Ask HN: What game do you wish existed?

As a former Mormon, I can see that first idea being absolutely hilarious if implemented correctly. I'm imagining all sorts of increasingly absurd scenarios you could place the Mormon main character in and the kinds of jokes you could make, there's a lot of potential haha. Stuff like coffee and tea being special attacks that the bosses can use, or dialogue with lots of really unusual swear substitutions. I think letting the player die and having the degree of heaven they get into be based off of their score in-game could be a really hilarious feature.

I think mixing in just the right amount of janky ragdoll physics and glitchy NPCs would actually augment the game, and I could see it being a game that streamers and their audiences would find funny too.

There would definitely be some ultra-strict/traditional Mormons who would be offended by a game like this but I'd say the vast majority of the membership would find it quite entertaining.

Edit: Could call it Mormon Missionary Simulator to both give the game a slightly tighter focus/story and also indicate that it's part of the wider genre of "XYZ simulator" games that are often pretty absurd and funny.

coop game EXACTLY like wow (5/10/20) instances, with time runs, achievements and item progression, etc. and where you have to think very well your strategy in every pull.

edit: typo

With a sidekick called... Murty?

This (or, the experience you're looking for) is available now, by using compositions more suited to it and adjusting your play, but it does require departing from the meta (which I agree is over-focused on micro).

It tends to mean more: splash damage, retreating, turtling, bigger units, expanding, scouting, moving along side lanes. All of these work to get you more for your clicks.

There is a very real sense in which you can shrink your pool of tactics to those with "good UI", allowing you to play more abstractly, similarly to how you'd want expressiveness in a programming language. If you treat your strategic plan as an engineering solution, and then try to reduce moving parts and possible failure points...turns out that is in fact possible.

Retreating, for instance, is a much simpler (in the Rich Hickey sense) endeavor than attacking. It's just less likely to go wrong---fewer things behind you, simple movement rather than dismantling a defense, etc. Doesn't mean you should never attack, just that you should appropriately cost complexity when weighing your strategic options.

Splash damage lets you work on an area level rather than a unit level---another source of abstraction.

Expanding tends to give huge benefits per click compared to other things, and lets you afford bigger units which require less micro.

This doesn't come for free, you do have to play more conservatively and think outside the box ("moving along side lanes" is how you get space for free, which we are quite profligate about sacrificing when we retreat), but it's very possible.

Not exactly just a game, but the book from diamond age, A highly sophisticated interactive book: “Young Lady's Illustrated Primer: a Propædeutic Enchiridion”

It’s obviously a fiction summarizing all the knowledge and education we have freely available now online and to some extent social media, and an iPad might be pretty damn close if you get all the right things on it. But still, childrens games these days are all focused on optimizing for intense attention on mindless content and accidental clicks to purchase other games that do the same, or pressuring kids to pressure their parents to buy skins. I would love to have a “gaming” experience that instead focused on giving kids the opportunity to learn and use their knowledge in an immersive universe, and to support them in their development.