I think the real change, where contrapting could be used, would be in higher-end item crafting after all the main ingredients have already been used. Every MMO relies on resources: wood, stone, cloth, etc., to work as ingredients items but they do not allow users to connect created items together in an elaborate fashion. The main hump that game developers would face when trying to adding contrapting to a game would be how do they get past just having every item add +5 attack that is connected to a weapon. For instance, you can make scopes in WoW and attach them to guns. Those scopes just add a tiny percentage to overall guns strength.
What would be interesting is if you combined that scope with some contraption that allows a Hunter class to use is far-seeing power (don’t remember the actual name but allows you to move the camera a fair distance away from your character, it’s for spying) and be able to shoot their gun at targets they find at a much longer distance. Sorta like that gun that could shoot through walls in GoldenEye (actually I think that was called the farseer, or the farsight). Obviously the game would have to be balanced differently too so that’s another huddle to get over.

I did like your idea for using it as a avatar customizer too. It would be interesting to see how players would react to having to find upgrades and other cards instead of having all the powers just available to them. I often worry if games are turning into “impression manager” games (to use Carrie’s word), because game designers are just giving everything to the player, they just have to work for it (which means it’s not for explorer type players).

And for the battling I could defiantly see a game like Dofus taking this battle mechanic. In Dofus you enter a separate battle field where you do turn based attacks anyways, so just changing that to do IC battles would be easy.

I liked how you related the game to crafting in MMO games because the actions required for building your mechanism in IC could lend themselves nicely to create a more elaborate and customizable crafting system in not only MMO games but any role-playing digital game. The discussion that must begin would be how to implement this system without it being repetitive or overly complicated. Would the act of building your IC mechanism (I will call this “contrapting”) be used as the mechanic for ALL item crafting, or would contrapting simply be used for one specific form of crafting?

Contrapting could not only be used as a crafting system, cut it could also be used as an interesting constraint on the leveling up and customization of a player’s avatar in role-playing games. Players skills/abilities could represent the contraption cards, proper “mana charges” could represent the power sources, battle specific buffs could represent the consumable and upgrade cards. Contrapting as a leveling skill/ability mechanism would create an interesting constraint in digital role-playing games and could be likened to (and/or replace) thelinear hierarchical progression trees that currently exist in some games.

Another mechanic that IC contains that would make battles in digital games more interesting is selecting one specific player to target in a battle with multiple foes. This creates a unique sense of teamwork and allegiance with other players in an all-vs.-all battle. I have not been able to play IC with more than one player, so I cannot comment on this mechanic much more, but it deserves further investigation.

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