Game design: Metaversity

Short pitch: A dynamic massive multiplayer educational game benchmarked off of educational testing standards (GED, SAT, ACT, GRE, 0-term, E-term etc.)

Goal: to provide a self-paced and dynamic learning environment for anyone with internet access.

Risk/reward: successful completion of puzzles increases subject proficiency score and earns points. failure to complete a puzzle decreases score.

Points: can be used to "buy" courses in non-standard fields, decorate personal avatar space, buy user-created content, buy increases in range of sociability.

Range of sociability: To emulate the geographic properties of academia, users can "buy in" to areas. County, State, Region, Nation, individual foreign countries*.

    *buying into foreign countries will be difficult to impossible unless also passing a basic language and history exam

Level/play heirarchy: Users will group up via social areas and enter dungeon-style puzzle sets based on the user's known statistics and desire for improvement.

For example:

A new user enters their level of education and academic desires:

    Timmy: 4th grade

        Plan: complete 4th grade

     James: 9th grade

          Plan: graduate high school and go to college

They then play a solo dungeon based on their data. Each room has a variety of puzzles. There is no time limit, but time spent at each puzzle is monitored to gauge level of difficulty. Subjects monitored to take little time will increase difficulty. Subjects monitored to be difficult will decrease in difficulty to a point and then gradually increase.

    Timmy:

        Room 1: arithemetic, spelling

        Room 2: logic, reading comprehension.

        Room 3: grammar, history

        Room 4: science, reading comprehension recall

        Room 5: pattern recognition, arithmetic

        Room 6: grammar, arithmetic

        Room 7: history, reading comprehension

        etc.

    James: Subject pool:

           Math: arithmetic, algebra, trigonometry, geometry, pre-calculus, calculus

           Science: scientific procedure, biology, ecology, physics, chemistry, Circuit design

           Computer Science: HTML, Java, computer heirarchy,

           English: punctuation, conjugation, syntax, clause identification, styles of debate and rhetorical logic

           *History: Greco-Roman, Ottoman, Imperial, American, WWI-II, Russian, State(x), etc.

                (*Historical tests can be based on required standards of regions and interest-based tracking could be based on wikipedia search history)

    *Solo practice test dungeons for various standardized exams could be made very easily.

Non-dungeon content: team-designed instances would be designed by the design staff, in order to create a historically (somewhat) accurate account of advancements in thought.

     ex: Led discussions by Aristotle, Plato. Following Newton through development of calculus, physics. Building rockets with Robert Goddard.

Multiplayer:

Groups of people can complete dungeons faster than those alone, earning far more points. In multiplayer each puzzle has a difficulty rating visibly attached to it, allowing the users to quickly identify which puzzle in the room suits them best. Players will be significantly penalized for taking  lower-level puzzles.

Johnny99 is studying for the SAT

He has achieved good aptitude at level 12 math problems and level 9 English problems

Janey00 is studying for the GRE

She has achieved level 15 math, and level 11 English

Room 1: level 12 Math, level 11 English

Room 2: level 15 Math, level 9 English