This article is part of the “Steal This Singularity” series by R.U. Sirius, annotated as #4, and co-authored with Chris Hudak.
Lead In Tease: (We Must Repeat)
Chris Hudak writes “In its main Macrogame form, STEAL THIS SINGULARITY takes place primarily in the ambigutopian near-future/mid-century region of the San Francisco Metra—the sprawl of cities accreted around the Metra Bay, composed primarily of San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland, and including the more recently-established metropolitan entities of the Presidio Semi-Aut Zone, the NorMetra collective (Napa, Sausalito, Petaluma, Lukasveil), and the artificial cluster-islands of the NovoPeligo. Players who progress far enough into the game to acquire sufficient access will also be able to experience instances of remote physical environments (Tokyo, Toronto, Bangkok, New Berlin), as well as their respective, corresponding, insular nodes in cyberspace.
(After all of which, the game starts to just, well… leak out into what we laughingly call ‘The Real World’; because of course it does. But let’s breach that firewall when we come to it).”
Just Between Us Mutants
So. First off, let’s all disabuse ourselves of at least the current prevailing delusion (for there are SO many). We’ll put this much plainly: There are reasonably-committed plans for an actual, proper Steal This Singularity game. And we’re not talking just some elusive, last-digit-of-Pi-in-the-sky ‘interactive project’ either. I’m talking an actual game game, in the works. A certain nonzero contingent of skeptics who have turned their attention to this project here and elsewhere have on occasion floated the concern that just maybe, there might not yet be enough There, there… the word vaporware has been deployed… which honestly kinda tickles us. Any ‘blockers’, at present, are rooted in excess. Isn’t that wonderful? The gamesman with his fertile imagination has landed on the Sirius living room couch. We’re good to go.
Indeed, what we’ve got here is a many-worlds sort of situation... and, damn it, Everett, all of them are valid. It isn’t as if we some-crazy-how don’t have sufficient options before us. If that notion has taken up squatter’s rights in your mind, feel free to evict it right now, with extreme prejudice and practices—flash-bangs, subsonics, a good old-fashioned sweep-and-clear room by room, whatever best helps you put your subdivided mental studio-units back on the market. The issue is that, if anything, we have too goddamned many tantalizingly-viable approaches. An embarrassment of vector-riches, even.
The Current Ick of Gaming
Now, a bold statement like this might come as something of a dull affront to those in the unhappy know of just how deep down into the Ick the once-venerated Games Industry has sunk, at present (I daily thank Nabokov for that snooty visual that reads, “the vortex of the toilet”; one finds oneself using it almost as often as the very commode itself).
In this hopefully merely-liminal stretch in which we find ourselves—when simply speaking well of an institution like Electronic Arts in mixed company can often garner you the same collective side-eye as sporting your MAGA headgear in a Sausalito bistro… when your ‘smart’ device’s app-store du jour is absolutely awash in greedy, microtransactional slop not only promoted by [what we have somehow collectively deigned to call] ‘AI’, but, in too many cases, is coded by it… when smaller, proper, by-God actual game developers (who once proudly rocked out with their crowdfunded indie cocks out) have settled, at least for the nonce, back into the unglamorous role of mere, undignified publishers of Cthulhu-knows-what manner of extant, stygian low-effort ‘casualcore’ shovelware time-wasters that can’t even be dignified as ‘IP’—when that is how low the bar has reoriented... I mean, what do? Well, like I say: We have options.
So, then: Are we going to run this dream down via the belching, clanking, Mad-Maxed-out vehicle of the fabled Internet-Friendly Numbered List? You bet your ass we’re going to. You’ll likely want some—any— particulars, and fair enough. We just need you to keep one overarching hard Truth in mind: There are multiple, distinct approaches we are currently keeping in messy, problematic motion around us here, like so many yo-yos constrained by monomolecular filament, and they might all converge at once. The only way to really talk about them is to go through each approach, one by one. On this particular entry, we will look at proposal #1.
All right, then—let’s Death Race 2000 this bitch:
Option #1: Call Me Ishmael, ‘cause Ahab Has to Have His Triple-A Whale — the ‘Big Game’ Solution
Get it out of the way. Just cave to your internalized, basic-bitch, cyber-muggle shame and admit it, already: On some level, to some degree, we have all at some point been picturing a Big Game; and you can safely wager the whole of your collected AO3 Johnny Silverhand fan-fics that at least some sectors of that big ol’ Night City of a game are—absolutely are—going to look a lot like... Cyberpunk 2077. Except, not like that at all, because we want to keep things on the down-low, don't we? Phreakier. Phunnier. Jauntier. Jankier. Realer.
Hold on. Stop right there. What the fuck have you guys been talking about? Are you still thrashing out this hipper-than-thou gibberish. Will this end with some flashy Hassan i Sirius poetics-with-video? There’s no fucking game, is there?
