Now, we know every fan of action movies secretly wishes that it was him or her battling through all those car chases, gun fights, stealthy strikes, and martial arts madness. Imagine a totally artificial city, about 25 square miles, designed solely to allow a large group of people with deep pockets to
roleplay their own action movie as realistically as possible in a three-day orgy of testosterone-laden mayhem without a significant chance of death.
The group first picks a general plot from a premade list, and picks the degree of realism that will be followed for the session. Then each member is assigned to a role in the plot, and then given the choice to make up their own character, or take the premade character that comes with their role. Either way, the player can still modify the skills of his or her respective character. There will be two teams, Heroes and Villians, and the captain of each group will be given the Main Hero or Main Villian title if he or she wishes, or can assign it to someone else. Each member will be extensively costumed appropriate to their role in "Butterfly", the city's fashion store, and be given a Cinematic Credit Card (tm) for purchase of goods at the stores (guests will only be charged for stuff they take home with them, and in this way some stores serve as souvenir shops of sorts). Then each member of the group will go through a four-day "acclimation" period, where they will learn the skills that their character is supposed to know, like stunt driving techniques, tactical gunfighting skills, negotiation techniques for persuading others, basic martial arts, etc. Then the last three days of the week will be spent totally in-character, with each day being an Act. Hidden cameras cover the city, and will record the destruction and intrigue occurring throughout the city, specifically in the Primary and Secondary Locations specified in the chosen plot for crux points in the story. After the three-day experience is over, an editing will process the video as they are best able and send it to the participants as a memoir of their experience.
Now, Ideas for Specific Elements of Adrenaline City:
The streets and perhaps also the walls of the buildings will look like real asphalt and concrete, but have springs underneath like gymnastic floors for give when players almost inevitably take a spill, and to allow superhuman or at least above-average leaps and bounds by the heroes and villians. Walls would be covered with very thin plaster, and have small powder charges placed in them that would explode when a nearby laser sensor in the wall was triggered by a gun(see below). All the windows that it would be cinematically interesting to dive through would be made out of candy glass, but they would not be installed above one story maximum. In case someone does take a tumble from a dangerously high place, sensors imbedded in the walls will detect their fall and a safety net or other protective device will be deployed rapidly to stop the paying customer's descent. Just to be safe, however, no building would be built higher than a safety net could stop a person's fall from (five floors?). The buildings would provide as much content variety that can be crammed into a 25 square mile plot of land. Examples include an office building, a casino, a nightclub or two, a fashion store, a hospital, a church, an (fake) industrial plant, a police station, etc.
The guns will use outdoor laser tag technology (see link), though they will look significantly more realistic than the current models. Each player will be rigged with unobtrusive sensors on the front and back of the head, torso, abdomen, arms, and legs. These sensors will be linked to hidden blood packs on the player's costume which will explode when the sensor is activated. Perhaps a system could be developed to restrict motion in the area hit for more realistic sessions, like immobilizing a leg when it is shot, so the player has to drag it around behind him or her until he or she gets to the hospital or a Medic character, who can "heal" the "wound" and remobilize the limb. In less realistic sessions this is not a problem, as the heroes and villians are likely to take sustained M60 machine gun fire with no adverse effects other than spilling of blood, a la Hitman 2 (It's only a flesh wound, guys). Also, ammo comes into play in realistic sessions, with fake magazines having to be loaded and reloaded into guns in order to keep firing.
Cars will be equipped much like stunt cars or race cars with safety as the primary factor, and will always have a stunt driver in the car as an NPC with an overriding control system like in driver's ed cars for safety reasons. City traffic will be simulated by full-sized remote controlled cars (they do exist), operating under a supercomputer responsible for the traffic system.
Weapons will be simulated by foam core replicas, much like Chanbara (see link). Hand-to-hand combat will use padded gloves. The weapons would also be somehow linked to sensors in the costumes that would cause blood packs to fire and limbs to be immobilized. It would be very cool if there was a way for the weapons or gloves to block incoming fire from the laser guns, simulating in an unrealistic session the impossible feats of deflecting bullets with a weapon, or picking them out of the air with one's fingers.
Staff workers will be NPCs, the normal everyday folk that inhabit Adrenaline City, some of which may interact with the players in more significant ways than just background atmosphere. An unfortunate point is that unless they get danger pay, these NPCs must remain indoors in order to avoid getting hurt by any car accidents that may occur.
Each player will also be tracked by GPS. As a player moves, the cameras in his or her vicinity will start to record or stop recording based on proximity, allowing for a seamless view of the player's actions.
Explosions would be present, especially ones due to time bombs, but would be small yet flashy and only go off when the subject is out of range, regardless of when the timer on the bomb goes off. Of course, you don't tell the player that.
That's about all the ideas I could come up with on the spot, stay tuned for updates.
And as a last point, I know Adrenaline City would be prohibitively expensive to build, but that's the only reason why this hasn't been built yet.