NINJA
Game Pitch developed at professional game studio
Game Concept
Mechanics Design
Mechanics Systems Design
Art Direction
Ninja is a concept for a Synthesis game where players play as a team of ninjas to gather and piece together conflicting information into truth: the locations of hidden ministers, in large cityscapes inspired by Edo-era Japan.
Art Generated in Midjourney
Synthesis is a company that makes complex, collaborative problem-solving games for students between the ages of 8 and 14 to play in teams.
I worked at Synthesis for about 2 years as a mentor for teams of kids who tackled challenges together weekly, while also working in game design and scenario design for bespoke systems in the Synthesis games.
The objectively difficult challenges along with the inherently collaborative nature of the games, work unreasonably well.
They develop critical thinking, mental resilience, and communication in kids at such a formative age and the benefits only compound with time.
NINJA competed against dozens of other internal game concepts and was greenlit to be one of the future games in the Synthesis roster. It accurately upheld the credo of an innovative Synthesis game and was chosen for it's potential to help young students gain implicit knowledge in a very crucial real-world system: information and the epistemology of knowledge (how we know what we know).
Ultimately, due to a limitation of engineering resources and other parallel projects, the game was shelved but the learnings and ideas from the time spent in developing NINJA still exist in the genealogy of the Synthesis creative process.
The Outcome & Impact
About Ninja
At the beginning of the game, locations of the ministers are randomly generated and assigned to a co-ordinate address on the game map. The location is then shared among the highest authorities of each House and then, pre-simulated to spread through the entire populace of citizens with some basic rules of variance (think like in Telephone, where truth mutates the further you go from the source).
After every citizen in the map has a version of the truth, players fan out and collect bits of the ministers' addresses. Players can rely on a piece of information only by cross-checking it with multiple reliable sources (i.e. the highest ranking authorities of the Houses). This requires players to track the daily routines of citizens, observe who they are close to and where they may have sourced their truth from.
Through NINJA, we hoped to explore themes of how news and misinformation spread, and how different people's perspectives differ based on who they trust - but also the idea of truth itself - that it is validating a guess through testing, rather than justifying beliefs through a higher authority.
The behavior of the population would also change between day and night, making it possible to use different strategies at different times.
NINJA is inspired by the sprawling cities of ancient Japan - the endless latticework of houses and buildings were a setting I was always drawn to. I emphasize the inspiration here, because it came from an unexpected source: archived Japanese maps. This is how I learned that game inspiration can come from anywhere.
The concept of NINJA was to fit inside the existing library of games at Synthesis. As such, it would have to closely mirror a real-world system such that young students could reflect upon and exapt their game experiences, towards growth in their real lives.
The Inspiration
I proposed NINJA with the intent that students would play as truth-seekers, who have to critically evaluate the information they gather along the way. A bustling populace of locals with affinities to Houses, would fill the cityscape making it a dense and challenging space to navigate.
I had to envision how Information would change to become more and more inaccurate the further it spread from the source.
I devised a system based on citizen relationships - citizens would be assigned random traits out of a total set, and if any two individuals had matching traits, they would "interact" and information would flow between them. The amount of information conveyed would change depending on the strength of their "bond" i.e. the fewer matching traits they had, the more the information would be miscommunicated, while with more matching traits, the information would maintain integrity as it flowed.
The player ninjas would observe citizen routines and their movements between House headquarters and city hotspots. In order to learn who they are close to, ninjas would notice key interactions and aim to discover strong bonds. The player could interrogate citizens or collect unrelated knowledge which would they could instead, directly get closer to more influential citizens in the hierarchy.
On Mechanics and World-building
Through the course of working on NINJA, I also devised the underlying systems to support the game’s mechanics. This was with the hopes of enabling endogenous (intrinsic to the game) mechanics that were in line with the behavioral outcomes we wanted to surface in students. Thus, by abstracting as much as possible, the original intent was preserved and game design, rather than gamification was achieved.
To conclude,