Welcome to the first installment of Reality Bytes, a new series here at MMOMFG.com.  Ever had an experience, visited a new place, or read a news story that you thought would make for a great video game?  With Reality Bytes we’ll report on dispatches from the real world that get our creative gaming juices flowing.  At times serious, other times comical, and always creative, this series will serve as a soapbox atop which we’ll air new ideas and innovations inspired by real life.

Not sure if you’ve heard, but there’s a recession going on; many are out of work, spending is down, businesses are suffering, babies are crying…nearly all the time.  It’s also a global crisis, with wallets thinner and belts tightening all over the world.

One area of global commerce hit particularly hard is the shipping industry.  With people buying less across the world, movement of goods is down and shipping companies simply have less to ship.  The most interesting result?  A freaking ghost fleet off the eastern coast of Singapore:

Back in September, Simon Parry of The Daily Mail filed a piece revealing just this: a fleet of cargo and container ships anchored off the coast of Singapore with no cargo, no crew, no shipment to deliver.  The fleet floats still, dirtying the water and frightening the locals.  The article paints this as a metaphor for the global recession, a picture of how far things have fallen.  But on the very surface, this just looks amazingly creepy.

My initial reaction to this article was not one of economic fear, it was simply “Someone should make a video game about this.”  I imagine it as a terrific setting for a survival horror game.  The ships have turned the waters to a “dark, soupy green” with a “suspicious smell,” according to Parry.  He quotes a native fisherman: “They are like real ghost ships and some people are scared of them. They believe they may bring a curse with them and that there may be bad spirits on the ships.”

Let me set the stage -imagine a foggy, murky sea, a mile or so off a rural tropical coast.  Your character has been sent to investigate reports of a fleet of abandoned ships.  As your rickety rowboat cuts through the fog, the dark and giant shape of a tanker ship emerges from the mist ahead. Venturing further forward, your skiff slices through water laden with ribbons of oil and fuel, between cargo ships and tankers of all sizes swaying and creaking spookily.  Your tanned and toothless guide pulls the boat up to a ladder descending the side of one ship and you start to climb.  Turning back to tell your guide to wait here, you find he’s already paddling away, leaving you stranded in the middle of a fleet of empty ships.  But how empty are they really?

That’s the kind of creepy atmosphere and setting I’m envisioning.  Hell, maybe you are Simon Parry, sent to a far corner of the world to investigate rumors of a ghost fleet.  That’s him in the image to the left – everyone say hello to our protagonist.  Perhaps, instead of finding a symbol of the economic apocalypse, you find bad spirits, slaughtered corpses, sinister plots, et cetera.  I enjoyed Dead Rising, playing as a journalist tasked to gather evidence and expose something for the greater good – so the journalist storyline kinda works.  However I’d axe the action for a heftier slice of scary; I’m thinking Alan Wake psychology meets Dead Space spooky atmosphere meets Resident Evil 1 and 2 problem solving.

When I first read Parry’s story, it interested me to no end.  It’s a long one too, so my employer lost out on about 20 minutes of productivity.  It really struck me as something right out of a movie and popped 2002’s Ghost Ship into my head – what a crap flick that was.  However, that movie was confined to just one ship and I enjoy the medium of video games over that of motion pictures.  I’m convinced that this topic would be a great game – especially if packaged into a survival-horror title like I described above.  This thing would go nowhere as a Hollywood film, but it’s got legs as a game!

Simon Parry’s story is real, providing the world with a starboard side view of the true effects of the global recession.  And the recession is real, bringing much hardship to many families around the world.  But as a gamer, I can’t help but view the world through XBOX-green tinted glasses sometimes.  The setting I’ve described hits me as a dead ringer for a sweet game, simply put.  Publishers, studios: I hope you’re reading this.  If you like it, and need a writer, look me up.  Who knows, I could be the next casualty of the recession.

How did you like our first installment of Reality Bytes?  Did you find it interesting?  A cool concept?  Or maybe plain silly?  Let us know in the comments section, we’d love to hear your feedback on what we hope to make into a regular segment on MMOMFG.com.

Images courtesy of The Times Online, copyright Richard Jones/Sinopix.

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