What if you played as a letter of the alphabet that could jump into speech bubbles to either help people or get them into deep trouble?

— petermolydeux (@PeterMolydeux) February 7, 2013

I think that playing as a single letter of the alphabet severely limits the gameplay options and puts an awkward constraint on puzzle creation, so instead, while maintaining the spirit of the idea, I would give the player all 26 letters – but with each letter usable only once. As a scene progresses, the player is given the opportunity to make a single modification to each speech bubble, with the changes they make forcing the story to take a different turn. The player can also opt to simply leave a given speech bubble alone, saving their letters for later.

The biggest challenge would be creating lines of dialogue wherein every line has at least a few opportunities to introduce a meaningful change. For simplicity, the player shouldn't be able to make any change, only pre-programmed ones, but in the interest of fun, the pre-programmed options should encompass every possible, meaningful alteration. "Do you like pie?" might become "dot you like pie?", but the modified sentence is gibberish, so it shouldn't be an option. By contrast, "do you like pies?" is viable, but here we observe a secondary challenge: "Pie" becoming "pies" isn't going to even raise an eyebrow; we need to create sentences that can be changed in substantial ways, ways that alter the flow of the scene. Some possibilities:

• Adding past tense to verbs: "I love you." becomes "I loved you."

• Adding plurality to nouns: "He's got game!" becomes "He's got games!"

• Convert one word into another of the same type: "Go rouse the soldiers." becomes "Go arouse the soldiers."

Ideally, most lines would also have multiple viable modifications: "can't you see the art?" is well-loaded, since "art" can become "cart", "dart", "fart", "part", "tart", or "wart", all of which create significant changes in the meaning and significance of that line. If one can generate enough of these, the only remaining problem is finding the right funny story to string them all together. Making any real narrative would likely create a massive computational difficulty in terms of designing every possible outcome of a scene, and every possible branching plot line that could result, it could be easier to manage if the game were set up as a collection of short skits, with a meta-narrative about the Editor (the player) being directed by management to alter the meaning of the series of transcripts so that the edited versions help push the manager's agenda: "Change this love story so it ends up decrying the evils of deforestation" and so forth. While the long narrative would make for a very interesting story, this idea instead offers more variety and clearer goals to work towards.