Games That Need To Be Made: Ender's Game: Battle School

There are some books that are just destined to be converted into movies. Sadly, such conversions are often awful, but that is a completely different article. In the same way, some books and movies are destined to be converted into games and sometimes game franchises. Lord of the Rings is one such book that has made the jump to the big screen and the computer screen in several flavors. Star Wars continues to spawn new games, and even Sherlock Holmes has gotten in on the act.

But some stories that beg for quality game treatment just haven't yet made the jump. One such potential gem is Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. More specifically, Battle School.

Ah, Battle School. How has this not been brought into gaming yet? It could well be the absolute ultimate in competitive PvP. Take two teams of 40, each wearing special space suits and carrying a light gun. Place them in a large cubic room with no gravity. If you can hold the beam of that light gun on an opponent's suit for a few seconds, you freeze that part of the suit. Freeze enough of the suit, and you've basically turned that opponent into an object lesson in Newtonian Laws of Motion. The goal is to freeze the other team while keeping at least five members of your own team active, four to activate your team's goal and the fifth to pass through the goal for the win. Oh, and feel free to toss as many or as few obstacles into that gravity-free chamber as you like.

Easy to learn, yet difficult to master. Obvious professional and amateur league play potential. I do not think it is an overstatement to say this could be the digital equivalent of basketball, and the tech exists to do it right and to do it right now.

So let's get on it! Hopefully any copyright issues can be resolved quickly and a developer can be found who would not feel the compulsion to sully Card's masterpiece of competitive simplicity with extra junk. Let individual skill and team strategy shine. There are no balance concerns, no classes to learn, to complex objectives that change with each map. The rules are simply, the objective is obvious, and the game play would blend the strategy of chess with the speed and power of hockey. This is a gold mine just waiting to be tapped, and I have to think somewhere in the industry is a publishers willing to tap it.

Some games just beg to made. Let's hope for Battle School, the time will come soon.

Competitive Gaming, Take Two!

PvP tournaments are old news these days. The professional gaming circuit has its own official league, is sometimes seen on such mainstream networks as ESPN, and has generally become accepted as commonplace in the gaming world. Amateur tournaments are no longer the exclusive domain of private LAN parties, but are held in bars and gaming stores around the country. If you haven't seen one in your area yet, look harder. PvP tournaments are fairly commonplace these days.

PvE tournaments, on the other hand, almost do not exist. Player vs Player gaming lends itself naturally to competition, but not so much for Player vs Environment gaming. Just about the only realistic way to run such a tournament would be to have players (or groups of players) clear a portion of content while being timed. Think of it as the gaming version of skiing's giant slalom, only with better graphics and no frostbite. I strongly suspect there is a market for such tournaments. Anything we enjoy doing we also enjoy paying to watch other people do better. See NASCAR and Major League Eating if you don't believe me. That's not to say that PvE tournaments will be come as popular as a high speed exhibition of the fine art of making left turns, but there is likely a market that would be interested in competitive PvE, could such a beast be tamed.

And the taming may have begun. A game convention in Germany later this month will include a timed run of Ulduar, the newest and hardest World of Warcraft dungeon. The competing guilds will not be running the most difficult version of the dungeon, but when was the last time you saw a giant slalom set up on an extreme slope?

Quite frankly, I don't care who wins this tournament. I don't care how they win, or what the time will be or what strategies will be used. What I am waiting to see is the popularity of the event. Am I right in thinking there is a market for competitive PvE? We'll get an inkling of the answer later this month.