more meaningful game mechanics

[Nachimir]

So you could make a shooter with not lethal weapons like a everyday cop shooter with rubber bullets and tasers but I think the message you would convey is "hey, look, it's fun to shoot protestors, go get hired in the police" which is pretty lame…

There's the Conscientious Objector mod for Doom III, where you only get rubber bullets and all the bad guys get back up.

Oh… Man…*Cupid, the game... of Love.

The kicker could be that you get no indication of who is single or not.

[Patters]

Splinter cell Chaos theory is a great example of this, to me at least. You can go in guns blazing or go through the game fairly passively, only knocking out a few people. The game encourages you to not kill people with the scoring system, while not directly penalising you for being violent, other than the reaction of the AI.

[toblix]

"Damn it, Fisher!"

[Gabbo]

Have any of you guys played Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth?

Now here is a first person game, where in the first part of the game, you don't have a gun, or anything to defend yourself with. One of the few games that actually managed to get under my skin, as you have these guys chasing you and you're locking and shoving things in front of doors behind you to slow down your pursuers. It was quite scary.

They did lots of interesting things with Call of Cthulhu. Your character would get vertigo when looking down from up high. If he was looking at something gruesome, your vision could go all funky among other things. The character you play isn't all that mentally stable to begin with, so looking at fucked up things for too long might leave him permanently insane and if you're holding a gun, he commits suicide.

Lots of love for that game.

DCotE is more an adventure game in first person, so it makes sense that combat is for the most part shied away from. Though how it gets around this is, as you've layed out rather fun/mind-melting.

I don't mind combat being a main focal point in games, I just wish there were weight and consequences to the use of combat. Reprimands for hitting innocent bystanders, that have some affect on how the player is plays out the rest of the game (not just a scolding during a cutscene or the mission ending). Having families of victims mourning over their bodies after a firefight or running and screaming in terror during one would add more weight to pulling the trigger.

I'm still waiting on someone to make a game out of the idea Anthony Gallegos had on RebelFM (and that I'm sure has been brought up on other 'casts.) in which you take the role of a medic in a CoD setting and have to perform surgeries on the battlefield in first person and patch people up as bullets whiz by. You take the FPS, remove the shooting and make players deal with the consequences of others shooting at them instead. Mind you, I doubt anyone could stomach the amount of gore that would be required to represent this realistically for very long. I don't know if this is really what you meant with the post, but I think it kind of fits.

[OssK]

There's the Conscientious Objector mod for Doom III, where you only get rubber bullets and all the bad guys get back up.

The kicker could be that you get no indication of who is single or not.

The mod is considerably fun, and your idea is pretty sweet "Yeah…*Well done god of love, someone killed himself because you deprived him of the girl he loves…*Way to go."