If you do, then you have yourself a deathmatch. You would have to restrict the secondary players (if there are any) to certain areas, certain duties, etc. Essentially, you’d be begging them to role-play through the experience.

2. The premise is great but it quickly becomes a bad idea in many ways. While it may prove more challenging and interesting every once in awhile, there’s no way they can control the single-player experience in a way to make it engrossing if a 12 year olds gameplay has to act it out.

Now your gameplay experience can be ruined because some idiot bounces a grenade off of a wall killing everyone on his team or maybe he just wants to jump up and down repeatedly. Wow, now that’s exciting.

I don’t want someone else controlling the storyline or gameplay of a single player game. There’s a reason why MMORPG’s really haven’t let player interaction directly effect everyone else’s experience. One bad egg could be catastrophic.

This game idea is awesome. I’m studying game programming right now and I am fascinated with the prospect of a single player endeavor with other people playing their own endeavors at the same time. What seems to me to be the most interesting element is how they’ll make a player feel like they’re playing a single player game instead of a multiplayer (or even a small multiplayer). I envision if it isn’t implemented well enough it will look either like a game of tag, a game of bunch of people with conflicting fetch quests, or something in a not-so-well thought out vein.

Fingers crossed. This actually woke me up this morning thinking about the application of this sort of game play and how I could implement something akin to it in a project I’m working on.