If you haven’t heard of it yet, Kickstarter is currently the largest funding platform to creative projects in the world. It’s the kind of site that you can sink hours into looking at all the incredible proposals people have. If you find something you like, you can “kickstart" it by throwing some money at the project. Each project has rewards to thank those who fund the project and one of the lower-rungs of the funding ladder usually involves getting a copy of whatever game/movie/product/etc is being proposed. It’s a great system, and I really recommend looking into it if you’ve got some extra cash and want to support some great projects.
Anyway, something that caught my eye today was a project called “Tweet Land – The first set of games that play with reality!“. It’s a really cool idea, and it’s already well on its way to meeting its funding goal. The basic premise is to release a series of iOS (and web) games that use tweets to create events in the game:
The game works really simple. Every time someone in the world tweets something, his or her tweets could affect the gameplay of Tweet Land by triggering certain action-keywords. It could be a “car accident" in your racing game, it could be your hate-gun gets reloaded in the action game, it could be anything.
I think what sounds so cool about this is that I’ve been a huge fan of randomized games on the platform. Various roguelikes, endless runners, and others games that are different every time you play them really appeal to me. Using the real world as a “random" event generator seems like such an amazing idea. Although, thinking about it, the real world really is far more random than any random number generator ever could be. Chew on that for a bit.
The down-side of all this Kickstarter business is that since we’re essentially being pitched a concept, it could take quite a while for that to actually materialize into a game. Regardless, I’m excited.
