This is a long ongoing project in concept, as I am curious how it would fair in execution and how to enforce portions of it, but a setting where the players themselves - those behind the screen - are the characters. Their names and some personal information changed to preserve anonymity, but the rest of them modeled as the actual people, thrust into a foreign world and forced to work together as though they were stranded. Specifically, the idea would be to mechanically reflect them through a medium such as a tabletop game, but they must explore and invent themselves within it and in as much detail and lengths they can; they must convince the Dungeon Master of these traits and provide examples to earn them, among offering hints to the others to curry some agreement.
As an off the cuff example, just how far can they run and over what time and what speed? How much education have they been exposed to and what of, be it private or public? How much life experience do they have in age, story and breadth of diversity? What do they know of the mystic and arcane, if not spiritual things in life? Have they life skills that translate from the mundane to the practical when all else fails? What terrors and triumphs have they faced first hand before?
More or less having them reflect their ability scores, classes, skills and talents the best they can, keeping them all in secret and allowing them to try and find their way through and into them with the story. Some will mature faster and take to the methods of exploring their unbound and evolving selves, others will find difficulty in that sort of reflection and legitimacy, while others yet are already the rare intuitives, those who will just know what is or is not them. In many ways this requires a great deal of trust to reveal so much about one's self, even if away from prying eyes and to a Dungeon Master who is sworn to utmost and unwavering secrecy.
The game is more about them interacting with people they do not truly know and discovering themselves in the process of the journey. A focus not so much on the end result, but the interactions and conflicts, especially the idea of losing one's self through personal alchemy; the transformation into what might well be frightening to admit, given these are inner desires and reflections. Such a creator of a game would need have great psychological skills, but the group? They get only bits of information of who these people are at all, a brief, vague write-up at absolute most almost as though it were a profile; even better, using examples of said profiles.
How does one explain their philosophy of life just allows them to feel as though they can do something. No less, can they actually do it in the game or just believe they can? What happens if they really cannot? That they explain it too poorly or insufficiently? It does not make them a bad person, or a lacking one, yet the perception and taste of failure is strong, it is personal. It says a great amount about one's self when others cannot see what they think they see.
An odd idea, one quite delicate, though I think would make for a remarkable concept. Real people having to reflect on their mirrored selves and the choices they would need make in a hypothetical, ongoing, and foreign - fantastic rather - world.
