I wish there was a game people could play that would train them to become successful entrepreneurs.
Here's the Apple 2 version of Oregon Trail:
http://www.virtualapple.org/oregontraildisk.html
Here's the source code to the original version of the game, called "Westward Ho!"
http://www.atariarchives.org/bca/Chapte ... wardHo.php
Here's an online version of Westward Ho!
http://www.apolitical.info/webgame/westward/?fr=
- what are the strategic decisions that top executives can make? (eg Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Bezos) Maybe use Felix Dennis' list of reserved actions as a start: Acquisitions, deciding how to spend their own time (micromanaging or thinking big-picture), hiring, having fun, etc.
- train people to gradually network their way to the top VCs and talented people, just like Marc Andreesen said in his interview with NY Mag in Oct 2014. Train people to spend their money on books to learn more, train people to spend time uploading videos that show them building cool stuff, train them to spend time on their resume, train them to spend time practicing their interviewing ability (coding challenges)
- train people to spend a lot of time UP FRONT preparing and planning out their big ideas, because once you have a ton of people around you things just get hectic and it can be a lot harder to think (like when I was directing for WIRED, or directing those short films).
- you need to train people to NOT just constantly accumulate new skills but to SHIFT from learning new skillsets to devoting their time toward a SINGLE project that would has the potential for profit. It's really a big shift in mindset. Or maybe have the person able to study both things at the same time.
- have people fill out information about themselves at the beginning, and then tailor the game to their problems. The fun of the game will be allowing people to imagine the different directions their real life could take, depending on their decisions. So ask questions like, "Have you ever had a cold-calling job? How many hours would you estimate you spent on the phone with people?" or "How much do you weigh? How tall are you? What's your BMI?" or
- train people to understand how to make a product attractive. Have them collect candy wrappers, beer packaging,
- train people to write down their ideas and keep them organized like george carlin
- I definitely want people to be able to choose how long the game will be. I think 10 mins is as short as I can make it. Maybe time your DiceWars games to see how long they take and use that as a lower bound. The longest games would probably just be limited by the mechanics of the game. You could maybe even do a 1-ingame-day-to-1-reallife-day game. But the easy-to-access options should all be fun. Less-fun options should be offered as hidden extras that can be unlocked.
- make the game length range from 10 mins to an hour, kind of like a game of Starcraft. Or maybe make it stretch out for longer, like Civilization or the Sims. Maybe offer the player to play either option.
- allow the player to allocate a portion of their time to reading books. Maybe even track all the different books (this would be a more advanced feature).
- give people the option to get a job as a cold-caller or retail job or street vendor job on the weekends. See the book "Growing a Business", pp156-157
- have players improve with the 5 aspects of tradeskill defined in "Growing a Business": 1) persistence, 2) the ability to face facts, 3) the ability to minimize risk, 4) the ability to be a hands-on learner, 5) the ability to grasp numbers
- maybe: have people die from being f**ked in the ear (as a reference to Mark Zuckerberg's use of that phrase)
- hunt bugs, where you're just looking for closing curly braces
- have your crew travelling from NYC to Silicon Valley, w/ a certain # of miles and a certain # of hours before they'll reach success and the valley
- theme music: The Son of Flynn by Daft Punk. have a very subtle loop taken from that so it won't be annoying to have it looped at the menu screen.
- ask people from silicon valley for inside jokes to put in the game
- have people pay for a second installment; have people sign up for an email list before you make the second installment so you can let them know when it's done
- fill it with simple fun minigames
- make the game go month-by-month
- allow the player to choose how many hours a day he will work on his project
- have the person take a cold-calling job (like Dell) to get experience on the phone.
- have the person have to decide how much time to spend reading online interviews with successful businessmen vs. working.
- allow the player to hold different kinds of jobs to make money, or to not have any job and live off savings
- allow the player to choose to live in different places (eg expensive apartment, cheap apartment, on his friend's couch)
- make it so that if a person spends too much time on the project they have begin to have less imagination about ways to improve it...I'm assuming this would happen in r/l, but maybe not.
- ask for feedback from successful tech guys to see if there's anything grossly misleading about the game
- make a survey for people to fill out so they can play with a character very close to their real attributes, instead of taking on another persona.
- ask people how much savings they have (in the realistic version).
- simulate the need to diversify your stock holdings to prevent your fortune from disappearing when the market tanks
- simulate the stock market, demand for IPOs, and supply of venture capital for start-ups. if the market crashes before your company makes it big, you're screwed!
- it'd be awesome if you could play a real-life version of the game; it'd be like the Hardcore mode of Diablo 2. You could hook up the game to your actual bank account or mint.com account so that the game tracks how much you've actually spent on stuff.
Allow people to collaborate with you to make this game:
- add version control or something
Make an awesome video showing you going back in time:
- start out in the present day
- have a timeline at the bottom that gradually goes back
- show all the things that have happened between now and 1998. have them moving backwards.
- use wikipedia to get all the events that happened in each year