The game is called "In the Blink of an Eye", because it deals primarily with the information world, in the sense that almost everything that matters in the universe is present digitally, as opposed to physically. This is set in the future, natch.

The idea... I've been thinking about how to handle 2 (or more) people going after each other in a certain "duel of computers", and trying to think of how to handle that systematically. Well... a spindled hit-point system is just not interesting enough so: vocabulary.

When you make an attack you target a word. Like "hello", "attack", "if" or whatever. If the attack is succesful, the victim player may not use that word for the rest of the session when describing anything they do online until they can repair their systems. If the attack is particularly successful, entire groups of words, or a whole bunch of words can be taken out in one fell swoop. Naturally, any computer function associated with a specific word can not be done. So... if you smoke somebodies "search", then they can't instruct any of their expert systems (pseudo AIs) to do any searching.

Thots?

kinda anti-that-caveman-RPG, starting with a large vocabulary and narrowing it down

I think a set of predefined abilities/categories would be needed (INPUT, OUPUT, PROCESSING perhaps? or READ, WRITE, STORE, SEARCH?)

computer languages also focus a LOT on syntax (damn semicolons), and communicating computers focus on protocol

anything but another cheesy "VR" interface ala cyberpunk/shadowrun (I hates those, I does)