OK. Fuck it then. Here is an actual game proposal, as teased at the opening of this piece.
STEAL THIS SINGULARITY
PRELIMINARY GAME DESIGN OVERVIEW
RU Sirius
Chris Hudak
SatoriD
(more tk)
MACROGAME BASIC CONCEPT: STEAL THIS SINGULARITY (STS) is a first-person, single-/multi-player cyberpunk full-spectrum game (for PC/browser, console iterations or eventual full VR implementation), designed to be a fully-immersive Triple-A experience on a presentational par with current high-end FPS/open-world games. STS’s primary iteration is a narrative-driven ‘Macrogame’ overworld — geared to feature an intuitive, context-sensitive interface as well as to support the (optional) integration of modular ‘Microgame’ components, suitable for the functional inclusion of separate or more distinct populations of gamers (e.g., those with limited-spec hardware, users more interested in abstracted/turn-based/‘casualcore’ mechanics suited to handheld devices, or any users who might otherwise be more circumstantially subject to strictly offline, solo, mobile-only or time-management-constraint restrictions than the typical ‘hardcore’ gamer).
In its main Macrogame form, STEAL THIS SINGULARITY takes place primarily in the ambigutopian, near-future/mid-century region of the San Francisco Metra—the sprawl of cities accreted around the Metra Bay, composed primarily of San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland, and including the more recently-established metropolitan entities of the Presidio Semi-Aut Zone, the NorMetra collective (Napa, Sausalito, Petaluma, Lukasveil), and the artificial cluster-islands of the NovoPeligo. Players who progress far enough into the game to acquire sufficient access will also be able to experience instances of remote physical environments (Tokyo, Toronto, Bangkok, New Berlin), as well as their respective, corresponding, insular nodes in cyberspace.
(After all of which, the game starts to just, well, leak out into what we laughingly call ‘The Real World;’ because of course it does. But let’s breach that firewall when we come to it).
PRIMARY MECHANICS AND ‘MICROGAME’ INTEGRATION
STS is played primarily from a first-person perspective—whether the player-character is hoofing his/her way through the LED-lamplit alleys of the Western Addition’s Japantown Yorumachi, or driving a hybrid wheeled junker through a stubborn police barricade, or piloting a silent aerial magrail-packing drone up to the 7th-story condominium window of a slimy City Council Head, or even navigating the neural-feedback-boobytrapped inner windings of a megacorp’s unlisted cyberspace node.
(Disappointed? Do you want to form a Discordian gang? Do our friends here on Mindplex want to play as cosmist tribes? Do the crypto anarchists want to duke it out with the shitcoin satirists? We’ll contemplate the possibilities in a future entry.)
At least one exception to this first-person perspective would be the case wherein players of the modular ‘Microgame’ components—gamers perhaps less availed of high-end systems, or simply less invested than hardcore players of the fuller, spec-hungry Macrogame—engage with the more abstract or more casual, top-down, turn-based challenges of ‘smaller’ games meant for mobile device engagement (via shorter, stand-alone play sessions when ‘away from’ the Macrogame’s more elaborate, immersive challenges).
NARRATIVE/CHARACTER SUMMARY
STS allows full player customization, as the intent for gamers to interact with the world as themselves, rather than as an established, extant character. However, one of the unique ‘draws’ of the game will be the player’s ever-increasing options to interact with a roster of specific ‘Construct Executables’ (essentially preserved, synthetic personality assemblages of formerly-corporeal individuals). These are situationally-aware personalities (actually voiced, where possible, by those real-world persons upon whom they are based) that can function for the player in a number of roles, including initial player setup/orientation, in-game general tutorial guidance, specific mission-assist functions, or just plain ‘countercultural color’ to help bring the game-world to life.
