Today at work a friend was telling me about Dying Light, and I mentioned that all I really knew was that there was parkour and you could dropkick zombies. And the dropkicking zombies part got me thinking, and over my shift I designed the idea for a game called "In This Corner"
It'd be played by two players, with viewers playing as the audience, via livestream.
The players act as the commentators for a futuristic wrestling/death match league, the game creating fighters and a fight around what they say. It'd be set in three stages; The intro, the fight rounds, and the finisher.
The Intro has the players creating their fighters by giving their intoduction. So, if you said "In the red courner today we've got the prehistoric swordsman who can't be brought to extiction! Give a hand and a claw for Rexcalibur!" The game would pick up words like "Prehistoric" and "Swordsman" and make your fighter a dinosaur with a sword, or something. And then your opponent would do the same.
The fight would have a series of points where the game gives each player the chance to commentate some moves for the fighters to pull off, and make the fighters do whatever the game thinks that move would look like. There'd be three "rounds"where each player gets to name a move.
The audience would have a choice between each fighter during the intro and each "round" of the fight, and should choose whichever fighter got them the most hyped. The fighter that gets best out of the three rounds wins and gets to do a finishing move based on whatever that player decides to name it, like "Rexcalibur is about to destroy his opponent with his classic "Sword in the Stone-Age"! (Intro hype would be used as a tie breaker. Not sure what I'd do in the case of a total tie from an even audience.)
Now this is all basically bullshit that I could never implement, so alternative ideas would be that the game generates traits and lets you make an intro and fighter name for it. Then it generates a less scripted fight, and the players just commentate over that for like three minutes, and audience can click the hype button for either fighter whenever they get impressed. Then the game creates the finishing move and the winning player names it. That's all much more possible, but way less magical than my first idea.
I also like the idea that audience members could create their own set of fighter traits for their profile, then when a game starts that they're watching, it picks from audience fighters. So you could have the traits "dinosaur" and "swordsman", but it's up to the announcer what kind of fighter those traits become.