Deep Magic: Excerpt
Fight for root; as one, as many.
A Game Treatment
Authors: Matthew Bozarth & Joshua Gilpatrick
Fall 2008
The metaverse was built on rules, rules that allowed for a complex, virtual world. A world that mirrors the digital infrastructure upon which it was based. Servers, the backbone of the metaverse, are represented by large installations. It is a boon for commerce; one can do anything, as long as it is within the rules and physics, and there is enough processing power. The ultimate rule is: computation equals power. Hackers quickly realized the potential and began assaulting servers of large corporations, taking over the virtual installations. The corporations fought back by deploying autonomous Daemons to defend the virtual fortresses. At first, the Hackers had the advantage. They knew how the metaverse worked and were able to take advantage of various back doors to run scripts on the servers. Instead of building avatars with heavy armor and weapons, like the Daemons, they scripted bots to fight for them. With these, they easily defeated the automated defense bots and the corporations responded by hiring white hats to run their Daemons. The hackers now fight these new Daemons not with firepower, but with numbers.
Tone Words: digital, security, power, underground, rogue, cyberwarfare
(This game was brainstormed, designed, tested as a boardgame prototype, and written up by Joshua Gilpatrick and myself and then pitched for our master’s capstone project. It was ultimately rejected, but I thought someone might want to look at it and see what I like to design.)