Hey there,
I have been thinking a lot lately how to incorporate my soon-to-be computational linguistics degree in indie game development and I had a cool idea:
Imagine a game where you work for a marketing/PR mill and had to,
as fast as possible, write scathing (or glowing, or neutral) reviews for media or products presented to you in rapid succession. The stronger your impromptu reviews fit the theme, the more points you get; but you cannot reuse the strong words you used again as the round goes on (that means, you cannot write "awesome" to everything and get max points)!
The technology to automatically rate the "sentiment" of a given input and how strong its emotional implications are exists today and is called sentiment analysis, it's actually quite popular in computational linguistics.
So I thought I'd do it; but I ran into the issue that all the popular and public sentiment analysis models cannot handle sarcasm, cynicism, double negatives or even double meanings, at all! "This movie made me ecstatic only when it was finally over!!" would be rated as a glowing review as it contained the positive words "ecstatic" and "finally"!
So, I have a perfectly fine video game idea with cool tech behind it, but I just cannot realize it because technology is not there yet.
It seems to me like there must be a lot of game ideas that technology, or perhaps social progress, or the gaming scene, will not allow today.
Do you have any? Share 'em!