ROB - A Short History of Nearly Everything

I just finished A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson for the 3rd time. It's obviously one of my favorite books. This book is chocked full of inspirational topics: the vastness of space, the geology of Earth, meteor impacts, the dawn of life, how a cell works... there is just so much to take in. The really outstanding part to me is the personalities of the past geniuses who discovered these things; the juxtaposition of their human eccentricities and their immensely important discoveries.

What are the gaming takeaways? A puzzle game about how DNA replicates? That would end up being a bit too simple. A sim game balancing important scientific discoveries and the pettiness of human actions? Eh, that might be like Civ will all the fun taken out. Plus all these scientist rarely, if ever, went to war.

As stupid as this might sound, when I read about these people I was reminded of the movie Real Genius. Incredibly brilliant people playing pranks and sabotaging others' work; work that could reshape the world completed in an environment of people acting like children.

If you combined a tech discovery system (resources, time, trees, equip slots, combining, etc.) with some systems for incredibly petty pranks (traps, shooting, sneaking, resource competition, sabotage) you could capture essence of this ideal.

It would be nice to take the player characters down to school kids on the playground or remove the human elements and make them an Ewok-like race of incredibly smart pranksters.

Goals could center around out pacing your neighbors or just reaching a certain tech first.