Preliminary Materials Toward "Experimental Unit" Serious Game Narratival Experiention

Choose Your Own DLC Packs or Augment With Your Own

Think first of a War Game. Generals command perhaps fake or fractional forces while no combat is really taking place.

It’s called a “game,” but this exercise is not just set up for fun. It’s supposed to help the top brass understand the implications of technological developments that have not yet seen the light of day in full operation. Or else confrontations are staged with hostile forces in order to try and prepare to fight this or that power or constellation of powers.

I used to play this game called Math Blaster. It was sort of like Mario where you side-scrolled but then you would have to do math problems in order to do the thing.

Here again we have a didactic game, one that is trying to teach you something.

Now let us turn to Experimental Unit as Serious Game.

“Serious” as a word immediately makes me feel silly, personally. So I would prefer to say that Experimental Unit is a silly game, as Camelot is a silly place (though no sillier than Dallas).

Now, the goal is to sufficiently emulate the experience of a Project Inner Alliance or other variant. The base version of Experimental Unit drives the game engine, and various DLC Packs can be added as described below.

In some sense the full game is only engaged by implementing all of the DLC Packs, but they will all automatically load upon initiation of the game engine. Reading the manual is not required.

Another stipulation is that you have always been playing Experimental Unit.

So here’s an example of how it could work out of the box.

The game begins.

Someone reads a prepared script, or players all read, together or privately:

“Welcome to Experimental Unit. You have just initiated a play sequence. You have been supplied artificial memories and sensory inputs to facilitate gameplay. Draw on your knowledge of your personal lore as well as in-game mechanics and established characters to make the most of your time together.”

Something like that.

Immediately, you are Alternative Reality Gaming (ARG). Compare to Grimes’ Media Empire or whatnot from the Chaos Manual. It also takes credit for our actual universe.

Note that all main storylines do this, which is why all stories must interface with cosmological stories.

Players may take this more or less seriously. See the psychedelics and meditation DLC Packs for more information.

So, how more immediately can you play?

I was thinking there could be player cards with checklists or something. Could be attributes or statements agree/disagree. Then become fodder for discussion.

Also perhaps could eschew these for a basic framing of what your life is like:

“Welcome to Experimental Unit. You find yourself in conversation on a planet in crisis, where any day could be the last for all anthropoids, including all of you, and you individually [this prompt designed to reinforce the knowledge of one’s mortality, similar to a Terror Management Theory experiment. Could perhaps simply be part of the reckoning with Death DLC Pack].

“In this context, meaningful cooperation remains hard to achieve. It is difficult to build meaningful activity when the workings of systems are so unknown. In addition, the nature of reality remains mysterious even to the foremost scientists. At the same time, to be alive is like playing with house money, and the artist in you reaches for everything at hand to express your reaction to everything you have been presented with.

“You emerge from this flux of beauty and conflict, mystery and technology, life and death. Here you have the opportunity to be influenced profoundly, and influence others. Transform yourself, and transform others. Express your secret carried truths, and learn the undersides of others.

“Or play a double game, invested in the lore you’ve been provided. Your task will be to pursue whatever goals you have given that you are obligated for whatever reason to be here, or that you are gathering intelligence or else visiting from another dimension as a tourist to experience the greatest game ever played.”

It’s something like this. People might find this too abstract, but the point is first of all to invoke skepticism by saying the beginning of time for you in this body is now. It invites psychic distance from the past & emphasis on future orientation & operationalizing the past as opposed to feeling bound by a sense of being judged for revealing something. Instead players essentially become characters and reveal their fictional back stories to one another, see Six Characters in Search of an Author.

Note also how this at least sketches an omnipresent functioning of the game. This initial load sequence establishes that all temporal-spatial experience can be conjured as an instance of Experimental Unit. In other words, this core game mechanic can be loaded in any situation, e.g. in a world which does not seem to be in crisis, where conflict is not present, etc.

Proceeding therefrom we have invocation of the metacrisis couched in conflict terms. There are many pressing problems and the inability to cooperate makes them all much worse.

Skepticism must again be reinforced by appealing to the mystery of the nature of reality. It’s a fact even according to the utmost believers of science that the ultimate nature of physics as we know it remains unknown.

We then have religious and other cosmological explanations, but these also all remain uncertain. None impresses itself on everyone as obviously correct, and so all may reasonably be doubted.

More could be said. We have then national stories and political ideologies. All of these are also in crisis and could not be more uncertain.

These are all categories of attributes or groupings applied to oneself and “one’s kind,” or one’s class in the sense of a property; see internal possession in Jainist vow of non-possession.

See also gender and sex, and sexuality. Here again we have core attributes by which a personal narrative is formed, and yet increasingly in all people and all “types” of people there is crisis. None of these stories seem adequate to the moment, and all may be doubted.

These all follow from the core game mechanic of imagining that you have been loaded into this experience in order to run an experiment. Think of Rick and Morty where Rick takes Roy off the grid. Many people have really gone for it with what they have done.

What such a mentality includes is the operationalization of all.

If in-game lore includes discussion of setting things ready to hand, then gameplay mechanics work to reach out and grasp these design elements waiting to be bricolaged.

This is in the sense that for each character, you will have a jarring experience playing Experimental Unit. If you play without believing in the conceit, then you are basically choosing to believe in “reality,” yet you are also drawn in your attention to your constant affectation. It is as Shelley says to make the familiar be as if it were unfamiliar.

It is then to outline “facts of life” almost like the birds and the bees 2 for our moment in order to fully contextualize the discursive anarchy and uncertainty which prevails, and the license as well as responsibility and management of risk that each player is called to assume.

DLC Packs

Some people don’t understand how to play Experimental Unit without a DLC Pack. These augment the game to provide specific points of emphasis.

It will be best to begin with relatively anodyne DLC Packs, as the game can grow quite intense (as you know).

I mentioned before psychedelic and meditation DLC packs, and we can also possibly segment out nation, religion, sex, gender, race, ancestry, and conflict.

Part of the purpose of DLC Packs as I mentioned is that Experimental Unit is always being played by all those who experience. Hence some modules will not be relevant or will be unintelligible for those whose in-game lore and simulated inner world history do not provide adequate basis to understand the interest of certain or all aspects of the DLC Pack.

There is no hard ceiling on the level of intensity of any sitting of Experimental Unit. The point is that anyone could do anything, which seems most correct in the moment. The whole fun and interest is to see what might seem most correct in circumstances where one might question anything or else go all-in on it at the drop of a hat.

[Transmissions fades to static Angst]