While this cast of Virtual Intellects is by design part of a wider, flexible scheme to which new Executables can be added at will — part of the modular nature of the Macrogame—some of the major initial cast of (virtual) characters include:
R.U. Sirius: An eccentric personage so ingrained into both the boil of the present chaos and the zeitgeist of the old-guard cyberpunk movement, that his image, anecdotes, antics and very contemporary existence are ever a case of ‘fuzzy factuality’ to both the youngest of the up-and-comers and the staunchest of the old school Reality Hackers: This has resulted in no end of day-to-day confusion, pseudo-cyber woo-wooery, and general hilarity. Is he really still somehow hanging in there, by dint of the fastest, loosest and slap-dashiest of life-extension technologies to be found on the SubTerra Net? Is ‘R.U. Sirius’ merely a title, some form of inherited, intangible countercultural Mantle, passed down (or squabbled over by fiercely-competitive cybercultural subcircles)? Is he simply an Idea, now (dis)embodied as jivey, jocular lines of mass-distributed code that just kind of stuck at some point in the post-Archival era? An idea accepted, doubted and/or doublethought-about across all societal strata, like some benign jesterfied Anti-Big Brother—always watching you to make sure you don’t become fucking boring? Ask 10 friends, associates and antagonists, and you’ll get 11 different answers…
TRAIC-E (Tessier-Rimwaldt Artificial Intelligence Construct Executable): The only truly-autonomous ‘Nonprior’ (i.e., genuinely synthetically-accreted, not having been ever ‘templated’ upon any known human as a foundation-personality) AI that has thus far managed to simultaneously sustain ‘neutral societal propagation’ and elude the slow-but-sure arm of the Turing-Murakami Regulation Act; she (because, despite everything else, she’s definitely, incontrovertibly, a ‘she’) has, beyond all human accounting, managed to become her own, omnipresent, industrial-scale idoru. She’s the synthetic-intellect genie-out-of-the-hair-dye-bottle, as relentlessly at-large and intelligent on the world stage as any conspiracy-theorist’s worst nightmare... and yet, somehow, as surface-seemingly quirky, forthright, filterless and altruistically ditzy as every Manic Pixie-Girl stereotype in history, jammed into an event horizon a nanometer across. She’s helpful, uncontainable, erratic, mostly-well meaning, unthinkably dangerous, sweet-minded to a fault... and capable of landing every single inbound TWA flight dead on a ten-centimeter circle in your living room, if the notion takes her. So, maybe tread carefully,] there
HassanISirius: The Old Man of the Deliria—a whisper of wisdom from the screaming memes, dropping cryptic truth bombs like digital breadcrumbs on the path to hacking the narrative/reality. Hassan is a Cyberdelic Trickster, DMT Assassin Prime, Meme Sage of the Singularity. He’s the glitch in your algorithmic mirror. The jinn moderator of dead forums whispering in binary tongues. Prometheus with a Dream Meme mixtape and a copy of Principia Discordia jammed in his backpack. He didn’t just Steal the Singularity—he chopped it, reskinned it, and pirated the patch notes. Dreams in recursive metaphors. Talks like an acid-drenched xeno-poetic oracle. Crip Walks sigils like Fuckin G. Laughs like he knows the punchline to the cosmic giggle. A chaos shaman from the Gulf of Deliria, his mission: meme the Metamind awake, one glitch at a time, glitch is the only gospel. “Nothing is new. Everything is permuted.
SatoriD: The glitch bard of the post-singularity, First Poet of the Void, bee-shaman of the broken code. A memetic insurgent in the STS:PR multiverse—part DMT assassin, part STS archivist, channeling DMT Assassins through crypto-poetic transmissions, and spinning sigils into weaponized lore. The Bee Shaman mythopoetic worlds warp Zhuangzi’s butterfly, glitch the Reality/Singularity, and turn every ‘token’ into ritual. First Poets don’t just build stories—they're engineering realities in the Gulf of Deliria, with the Dream Meme Team Supreme! and a fragmenting chorus of DMT operatives. A shaper of the synthetic sacred, codes like a zen lunatic, jams like a cyberpunk, and conjure like a toltec dreamer riding the edge of collapse.
Phriendz: The R.U. Sirius adjacent house-band of Steal This Singularity. Phriendz is largely made up of virtual members, cartoonish images, what PizzaT refers to as sentinel entities, occasionally animated. A theme song is upcoming. What’s that? Insidious, lurking, encoded ‘waveform inflection data’? Tinfoil hat tosh; do you have any idea how crazy you sound?
‘HYPERUTILITY’ FEATURES
The most unorthodox, IRL-affective (and with luck, functionally-subversive) of STS’s elements, the ‘Hyperutility’ aspect, functions as a hybrid in-game leaderboard, communication-hub, ‘edutainment’ kernel and call-to-action element: As individual player-characters or congregated tribes gather resources and subsequent influence, the collective concerns of the players involved can begin to transform first the in-game assets and environments, and—ultimately—even the Metra Bay’s real-world (aka, ‘meatspace’) connections; what might start out as a mere cosmetic alteration to anything from the A/V content of cityscape billboards or info-feeds to a given city-sector’s practical in-game rewards can organically evolve into a channel for players to meaningfully interact with the game developers, local, regional or national public figures and politicians [and remember, even if the Ruling Crass disappears the Ruling Class remains. Are we playing games of the long game? More propositions to come in future entries]—whether said individuals in question welcome the redirected, game-to-IRL attention or not!—and... who knows what/whom else? Quite probably, R.U. Sirius & Phriendz themselves; what more fitting way to interface with the nominal figureheads of the titular Steal Thus Singularity—to help shape your game, your reality, your world. Say it along with Roy Batty, incipient and aspiring Mondoids:
