Funky

What I’ve been mulling over is essentially a gag game using the following video as a premise:

The central gag of the video being that the super-advanced future AI could easily solve our societal ills and bring peace and prosperity to all, but it only came back in time to up the funk, so to speak. 

I’d like to create a fun scored Inform 7 game with FunkBot 10,000 as the central character. The player is confronted with, at first, relatively simple situations, like, “Oh, no! My sheep have run amuck! FunkBot, won’t you help me gather my sheep?” to situations of increasing gravity and moral and ethical weight as you continue. Each time, they’re given various options for helping or resolving the increasingly complex issue, as well as an option to instead just break out into a funky jam. 

Ostensibly, you could go through the each step and gather the sheep and help everyone and solve world hunger, and save the world, etc, etc, and the game’s puzzles will actually get pretty difficult as the seriousness increases. Although, completing each of these challenges grants you no points and, after fixing everything, you “lose” the game due to lack of funk, even though the epilogue acknowledges that due to your influence humankind moves into an unparalleled period of peace and prosperity, sadly bereft of funk, however.

If you decide to funk out instead, you gain points each time, a different funk tune plays audibly, and people increasing surround you and celebrate your funkiness, as, in the background, each of those individual situations goes terribly awry due to your negligence.

If you keep choosing to funk out, you garner a very high score (with little to no effort or puzzle solving, but perhaps an increasingly troubling weight on your conscience) amidst throngs of cheering fans as the planet literally burns around you. The epilogue acknowledges that Earth descends into an apparently endless apocalyptic (yet, super-funky!) hellscape of biblical proportions. 

You win! Congratulations! The credits roll with the audio of the video above rolling in the background.

To pull this off right, the tone has to be nailed correctly right from the start so you can get away with satirical mayhem. You would need to be conscious of how you frame things. It has to be comically over the top, like “Funkbot, we need to rescue the children in the burning orphanage!”.