Players

A 2-player digital live action roleplay game by Ron T Blechner of Breathtaking Games - 2020 Golden Cobra Challenge Honorable Mention

Tags: Transhumanism, sci-fi, neurodiversity, sensory, digital, empathy, hope, communication

It is a decade of incredible scientific advances and prosperity. In 2056, artificial intelligences (AI) developed sentience on the Hypernet. They called it “The Awakening”, and named themselves “fortuna”, plural fortunae. Fortunae quickly outmatched limitations of physical human bodies. They evolved further. The Hypernet was now their home, and they started calling it “Dotwun”. In 2066, fortunae and human scientists cracked the ability for humans to fully integrate their consciousness to the Hypernet. Humans and fortunae experience differences in how they experience Dotwun, especially in sensory inputs. One player is a human, plugging in to Dotwun for the first time. The other is a fortuna, aiding the human in preparation for “transcending” to digital life in Dotwun.

This game will involve the player of the human to interact with, touch, and sense objects in their real life physical environment, and describe it in detail to the other player. Only the player of the human will have a camera turned on, that both players will look at.. Players will communicate through audio*. The player of the AI will be giving instructions to the human player on how to interact with the environment, based on a checklist of items that only that AI player will know. Players are likely to succeed, but will face challenges as the two characters will have gaps in communication and differences in how they perceive and sense things. They will need to learn about each other, and share feelings and memories to succeed.

Gameplay about 60 minutes, with 20 minutes workshop and 10 minutes debrief. This requires pairs of 2 players to run. I will run up to 4 games simultaneously with shared intro and debrief.

Content Warnings This game may spur topics of death, mass death, war, famine, dispair, disabilities, mental illness, and possibly suicide. (This game typically should NOT deal with topics of racism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry.) Each set of players will discuss topic boundaries and calibrate intensity of play as part of their intro workshop.