Yeah, not sure this idea can work that well - but with much attention and planning, it can be very unique and cool (and maybe even fun ) -

A game (platformer would be good) where you have to get a Game-Over as fast as possible.

The game can start in an extremely hostile environment (lots of pit-falls, insta-death traps, enemies etc); and later areas can get easier and easier - comfortable layout, extra lives pickups, invincibility powerups (all located in hard to avoid places of course)...

It's just an idea...
But can be interesting.
Sort of an 'anti-game'.

Not so long ago I was thinking about a reverse tetris. The "losing" concept certainly has potential. Perhaps in the platformer you're character levels-up or something, gaining automatic special moves anf more HP. If you're the one giving it "attention and planning" I bet it would rock.

Good to remember that the idea of GAME OVER came from the arcade game industry where it was all about getting the player to put more money in the machine.
These days with most gaming going on at home there no real reason for it

..but it sounds like an excellent idea.

And every time your character (unwantedly) finishes one level, lots of small cute furry creatures (yes, pikachus) start to dance around him and hug him and shout "Hooray!"

http://gmc.yoyogames.com/index.php?showtopic=362308

weapon_S: Thanks, that's high praise - but I wasn't planning on creating such game, just had an idea and thought about sharing it...

X-G: Cool That's not exactly how I thought it should look, but it plays very interesting...

There's a game advertised on the cartoon network where you are trying to kill yourself in five minutes in an office setting.

However, your game seems more like the objective of a level is lose it. Doesn't sound like my kind of game, sounds a bit too "novelty" ish.

The objective of a game can't be to loose, since if you lose you win, therefor you wont lose, thus cannot win nor lose.

But I can see how you could win by doing what is usually done to achieve "game over" status in games in general.

What if the objective of the game is to create a logical paradox?

And all you can do is an illogical paradox?

How about a 3d game where you go into the door of a little shed and there's an immense world inside?

I like the reverse Tetris idea as a minigame.

Come to think of it, if you strung a whole lot of those minigames together, you might just have a complete game.

Here are some ideas:

Platformer: Kill yourself by jumping on spikes or into bottomless pit.
Pacman: Get hit by a ghost. Not so easy if the maze is small and power pellets are everywhere.
Shooting gallery: Be the duck!

I really liked the concept of My Life as a King, the Final Fantasy game for WiiWare, because you are put in the king position (instead of the adventurer one as in every FF game). They removed the most tedious in RPGs, the battles. I believe that is brilliant, a game where you tell the adventurers "Retrieve the Sword of Hope from the Cave of Darkness, here you have these armours, weapons, tonics, elixirs and amulets" and they go, and a few days later they come back successful, hurt or with several members dead, they tell you where they reached, the different enemies and their attacks they faced, and whether they gained levels or not, and then you adjust the supply you give them to face the cave again (for example, giving them fire protection if they fought several fire elementals, etc).

Combat goes from something boring and repetitive (Attack, Attack, Item -> Tonic, Magic -> Fire, Attack, Attack, Item -> Tonic, Magic -> Fire) to something you cannot control directly.

Not that it has anything to do with the "kill yourself fast" concept (who remembers Karateka, the game where upon start, if you walk backwards you fall into a pit and die? 1''40 according to Wikipedia article), but it has to do with the "inverse" concept.

These are two distinct ideas:
1) reverse the goals
2) change the point of view: Same protagonists and goals, but the game lets you play a different protagonist.

Some games that implement the 2nd idea : Half-Life:Opposing Force, where you play one of the soldiers who are Gordon Freeman's enemies; and Dungeon Keeper, where you design&defend a dungeon against attacks of an adventuring party.

For the idea 1, the examples that have been given rely on game mechanisms that are used in racing, and speedrunning: Determine one or more way to reach the goal, study and weigh the different possibilities, play repeatedly to study the difficulty to succeed each variation, and its interest toward the global goal.

