abandoned ideas 1

I was looking at my folder where I keep my stories. Mostly, if I'm generous, I can say that they're all work in progress. The reality is more that many of them have been, if not abandoned, then moth-balled indefinitely.

I though I might do some posts covering some of these ideas, just for the hell of it.

Mall Games

The idea of this was it was a mall where, in order to buy thing, you had to go on raids and shoot your way through to the item and then to the checkout. So if you wanted to buy some toilet rolls you'd have to blast your way through to aisle 15 or whatever and then get to the checkout where you would pay and go.

I still like the idea - it has some potential as either a comedic thing or an ironic thing, or even as a satire. The problem is that the framework for it seemed never to come together.

At one point it was a virtual thing. In order to go shopping you logged in and the combat was virtual. But then, how would that work? If it's virtual it's like so what? There's no real danger - are you playing the game to get discount coupons or something? And why go to all that trouble just for a pack of toilet rolls? Plus it's compulsory or what? And what's the underlying story - what are the character arcs?

The other way is it was real, but again what's the framework? And what's with the checkouts? You have to kill your way through just to buy toilet rolls? And there are checkout staff to let you buy your toilet rolls you just killed 5 people to buy?

It kinda didn't make any real sense.

I did come up with a couple of possible other ideas to it, though. If it was virtual there could have been a conspiracy that actually you were controlling real people and they got killed where you were safe. This seemed a little impractical - where do all the bodies go? And where do they come from? It's also a bit "running man".

The other idea was that it was following a young kid and maybe it was some sort of tournament. Maybe a lethal version of Supermarket Sweep? This was the closest to coalescing into a story, but again there were things that didn't quite make sense.