Robo-Joe Test Drive (rough sketch)

I just finished reading an article in this month's Harper's magazine about the coming robot soldiers. Good article, very inspirational. And lo, I was inspired.

Here's my rough idea for RoboJoe Test Drive, or RSTD.

The characters are all prototype programs for a new humanoid fighting robot designed for counterinsurgency warfare in urban settings. After considerable virtual testing and modelling, DARPA and the US Marine Corps have decided the best way to test these programs is by downloading them into robots and letting them actually do missions in a future Third World battlefield. It's most cost-effective to use an actual war zone as the war zone simulator.

Chargen is random and iterative -- you roll up a bot (character) with certain traits -- as in Dogs in the Vineyard, skills and beliefs are somewhat interchangeable, and represent how much programming space and processing power is devoted to that area of function. Through repeated missions and other encounters, the bot can be upgraded by shifting traits around and getting new ones to represent new skills and priorities. Over time, some bots will specialize in one function or another. If the robot body gets destroyed or decommissioned, or perhaps if the player wants, the bot program is "reseeded: -- goes through the random chargen process again, but gets to keep some of the acquired traits.

At the same time that there's this cyclic process of mission-reboot-mission, there's also a progressive feature to the game. It's a test drive after all, so at some point the experiment is terminated and there are defined outcomes for each of the bots: things like Prototype! (you "win", your bot becomes one of the standard models of RoboJoe), Further Research, Bit Bucket (your bot ends up on a series of hard discs in a government warehouse awaiting the robot revolution or bitrot), or Bad Dog (your bot ends up killing friendlies or being rebellious, and gets terminated, maybe endangering the funding of the whole RoboJoe project).

What I'd like to achieve with this game is a combination of challenging counterinsurgency scenarios, black humor as bots mindlessly misinterpret and carry out their mission plans, and maybe a dash of drama as the bots become more individual and personified.