What's next
A net LARP.
NETGODZ is the first game set in this world. The larger plan is a hacker role-playing game played across the real web: corporate factions attacking and defending their own versions of the internet, from browsers that work as cyberdecks, in a net with thirteen versions of itself that players move through.
NOTHING HERE IS ANNOUNCED. There is no date, platform commitment, signup, pre-order or list. This page describes where the work is pointed, and any of it may change shape or never be built. None of it is a reason to give anybody money or an email address.
The idea
Fiction and reality, past and present and future, in one game.
Three things are mixed on purpose.
- Fiction and reality
The invented companies already have real websites, at real domains, with real product pages you can read today from a browser you already own. Instead of a codex, the game points you at the sites.
- Past and present
The history inside the game follows the history of computing, in the same order and with the same arguments about memory, bandwidth and who owns the wire. An early era is a net that cannot do what a later one can, and it plays that way.
- And future
The eras keep going past the one we are standing in. Walking forward through them is walking out of the net's documented past into a version of it nobody has had to operate yet.
The deck
A browser that is a cyberdeck.
The intent is downloadable Chromium-based browsers that function as decks rather than emulating one: desktop and mobile, the same browser you would otherwise use to read a spec sheet, fitted with the instruments of the fiction.
The net in this world is hardware in a building, so the thing you jack in with should be real software with real limits.
The web, and the net, in one pane
The in-world sites are ordinary web pages. A deck that is a browser can hold both the fiction and the open web without a loading screen between them.
Two form factors, one net
Playing at a desk and playing in a queue carry different risks in a world where being reachable is the danger. Both are meant to be supported.
The factions
Everyone is building their own internet, and defending it.
In this version the companies are sides. Each has its own idea of what the net should be (craft or benchmarks, openness or throughput, a gallery or a warehouse), builds that net, and then has to hold it.
Players take a side, run for it, and take ground from the others. Territory is the game's own net: the in-world properties, the racks behind them, and whatever players have raised themselves. Nothing in this points at a real third-party website, and nothing in it teaches or enables anything that works against a real computer system. The arithmetic and the targets belong to the game.
The eras, promoted
Thirteen versions of the net, and you only see your own.
In the mini game an era is a renderer. Here it is a version of the net you live in, and you can only see and attack other players standing in the same one.
Progress moves you forward through the versions. That is a trade, because moving forward changes who can reach you and who you can no longer find. An era is a neighbourhood with its own population, its own economy, and its own ceiling on what is technically possible in it.
A teletype net and a lit 3D net are the same net at two points in its life, running at the same time, with different people in each who cannot see each other. The larger game is built on that idea, which is why the thirteen eras were built first.
Where it stands
So far it is a direction.
The thing being built now is NETGODZ, the single-player mini game. Its lite build, NetGodz RUN, plays in a browser; the full game is unfinished and undated. Everything on this page comes after it.
There is no announcement to be part of. The five company websites are already up, in character, if you want to start there.