Pill: Meet me on the deep(er) net

[desktopreluctant]

hello protocol friends far and wide!

i’m building a small browser-based game about intimacy, trust, and establishing connection while being anonymous called “meet me on the deep net.” it’s an interactive story about a person crossing an ocean to meet a stranger, where a player can choose to be either seeking or offering connection. the protocol drama (if you will!) is inspired by the way secure rendezvous points are established in the tor relay network, which support anonymous hosting and visiting of websites.

since i pitched this idea, the direction that i want to take this during summer of protocols has shifted (as directions do :)). for one, i have a playable prototype! you can walk through the game here. (for the curious, code is here: github.) here are two screenshots:

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(a few “big thoughts” i’m working through)

the aesthetics and interactions of the game find pleasure in the language of browser defaults. the game is rooted in the awe i have for the dance of request <> response that make anonymously accessing a website possible and my desire to (un)learn possibilities of what networks can be. i think a lot about a chapter from alexis shotwell’s book against purity: living ethically in compromised times called: “‘women don’t get aids, they just die from it: memory, classification, and the campaign to change the definition of aids’”. in the chapter, she argues for the importance of wrestling with how knowledge gets produced:

“What does it mean to think about those histories that are difficult to remember well—either because the present in some way requires erasing what happened in the past or because particular past events have become so taken-for-granted that it is hard to imagine that the world was once different.”
[…] “When classification becomes commonsensical it can become difficult to recall that they were created and, sometimes, contested. Attending to contestation reminds us that what happened in the past was not inevitable. And since the past persists and consists in the present, no particular future is inevitable either.”

i might replace “classification” here with a variety of other “big words” related to the internet, digital tools, and network communication. tor, as an open-source, privacy-centric tool that’s supported by volunteer-run servers around the world, is one such model (of many!) that’s changed & continues to change my understanding of what networks can be. it’s an imperfect and limited tool for contesting the inevitability of the web we have.

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right now, i’m sketching out two different directions i’d like to explore further:

• two-player mode: a version of the two game roles (seeking and offering connection, mirroring the “client” and the “server”) that can be played side-by-side in the same browser. this would let two people play the game together and find their way to each other through the elaborate process of connection.

  • it’d involve refactoring the game to be split between two windows, where each scene in the game only progresses when the necessary steps have been completed by each player. it may also involve restructuring the individual scenes a bit so that they align nicely.
  • what i like about the idea is that it lets each player see the ritual that the other player has to perform at each step to meet them, but i’m not sure if the two-player interaction undercuts the emotional resonance of the story. does the structure of this interaction (sitting side-by-side with another person who you presumably already know and who is literally right there next to you lol) make sense when the game story is centered around crossing a great distance to meet a stranger?

• level two or an epilogue: a second part to the game, where a player can visit an onion site that i’ll self-host from a computer in my house. after manually performing part of the ritual to establish connection, the player is invited to let their browser perform that ritual to visit an onion site. on the site, there will be a landscape that the player can contribute to and leave behind a token or record of their long visit that’ll be saved on the site.

  • it’d involve setting up an onion site and a web server to persist the website state on the filesystem (which i haven’t done before!).
  • the “digital garden” is a pattern that pops up a lot in poetic web space – i like it! it’s sweet! but i do wonder if it’ll hit a “been there, done that” kind of note with folks and won’t be very engaging. i also am not sure what kind of “add to the landscape” gesture will feel meaningful if i end up going this route.

this next week, i’m planning to attend an informal game play session in brooklyn, ny. (come thru if you’re in the area!) i’ll get to watch people play (or not play) the game and get some irl feedback about what works / what doesn’t / what’s engaging / what isn’t. (i already spotted a few bugs today, oops lol)

anyway, all for now! thoughts / questions / links / feedback welcome.

[ceciliyazi]

this is such a beautiful game and idea!!!

• i love the options to be in either/both roles and played it both. i found it very comforting and calm (maybe also bc of the music in pentatonic notes?), but as i played the “seeking for strangers” narrative first, i felt taken care of, a sense of reliance, and patience from the step-by-step aids. yes, it’s nice to trust! trusting a stranger who we “choose-to-trust”! nice that we will be friends on the pathway, even if temporarily.
• i love the pun with “wave” - it almost feels like a learning process for this space/protocol(?) to encounter, to make effort, instead of only free-flowing… same as the reminder to wait and offer a connection while we could choose to look for one.
• being between messengers is like offering attention to those with us there on the journey, as the path already records what happens in the past and in the future, for it’s the present. from the Shotwell quotes, the idea of inevitability definitely circles back for me with the “entanglement” and the “always-alreadys”, while here with inevitability i’m finding more tenderness in these trusted/chosen moments, trusted strangers and messengers to surf or to tunnel with. maybe being given clues and unique signatures JUST for us could make us feel assured, an act of care.
• i was curious though how it’d feel to really witness/experience a version of having data/message sent and received with the relay, beyond being explained to? idk if this could be realized with the two-player version – if that means to have some liveness to it, and if that means to involve something like hosting socket servers (if that’s what’s needed…)?
• sitting side by side to play is interesting to me! like adding a physical layer to it? it’s literally finding the next messenger, who’s the only person you’d know, meanwhile you wouldn’t know where they’ve come from, and neither would they know where you’re headed to next?
• also love the level two/epilogue and a fan of visiting your self-hosted onion site as well as leaving traces there as contribution, whether it’ll be a garden or other forms of spaces to continue the journaling and whisper-like narrative… to me it could feel like, although they’re anonymous messengers/visitors, we’re reminded that the relays and networks could happen because of these real people/rendezvous points. reassured as they’ve always been here…

wonder how the game session went!

