These meters are pretty cool. Let's not just restrict them to the player. Let's introduce the concept of rivals.
A rival is an NPC who is pursuing the same set of meters you are. Let's say that whenever you reach a meter's threshold, a new rival is introduced. He's at the same threshold as you and his goal is to beat you to the next threshold on that meter. So when you hit 40 on Infamy, we introduce Johnny Stumpkin, rising thug, who is also at 40 Infamy. Let's say we can introduce a rival within any Bank Robbery, New Partner Deal, or Business Extortion action you take. Those encounters have a slot where a rival can be slipped in, triggering a short non-fatal confrontation where he robs the bank just as you arrive, or kills the new partner, or firebombs the business just after you extort it. In these encounters the rival screws you over, announces himself, and splits with his own personal thugs. Until you reach 60 Infamy, Johnny Stumpkin will keep causing you trouble.
We'll customize the standard content to include this rival's agenda: For example, when a street thug takes a shot at whacking you, there's a good chance we'll make that thug one of Johnny's goons. Meanwhile, Johnny is pursuing his own goal of reaching 60 Infamy and he has the same options you do - only your holdings are part of his list of valid targets. If the Johnny NPC decides to steal a car, there's a chance he steals one from you. If he wants to rob a bank, we'll make it a bank in the neighborhood where you currently are. Johnny will haunt you and dog your trail until you manage to kill him - which is really, really hard - or until you beat him to 60 Infamy. If you do that, Johnny's thugs desert him and you can take him out easy. But if he beats you, he becomes substantially more powerful and continues striving to beat you all the way to the top.
One of the concepts I'm using above is the notion that any of the standard encounter types, such as a bank robbery or a carjacking, can have a wild card. I'd really want to run with this idea. The standard templates for all these things should have a couple of random points where things may or may not happen differently. If you're doing an Influence deal, your new partner may give you a task such as firebombing somebody's business before he'll complete the deal. That's a possible twist on the Influence encounter. But that firebombing encounter may have its own twist: The target belongs to your current Wealth rival and his beefed-up thugs will make the job tougher. So these wild cards aren't just random events; they're slots into which other currently active dynamic systems can plug into. As these connections get made, the world comes alive. Everyone has an agenda and every action has consequences.
I Could Go On
There are plenty of problems with taking this approach, but we aren't going to solve them by sticking to our static, level-by-level content.
My GTA example is a big, sprawling project meant to show how you could do a giant AAA project with this approach. But scale down those ambitions and the presentation and you could turn that into a Harvest Moon-style game about running a happy little farm, or a game where you're a circus ringmaster who needs to keep the audience on the edge of their seats by deftly summoning the right acts at the right moments and responding to the energy of the crowd. You can make games a lot cheaper, a lot more pick-up-and-play, and a lot more responsive to the player's will.
I have two final points here.
One is that we don't need to make virtual books and be auteurs. We can make experiences. That's what Wii Sports and Carnival Games and Settlers of Catan are: simple, repeatable experiences that can be picked up, enjoyed, and put down until later. They don't need the plodding tread of level content weighing them down. They're games made by game designers, not auteurs who can't get their fantasy novel published.
My other point is that the way to make dynamic content work is to make dynamic content work. We advance by building on what the last guy did. We need more studios trying this approach so that the next round of games can learn from their successes and mistakes and take this further and make it better.
Valve just threw down a gauntlet with Left 4 Dead. Who's next?
John Scott Tynes is a game designer who wishes he had the time to be a modder, because that's where the action is.
