Progression Design

A group of people are convinced that modern society is unfair and that our obsession for the “free will” is preventing humans to reach spiritual elevation. Motivated by an urge of fairness and some strong religious beliefs, they are trying to build a new system where determinism will be the answer.

Setting up of the game
The first part of the game consists of setting up how the settlement – this new funded society, is functioning.

This part of the game draws its inspiration from the “Veil of ignorance” thoughts experiment.

A player would have to establish the rules of a society from which they know nothing, not even the roles they will play. Therefore, this society is supposed to be fairer – since no one is considering their personal interests.

1) A random player is drawn to create the law of the newly founded society. A warning is displayed on the game screen:  "“Behind this veil, nothing remains of yourself. Neither your gender, social position, tastes, skills nor race. The laws you will set up could affect you in any manner.”"

2) The player must take a decision about each of these categories and/or subcategories:

After this step, a role is randomly assigned to each player – including to the one who selected the rules. Those roles can be divided into two categories – the people in control, and the people under control. Half of the players will be in control and a half, controlled. In case of a five players game, an additional player will be controlled. It is also possible to select the laws in a way that no one is in control.

This part of the gameplay draws its inspiration from another sociological experiment “The Stanford Prison experiment”. The purpose is to see how people react to power and how the laws determined earlier are shifting the impact of power and balancing its negative consequences.

In this part of the game, is assigned to the player a gender and racial background. The roles played by the player delimit the kind of events they will have to answer to, in the game, and the way they can interact with other citizens. Some roles can only exist if the laws linked to them have been selected.

IN CONTROL – Mayor, police officers, army officers, executioner, rich merchants, aristocratic unemployed dandy, religious

CONTROLLED - Small farmers, beggars, workers, nurses.

Testing the system
It is now the time for the players to step on the stage and become the actors of this political and sociological play. Each of them will act in accordance with their role in this society. The players' characters are respecting the system and accept their position; their faith is unshakable, and they truly believe that this system will allow them to create a fair system and thus push their goddess to absolve the human kind’s sin.

Each game is composed by twelves rounds where each round stand for a season and thus four rounds stand for a year. The standard duration of the game is three years.

Every round, a small scenario is given to the players according to their roles. The player will have to make choices in relation to this scenario. Often, this scenario will be connected to someone else scenario, pushing the players to interact with each other and test how interpersonal relationships are affected by the rules and the position of powers. Since the game is a local multiplayer, the scenario will encourage the players who are at different ends of the scenario, to interact in real life and reflect together. The acts of the players will not only affect their character but also the whole of society. The way the player can answer to the scenario will be limited by the laws of the society.

At the end of each round, the players will have the possibility to vote and decide if they’re happy with the system. New rules could only be selected – by a random player once again if most of the people in control decide that they’re unhappy.

Every season the roles will be reshuffled, giving to the players the possibility to experiment with every social position, in order to better understand the mechanisms of power.

Judgement Day
This whole new system is based on a vision the settlement’s guru had. In this vision, the guru has seen that three years after the establishment of the new society, the Goddess will arrive on Earth and judge people’s actions. This spiritual event is announcing the end of a cycle, everyone is judged for their actions and the reliability of the system is rated

In this part of the game, players will have to confront their choices. Their own actions will be compared to the game’s statistics and they will all have an individual ending, in addition to the general endings, which is only evaluating the state of the society, in order to judge the reliability of the scenario. If this scenario was a disaster, players are invited to play again.

(Safya Devautour - 1703575)