[desktopreluctant]

ah, it has been so long! i have been steeping and simmering in thoughts related to this work, but have been tied up with my job enough that i haven’t had extra time to share what i’ve been working on along the way.

a few notes from a night of playtesting last month:

• so blown away by how kind and generous people were; i think everybody that started the game played the whole thing, which i think is really generous! it’s a short game and the crowd was full of people who were there to have their game playtested or playtest other games, so maybe it’s not surprising. (:

• i found a few bugs that i should fix!

• i heard a few variations of people saying they found the aesthetic of the game really compelling and pleasurable, but the narrative felt lacking. a few people gave feedback along the lines of:

  • wanting to explore the game space more; some of the invisible boundaries were confusing
  • trusting people to understand the game play and how to move through the space, wanting the interactions to be less linear
  • the text felt too instructional and it could be more evocative, layered, or provide a more open-ended experience

this was really interesting for me in a few ways! one is that, in creating a “drama” for a specific protocol, i do feel that the game is committed to a certain rigidity and linear order of operations. how could the game feel more open while also following the protocol structure?

the second thing i’m thinking about is ian cheng’s emissary’s guide to worlding. (i started reading it a few months ago while prototyping this game.) the way people reacted to the environment, feeling compelled by it and wanting to explore on their own, makes me think i built more of a “world” than i was expecting / intending. that’s pretty neat. (:

i’m not planning on changing anything just yet. my instinct is to let the main game be what it is right now. changing the narrative has big implications for the game. (each scene is built based on the story for that scene, so changing the narrative might mean re-working chunks of the game, which isn’t a bad thing, but something that i’d like more space to develop a vision for.)

what i have been developing for summer of protocols:

(this is what we’re here for!) i’ve designed a communal digital landscape that people can visit using the technical protocol they play in the game i built, meet me on the deep net. after playing this dance of request and response to establish an anonymous rendezvous point to communicate with a stranger, people will be invited to visit a website using tor. there, they’ll find a digital commons that they can contribute to and explore. over time, the landscape will fill up with patches and islands created by travelers who have made the journey and want to leave a site behind for future travelers to encounter.

what i like about this experience is that it offers something to travelers who have made the journey through the game, beyond the game’s current “wow you made it! wasn’t that cool!” ending (which i think is valuable too!!). it puts the story into practice, through both the technical protocol and the offerings of other travelers that you get to experience.

i’ll have a real, visitable site to share sometime tomorrow, but for now, you can take a look at this rough sketch to get an idea of what the landscape-making looks like.

[desktopreluctant]

@ceciliyazi, you are amazing! thank you for such a thoughtful and long response, and for taking the time to play the game in both roles! (: i’m so overdue to respond.

i love this attendance to being with the messengers and this reading of past, present, future and the intimacy you’ve found there. i’m also intrigued by your desire to witness this communication in real time, to make a connection with a person or this volunteer-run infrastructure. i’m hoping this collective digital landscape i’ve been building will kind of get at that desire! maybe not as directly as you’ve expressed, but i’m hoping it’ll connect some of the “story” of the protocol with its “practice” in the world, and that’ll feel both more real and magical? people get to see the protocol as a way to experience an exchange with other people through the giant collaboration and (archival?) record of the site.

would be super curious to get your thoughts when it’s live!!

[wip]

I played the game for the first time last week. I really enjoyed it, thanks!

I think it does a great job of explaining the very basics of the TOR network to people without technical. However, as someone with a technical background I wonder if there could be another layer/level that goes deeper into the protocol. Or perhaps even just including links to other places for those who want to explore further.

Building on this, I wonder if there could be some more information around how and why to use TOR. Like I imagine this might be the first time going to a .onion site for many people. Is one of the goals to get more people to use TOR regularly, perhaps you could share how you use TOR. Although not sure how it fits into the gameplay.

I found the gameplay mostly intuitive, although there were a couple of times I stuggled to find the next point to trigger. I think it was the stars towards the end of the game, perhaps because I am on a laptop, but they were off screen for me so I had to search a bit for them.

Overall though, wicked project. What a great way to make something complex accessible.

[desktopreluctant]

@wip, ty so much for spending time with the game and making an island (: i appreciate all that feedback. i love to hear that you’re curious to dive deeper, like i think that’s a sign of compelling storytelling, even if the game/story didn’t provide a satisfying avenue into that.

my intention is less to inspire more people to use tor (though i think that’s a lovely outcome), and more to create a sense of wonder and curiosity into how networked communication operates and destigmatize privacy-centric tools like tor. this is something as a whole i’m trying to figure out! i have taught a few versions of a workshop on hosting websites with tor, which i think gets at all the questions (how do people use this? why should i use this?) that you’ve asked from a different angle, but i haven’t figured out where/how that content should live online yet. i’ve attempted to pull some of the hands-on exercise portion of that workshop into https://self-host.lizz.website (which is linked in the credits of the game) but i’m not sure if that accomplishes what i want it to just yet.

and thank you for pointing out where you got stuck at the end of the game! that is really helpful for helping me improve the scenes.