Argument Champion is now available for all to play.
In Argument Champion, two debaters engage in rhetorical combat to earn the title of ARGUMENT CHAMPION. With the help of the Argument Demon CORAX, the player can see the audience’s beliefs and construct a rhetorical strategy in pursuit of victory. Gain popularity from the audience’s positive associations, and erode your opponent’s with the taint of the audience’s negative associations. Who will the audience vote for in the end? See if you can become the next Argument Champion!
Last minute pending additions including a preloader and some token sounds. And no, sadly the two player mode did not get finished in time. Here’s hoping I get it squared away for a post-AGBIC finished version.
Finally, my thanks to the organizers for this wonderfully stimulating challenge. And much props to the participants for seeing things through!
I forgot to mention that the core gameplay is randomly generated afresh with each playthrough. The debate topics and the audience preferences are randomly chosen from the underlying concept association network, derived from MIT’s ConceptNet. The magic of the game is really the effort it makes to make gameplay easier (i.e., possible) in early levels, harder in later ones.
For example, you’d think JEALOUSY would be hard to link with LEAF. But the game makes sure that it doesn’t display all 60 associations with JEALOUSY, and in the smart-random handful you’re shown, you see ENVY. ENVY then leads to GREEN…and suddenly the connection to LEAF becomes much more plausible.
The concept net has some pretty weird associations. Names can be weird with arbitrary, inscrutable links. They can be cool, too. (How to link JOHNNY and CODE? JOHNNY->CASH->BANK->SAFE->CODE!) The completely random nature of topic selections can lead to funny situations. My last playthrough had my first opponent arguing in favor of OPPONENT! In the playthrough before that, the final boss argued in favor of DEBATE! Not to mention topics like GROSS, FREEDOM, and DEATH. Hard to feel great about winning a debate about DEATH.
It’s not Super Meat Boy, but it is fun to explore language. Here’s hoping the bugs stay under the rug and everyone has a chance to try it!
Wow this is a well thought out game, and the interface is very complex in graphics in a great way You put a hell of a lot time in this especially the whole connection words with the cpu opponents argument. This is very crazy. I am amazed of all the programming you had to do to get those strings to show up all over your game! The argument demon was awesome too!
