Hi!

I’ve had for a long time the idea of a narrative ARG centered around a decolonial retelling of history as the theater of super-human memetic entities (like greek mythology, except actually true). I thought this jam could be a chance to start working on it.

My idea for this jam would be a small “visual novel engine” (HTML/JS web techno) on top of google map/street view, where each page would have time and geographical coordinates. It would have an online mode for everyone to play, as well as an offline mode where pages would be locked behind “actually being there”. A stretch goal would be to add light choices/escape room puzzles (much like Stembridge Society).

I was thinking of a… 90s edutainment aesthetic, i.e. something looking a bit like Microsoft Encarta or those virtual classrooms in low polygons that were popular in the early internet so that it could be eventually extended to other topics besides history and geography.

But enough about infrastructure! The juicy part is the story!

November 2nd 1917, 10AM, the Society of Psychic Research in their London offices at 20 Hanover Square is in panic. All of their instruments show a disturbance on a scale never seen before: reality is leaking. During the investigation, the players will learn the Truth behind the Balfour declaration, as well as discover the Extractors, mysterious entities parasiting the minds of humans to suck all value from the real.

To contain the leak, the players will have to pinpoint it to a precise location, time, and human being in a ritual called Grounding.

Sometimes, reality is stranger than fiction, and going into the past might be the only way to prevent the Extractors from destroying the world in the Singularity…

I would strongly encourage you to take a look at my portfolio to see if our values align. Everything is at https://www.yo252yo.com/. In particular I am hoping to release everything from this project fully open source for free, and use this engine to make a new version of my portfolio website by porting all my previous stories to it.

In case anyone is interested,I have started working on the project and it is now called "Push your buttons". As mentionned I'm making a new game engine for it. I've put on a prototype at https://yo252yo.itch.io/push-your-buttons with password "wip" though obviously this is going to change a lot.

I'm no longer seeking coworkers, I'm sure this work will be controversial and I don't want to inflict this on anybody else.

The topic has changed, away from the balfour declaration to the story of the story of robinson crusoe to be more pallatable to non far-left-ists. My hope is that once the game engine is made, I can easily add a "DLC" for the balfour story, and it could become a mega engine for all kinds of leftist storytelling.

Everything will obviously be free and open source

The human who pushed buttons "thread" was wonderful 😊. Looking forward to see how this progresses