RolePlay onLine

Through the Door

PAX is hosting a massive video game cosplay competition, celebrating 42 years of video games. The competition has large cash prizes up to $15,000 and also many random spot prizes of $1,000 for whoever those handing them out feeling giving them too, which draws in both professional an amateur cosplayers alike.

Thousands have come to Seattle, to compete for the grand prize, hope for a spot prize, or simply to hang out with like minded individuals for a few days. Some are dressed in fully tailored professional-looking outfits, while others wear something bought online, and some are wearing cardboard armor sprayed black.

While enjoying the convention, four cosplayers open a white door (for whatever reason) and suddenly find themselves standing in an eternal plain of green grass under an empty blue sky. An eternal two-lane road runs down the middle with parallel sandstone footpath. There is a white mailbox on a post, with a metal garbage bin beside it, between the path and the road. A simple wooden door stands 30 feet from the road, closed in the middle of the grass.

Additionally, the costumes the cosplayers are wearing, and the weapons they are carrying, have become real. Armor that was once cardboard is now a full suit of hardened steel, the painted Nerf gun is a sleek rifle ready to fire laser bolts, and the cosplayers now know how to use them just as well as the character they're playing.

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While perhaps not immediately apparent, the cosplayers have been transported into a video game. Using the wooden door, players will jump from one game to another in an attempt to get home. The method for getting home will be revealed over time, as they explore more game worlds. To get back, players will need to complete quests or objectives that exist in those games. Though modified due to cosplayer influence, they will be mostly as they are in game - so in this way, player knowledge about games is perfectly alright to help you get through.

The cosplayers would retain their own memories and bodies (as appropriate) and gain the character's capabilities and equipment. Some of character's memories or personality traits might trickle in to the player. Visually, everything still looks realistic to the cosplayers, even if in an old 8-bit game (ala Wreck it Ralph).

Despite the potential lunacy some video games may invoke, I'm hoping this to be a serious game with at least some focus on the psychological issues that ensue - such as dealing with NPCs who only repeat the same three phrases.