] want to make a game about guns; there are plenty of those games already.”

I’ve thought for a while that this kind of inversion would make a great game. Not only in a MMO. It would work great in a singleplayer (SINGLEPLAYER! Let’s not start on that subject )

You could also do FPH’s where the player has the cure for the zombie outbreak and has to stop the zombie spread. Or operate to remove the alien parasite, rather than just blowing away the host.

And you’re right, its really just a case of renaming and effects, the actual gameplay is virtually identical for a number of “proven” genres.

-Matt Severin-