Player Experience Goals:
My primary goal is to give the player a unique experience of what it is to know all of your possibilities for action before you act. It will be interesting to see if this results in a percieved loss of free will or agency. I would like to provoke players to respond to their predefined paths in the game either by embracing the paths and following their virtual fate, or trying to rebel against their predefined paths simply to exert some sense of free will. Will having their actions predefined for them give them a sense of ease in knowing what their future holds or a feeling of being caged by the predefined possibilities of their action. My overall goal for the player would be to provoke questions in them as to the extents of our own freedom for action in the real world, such as whether our paths through life are as predefined as those paths that are made visible in plurality. I would also intend for the user to question topics of social inequality, and the importance of free choice based upon the disequalities that are exagerrated in this society.
What will it take to accomplish this?
Creating a novel experience in foreknowledge of their own events can be accomplished easily simply through immersion in a world in which your possible actions are already known. This occurs in Plurality by the existence of the spacetime worms of players’ potentialities. Discourse about the topics of social inequality and free will will hopefully be accomplished through the “short string” vs “long string” disequality in the world, and the idea that the “long string” foreknowledge of their own actions negates and is seen as superior to free will.
How will I evaluate my success?
If players interact with their known potentialities in playful ways such as rebelling against the potentialities they see on screen, or following a potentiality down a hazardous path just because it is their “fate” I would evaluate my primary goal as successful. If they are intrigued by the storyline and relate some of the concepts to real world problems this would be satisfactory for my secondary goals.
Atlas:
Form
The atlas will take the form of a tree of branching decisions. Just as there are interconnected spacetime strings between parallel worlds in plurality, there are also strings that interconnect between the pages of the atlas. These strings show both interconnections between the topics covered in the atlas, as well as showing interconnected branching decisions that occured in the world, such as the connection between the undestoryed New Geneva, and the crater of New Geneva. These strings also map the reader’s choice potentialities in a way. Just as a human in the world of Plurality can see all of their potential choices, the atlas reader can also see their potential paths from the table of contents through the contents of the atlas laid out before them.
Table of Contents
-Philosophical Ideas
—Determinism vs Free Will
—Multiple Worlds Theory
-Physics of Plurality
—Potentiality Spacetime Worms and seeing into the future
—Planetary Locations of strong inter potentiality connection
-Politics
—Long & Short Strand Law
—Governmental Appointment
—The Seers Word
—Relay Stations
-History
—The Emergence
—Vision of a Better Tommorow
—The Rise of the Seat of Governance
—The Seers
—The Construction of the Relay Station Infrastructure
—The Tragedy of New Geneva
—Short Strand Apartheid for the Greater Social Good
—Current Social Tension and Civil Disobedience
—The Reemergence of No Strands
-Map
—Overarching map
—Key Locations with 3D depictions
—–Seat of Governance
—–Long Seer Tower
—–Short Strand Light Confinement
—–Prison
—–Nuke Site of New Geneva
Assets to produce:
Artwork for depicting how a person would see their own spacetime worm potentialities.
Enumerated laws of segregation that short strands must follow.
Fleshed out storylines for the history of Plurality.
Map of the world.
3D mockups for key buildings in the world.
Atlas Structure Mockup:
(Click Images for Fullsize)