This works much better if the game elements allow partial steps before victory (or failure) For example with a platformer "kill-yourself":
1) go to hazard 1 to lose 30% life
2) go to hazard 2 to be poisoned for 40% life over 10 seconds (take the short path that gives you back 10%)
3) go to hazard 3 to lose 40% life, can easily be reached in less than 10s
4) wait until your health reaches 0.

30+40-10+40 >= 100 health loss, game over = win

Another interesting story idea:

You play a goomba (the mushroom from Mario), and at the start of the game, you innocently play with your other goomba friend (as in, you move left and right, bounce into each other) - and then suddenly, Mario comes running from one side, hops on your friend (which gets flattened, and give mario 100 points) and keeps running on; leaving you in tears.

And from that moment, you search revenge upon Mario.

Not totally relevant, but the idea makes me think of Achievement Unlocked, where the point is to complete all 100 achievements, rather than achieve any goals in the game.

I've wanted to play that game. I've been designing a game with a similar concept. Battles happen, but you don't actually "do" the battles. While I was in the hospital, I got to document a lot of the idea to keep my mind off of things. I'm hoping to start programming the world engine this weekend.

Anyway, weird, unconventional ideas have a place in the market, but they're hard to pull off without feeling too gimicky.

I want to see more surreal things in games. Everyone's going for realism, I want to see what happens when we go for weird and impossible.

My thoughts exactly.

If I was creative enough I'd try to make a game that was really out there in terms of gameplay. I may try anyway.

Ugh, do you know those experiences:

Those are the most frustrating game moments, that make we wish you could control the response of the character after a battle. Johan, I can already feel my toes curling up.
But that aside, I had this sudden idea. I was thinking a Sonic level, where you often (react to) get on a higher platform for bonuses. Sometimes sequentially. What if you ever got higher picking-up bonuses and finally plummet to your death
Or pick-up a Mario-style flying item, only to gain height for your fall.
And I (unintentionally) came up with this story:
DarkMage: Muhaha! Princess now will never escape my trap! Princess: You are a fool, there are dozens of men who would want to beat you up and free me! DarkMage: Exactly! And your foolish father has declared anyone who does can marry you! Princess: No! No, I want to marry prince Edgar! DarkMage: Either way you're doomed! Muhahaha!
Then a hundred brave men come for the princess. Each must fail for the princess's sake. You get three stages to retry and each man is stronger (and more desirable) then the previous. Anyone can marry the princess, but the ultimate goal is letting the princess finish her captor. Notice how men are levels and stages are lives?

Whoa, that last sparked me think up this:
You have 2D slices of 4D objects on your screen. You can only move the laterally. But then they collide and rotate. Your job is to put them together. You won't see the shapes, but the player is required to gain an intuition for what the shape is determined by its rotations and collisions. Of course, you could subtract from the 4D, or add to the 2D . Not really surrealistic though, only confusing.

At LaTrobe Uni openday last year there was a maths professor showing off his game in the game lab, he had two 3d rendering of a rotated and sliced hypercube, your goal was to rotate the 2nd in 4 dimensions so that that it was at the same rotation as the 1st.

So you'd want to die as fast as possible per level? That'd be counter intuitive, but it seems a neat twist.

I'd like more simple concepts that cannot be easily replicated in real life. Like tetris. Simple enough idea (make a line and it disappears), but try doing that in real life (real time).

There's a tall building on campus (I think it's 26 stories or something like that), and a friend of mine has an idea to turn it into a huge tetris game using the lights in the windows as the blocks. There's even a nearby bell tower we could program to play the tetris theme.

Five Minutes to kill (yourself).

http://www.jokeroo.com/funnyvideos/worlds_biggest_tetris_game.html

http://www.jokeroo.com/funnyvideos/school_dorm_snake_game.html

People who do things before me suck.

Ah well, I still have going down to a local store and solving all the Rubik's Cubes.