Design Motivations

 

Genre

New World mythologies of pirates and privateers, western gunslingers, space exploration, and post-catastrophe settings are ideal for computer role playing games. They distill human societies to their most basic, tribal forms, allowing for expansive worlds that are relatively easy to model. Stripped of law and social order, they are perfect for exploring the development of ethics, culture, and characters. And by fusing ancient, modern, and futuristic conditions, they gain a timeless, paradoxical quality; able to confront contemporary issues free of historical and technological constraints.

 

Post-apocalyptic worlds envisioned in fictions such as Fallout, Mad Max, and Six String Samurai, are unique amongst these myths in that the frontier is replaced by our own homeland transformed into an alien landscape. Like a collective out-of-body experience, this lets us see ourselves from a distance without losing any immediacy of the often discomforting content.

Format

Role-playing games like no other genre allow us to walk in the shoes of someone or something other than ourselves—with all the benefits and drawbacks. The beauty of pen-and-paper role-playing in particular is how personal and mutable the experience is, developing into fantastic stories written purely by the players' decisions. Ground Zero focuses on this improvisational aspect, the consequences of player decisions in a responsive framework that offers equal demand for a wide variety of persona.

Inspirations

The core mechanics and interface of Ground Zero are inspired by many pen-and-paper and tabletop-like games: Fallout, Shadowrun, Rifts, X-Com, Syndicate, etc. The world framework itself is built in the tradition of frontier-trading games (e.g. Elite and Sid Meier's Pirates!) for their procedural network of economically connected locations and occupational freedom, combined with abstract world simulation games such as Civilization to govern the actual interactions between factions, cities, and organizations.

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