I will give a quick explanation of my plans for this game.
Anything else that I leave out that you would like to know, just ask.

Role-Sharing game.
This means that all the players at the table will be playing one character.
They will have control over part of one side of warring factions of the human psyche.
ex: Fight Vs. Flight.
They will work together or against each other depending on the situation to help their character survive the drama going on in his/her life.

Memory Lapse
If you haven't seen the film Momento - watch it. its mindboggling but awesome.
The character has had some trauma to his/her head. it causes all short term memory to be lost during sleep.
everytime the character wakes he has to start all over again.
the character will have a goal to accomplish based on something in their long term memory. (in momento he needs to find his wife's killer)

The game will start always with someone/group of people (fbi, mobsters, etc) chasing the character but he/she doesn't know why.
but the whole game is played will evading capture. "On the run" so to speak.

every gaming session is from the time the character wakes until they go to sleep (on purpose on while in the middle of something/passing out)

my issue involves dealing with what I have been told is called "Meta gaming"
using knowledge the character does not have.
ex: player knows the trolls burn easily but their character does not - but using fire anyway.

Out of lunch break -- more after work.

Brent

Evading Capture.
This is a major part of the game, as indicated by the title - [RUN!]
Every second that passes in gameplay, every decision that is made needs to bear in mind that people are looking for the characters.
"No country for Old men" is a good example of how a game could be played. or the show "The Fugitive"
Some of the Borne movies stuff but way less fighting and action.
but the kicker is that the whole time the players know they their character will have a memory lapse when he/she falls asleep.
The game ends when the character's goals are met. i.e. - Momento example - He finds his wifes killer --- No country for old men example - He gets away with the money. Etc.

It took a lot of thinking and searching to come up with an "original" setting/situation. (ha! original - guess I mean not used all the time)
It came to me after digging through my movie collection. ;)
Thing is... how can I get it to work? The whole metagaming issue....?
how do I keep the players from using past knowledge that their character should have forgotten?
I think its safe to say that if I leave it up to the players this game with be broken.
I need some mechanics that make this feel natural.
anyone got any ideas?
or game suggestions for research?
I'll be brainstorming.
also if you have any questions about my game idea - toss it out.
I can't promise I'll have an answer but maybe you asking will help me find it.
later Guys.

Brent

II am constantly forgetting everything, how do I know that I am trying to evade anything? In Memento, he took extensive notes so that he could bring himself up to speed with what was going on. If the RUN! character is doing something similar, then it seems there would be no meta-gaming/story-telling issues. If the character isn't taking notes for himself, then the whole game becomes a crap shoot because the evil villain can find the character at any time but the character has no idea who the evil villain is. And since the players are/can be in conflict, if note-taking is something you want to happen, then the exact information recorded depends on which side wins the debate.

Nice point!
That could be another motivator to win the internal conflicts.
Never though about. I guess there needs to be rules for notes. never would have thought of that.
Good one.

because the evil villain can find the character at any time but the character has no idea who the evil villain is

A couple thoughts:

In Memento the key note of Mission was tattooed across his chest. That's what he gets up every day to realize. Now one thing they mention in the movie that's very important is that you can still learn things if your hippocampus is damaged, but in a very slow and primitive way. As long as you take in sensory information, your neurons will rewire themselves on their own and thus can store long-term memories through simple Hebbian learning: i.e. classical conditioning.

An important side note to this is that learning through this method is a lot faster when the subject is something of passion to the person. For example, in Oliver Sack's "An Anthropologist On Mars" (required reading), he talks about his work with a Grateful-Dead-Hare-Krishna who had a tumor that destroyed his hippocampus, thus being a living fossil of 1968. Sacks took him to a Grateful Dead concert, and from that one night alone the guy was able to remember much of the new songs he heard, even though he could barely remember the nurses' names (after several months, though, he was able to remember Sacks's name).

So hopefully that makes play a bit easier - the essential plot is known. To make the subtle details change, why not have the GM or scramble all the NPC names and facts with each session - like if all bits of NPC and plot information are stored on notecards, shuffle them on each session - and leave the rest of the character quirks to roleplay?

Another possibility is to keep players on guard by having attribute penalties for whenever they use metagame information, kinda to symbolize the concentration expended to actually recall some piece of information (or piece it together logically).

And with the character themself taking notes in-game, one could have the PCs each have a notecard unshuffled that they keep for each session, adding to them as they take more notes - but if they are attacked or manipulated or something, they lose a notecard to be reshuffled.

Recall that in Memento the main character didn't forget things from one day to the next; he forgot them moment by moment, such that he could be easily manipulated by Carrie Anne Moss's character, who would spit in his beer and then just wait a few minutes before handing it to him. Anyway, the film-maker simulated that experience for the viewer by essentially making the movie go backwards in time--we learn what the character has forgotten when what we never knew is revealed. You could do something similar in your game, which strikes me as ideal for structured freeform (see the article on p. 23 of this pdf for my take on this).

So hopefully that makes play a bit easier - the essential plot is known. To make the subtle details change, why not have the GM or scramble all the NPC names and facts with each session - like if all bits of NPC and plot information are stored on notecards, shuffle them on each session - and leave the rest of the character quirks to roleplay?

....we learn what the character has forgotten when what we never knew is revealed. You could do something similar in your game, which strikes me as ideal for structured freeform (see the article on p. 23 of this pdf for my take on this).