What would you like to see from Frictional next?

[superluser]

The thing about not being able to have children... I wouldn't buy that game, because you'd need to be some sort of bigot to not realize you can just adopt. My sexuality can't stop me from being a dad and not having some specific genes won't make my kid any less of my real kid.

That's all well and good, but there are many, many women who are driven by the incessant ticking of their biological clock. Sadly, I have yet to meet any of those women.

I originally had that written as ``fear of dying alone,'' but I did not want the two statements to be lumped together, since one is about dying and the other is more about living.

The fear of dying like your mother, though. That sounds interesting. Things as emotionally deep as that would prove really neat. I'm not entirely sure how it would transfer to gameplay, though. It would probably end up like one of those five minute Flash games about life you find every once in a while. Perhaps a commercial game, though, where you press F to not sit in a rocking chair and knit your grandson a sweater.

I remember reading Breakfast of Champions, where Kurt Vonnegut describes how his mother committed suicide, and his fear that he would kill himself the same way was tangible. He did try to kill himself the exact same way, but he proved himself stronger than that and lived until 2007 when he died of brain injuries following a fall. So it goes. I have a similar fear of dying not so much the same way my grandfathers died (each got lung cancer, and I refuse to smoke) as dying the same time the did (when I was in my mid teens). I later found out that one of my grandfathers was a huge fan of Vonnegut, and I feel very sad whenever I think of all the common interests that we would have had when I began to get interested in some of the things you aren't interested in as a dumb teenager, and I feel sadder when I contemplate the possibility of not being the sort of mentor my grandfathers could have been had they been alive.

I don't know how you turn that into a game, but those sorts of fears are perfect for immersion into a game.