I had a fun conversation with Francis Steen at dinner tonight after our long but rewarding all-day game conference (featuring Mimi Ito, Ted Castranova, Jordan Peterson, Celia Pearce, Francis Steen, and myself, among others).

Anyway, Francis and I were talking about folklore, fairy tales, and games. Red Riding Hood especially. Francis pointed out that Red Riding Hood requires quite a bit of complex cognition, really more than a child can handle: the child has to recognize that the wolf is going to eat Red Riding Hood, but he recognizes that if he does, she'll scream. And he hears hunters nearby, so if she screams, they'll respond, and they have axes.

Fairy Tales offer interesting rhetorical game research parallels because they communicate morals. In the case of Red Riding Hood, the moral is something like, "Don't trust everything people tell you, they may be a wolf."

This led us to think about what a Red Riding Hood game would be like. Clearly, it couldn't be a quest game like the story, since the reader doesn't really learn about the nature of the wolf until after the story ends, and that won't work for the game. The best approximation I came up with off the top of my head is something like a takeoff of the old gameshow Let's Make a Deal. In the gameshow, there are three curtains. If the contestant succeeds at a small challenge and wins some cash, they could choose to keep it or give it up to "take the curtain." Behind the curtain might be something terrific, like a new car, or something less terrific, like a cow. The host, Monty Hall, would manipulate the players trying to get them to change their minds or pick another curtain.

So, in the Red Riding Hood version, the wolf would take the Monty Hall role, and the player would choose between his suggested outcomes. Sometimes the wolf would lead the player toward the right goal (presumably your grandmother) and other times the wrong goal (something like a big kettle where you cook). What's important in this design is that the player learns the moral through the unpredictable behavior of the wolf. The moral isn't that people always mislead you, but that you need to be careful, because someone might at any time.

It may just be a diversion, but it's actually pretty challenging to think of game designs for fairy tales. If you want to have a go, post your fairy tale reference and game design in the thread for this post.