If I were Peter Molyneux 12

A stealth game set in a school, where the player character is a student trying to mastermind the successful saving of a teacher’s career and the dismissal of another teacher who is deliberately conspiring to hurt the first teacher. As a student, the PC doesn’t have a lot of options for manipulating the events of the teachers, meaning that the player has to turn to distinct methods of trickery! The game would break down into four distinct stealth modes.

First, successfully infilrtrating an office or school site after hours, avoiding the night security of the school, to obtain evidence against Bad Teacher or to prevent some planned disaster for Good Teacher. This would provide hacking and lockpicking mini-games while trying to circumvent the paths of guards, primarily visible through the use of their flashlights in the dark of the school.

Cheating during exams, which involves waiting for the auditors for the examination to move past desks, then slide notes from one student to another while the auditors aren’t watching. Some students copy information at different rates, and some are more nervous than others, meaning they need the notes earlier in the exam. Some students are resistant to cheating, and if passed the notes early, will call the teacher. As the term progresses and the characters come to resent Teacher B and conspire with the player for Teacher A’s sake, the students become more willing to help.

The third part would be for rare scenes when the player character needs to help smuggle a television or a large prop out of the school and into the carpark or the lockers of Bad Teacher or Good Teacher for narrative reasons, and therefore the PC has to spend their time moving around the school causing small distractions to create a pathway for the other players to work around the ‘guards’ – prefects, gossippy students, actual security guards and teachers.

Finally, some of these events will need to be reactive to Bad Teacher, but some will need to be planned to coincide with important events for Good Teacher – things like making sure that the cheating comes up when they are on holiday, or deliberately getting caught doing something wrong under the Bad Teacher’s watch so as to reflect on their teaching methodology.

This idea has been sitting in draft for a while, but was spurred to posting by this Extra Credits episode. Most stealth games are defined by their framing devices, where stealth is necessary as a way to overcome an overwhelmingly superior force – while often the threat is lethal, I wondered; why not make the threat one of punishment and authority, not one of actual death?

5 Comments

  1. I wonder if kids often use their phones to record their teachers these days.

  2. premmylmost perfectly describes the stealth segments and the Mr. Hatrick/Drunk teacher who’s name I forgot story line in Bully.

  3. I hate typing on this tablet.. What I meant was:The Rockstar game Bully ( basically GTA but with kids)has almost all of what you’re describing, minus the test cheating mini games and the teamwork aspects, Jimmy did most of these thiings by his lonesome

    1. Huh! Interesting. I didn’t go near Bully, because, well, it’s Rockstar and it’s not 2D.

      1. It’s far from the central premise of the game but it’s certainly more interesting than vanilla GTA due to the lack of serious death and such(still plenty of violence,though) making the sandbox experience feel more jusified.

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