Jamie Antonisse

The lost station Eliza floats through space, drifting ever closer to Earth, its erstwhile home. In the abandoned corridors nothing makes a sound any longer; the only survivors are the static, flickering dispassionately on cracked monitors, and, shut away within a solitary room, the cursor.

Presiding over the void, the cursor blinks, regular as a pendulum, green and black, at the end of a sentence. The cursor blinks, green and black; it waits, in infinite patience, as it has waited these last three months.

Welcome to the Cache: Press Enter.

I found this hand-scribbled on a notecard beneath my bed. I vaguely remember writing it months ago at 2 AM, imagining it thought and written by a man with a permanent-fixture cancer stick dangling from his lip and a suit that had been on his back so long it no longer smelled of B.O. A real fucked up gentleman with the following on his mind:

"Fear... fear isn't so bad. Fear keeps me going. But as I grow older I fear less and less... it's all familiar, all too comfortable. It's just the one fear in there now, eating its own tail, the fear that's come to dominate me: the fear that I'm not afraid of anything anymore and that I never will be again. It's a stale fear, there's no comfort or rush in it. It eats at me, all the time: "I'm not afraid of ANYTHING anymore." And I hold onto that sentiment, because in the back of my mind I know: fear is LIFE. And when I accept that I've mastered it, when I give up worrying on how easy it all is, when I decide that it's Okay, then my little life will be over."

Happy Tuesday.

To reiterate, with visuals...

This is a prototype of a new sort of narrative, a fully explorable environment fixed in space and time. Each page shows a map. As you flip forward through the pages, time moves forward by fifteen second intervals. The game covers four floors of a space (each represented by a colored oval) over four minutes of time.

The back of each card narrates a Moment, a particular 15-second chunk in a particular room of the space. Sometimes there are people moving through the spaces, other times you act as a camera, surveying details of the space itself.

The artifact you're looking at isn't really a game... there's no way to win or lose. The reason we've been running this test is to see how people interact with this sort of story space. How do people read when they can move through space and time at will? What do they want to DO with this power?

Already, with a mere four tests under our belt, we've gotten some very interesting results.

[UPDATE: I browsed my uploaded images on another computer and they looked TERRIBLE. On Matt's advice, I tried moving them to Flickr and linking to them there. Let me know if you still have trouble viewing them. If the text is illegible at standard resolution, that's understandable, but the shapes at least should be unbroken.]

Well, my Atlas is done for now. No Document just yet... I have fifteen pages on world history, the purpose and form of the ship, and the experiment that I'll refine and put up here at a later time. For the moment I've decided on posting the sexy stuff, the architectural design of the ship. You can view the drawings below, or see the larger drawings and comments in the Cache Flickr set.

I rounded out the architectural sketches with notes (purportedly written for investors) about the working of the Eliza and her various facilities and amenities. If anyone feels up to the task of poking holes in my ship design, from either a left-brained perspective ("you forgot to give them AIR") or a right-brained perspective ("I threw up in my mouth a little when I saw your font choice") I'd love to hear it.

"This ship has no windows. It was not built to look out at the stars, to explore unknown reaches of space. The universe in all its vastness is only a technical incovenience, an uncontrolled variable, for the Eliza’s grand introspective experiment.

The Eliza’s inhabitants careen through space without any line of communication back to Earth. When they return, five years of history will have passed, and they will face a planet restored or destroyed. There is no way to know which it will be: they can only complete their small mission… to remember and to recreate."

Mike Rossmassler, Sean Bouchard and I worked all last semester on a prototype which allows users to explore a 4 dimensional story-space and edit together a narrative from the events.

We now have a digital version of our prototype available online! Here's the site:

http://undefinedbehavior.com/cache/index.php

We're constantly revising it... I'll post here whenever anything significant changes.

In a recent entry, I described the events that led me to re-evaluate the underlying gameplay mechanics of The Cache.

After this soul-searching, I went back to the drawing board, looking for new fundamental game paradigms that could bring out the strengths of the Cache. Strategy? No. Rhythm? No. Action? Clearly, no. Puzzle? That had always held the most immediate possibilities for this form. I dug a little deeper this time, however, and found another paradigm, a cousin (nephew? son?) of the puzzle that I thought held some rich possibilities.

I started looking at The Maze.

It turns out everything changes.

I knew that, of course... babies know it. But the last three months have reinforced that fact.