@Houkime on itch.io has recently started organizing Gamejams on the Fediverse. This is a great idea to get some real creative hackathons going that drive fedi forwards at the same time.
This brainstorming thread is for posting game ideas that might be picked up in these sessions.
🌏 Sci-fi Labs Federated Worldbuilding
The other day via iAlja I was pointed to the Science Fiction Economics Lab. It is an initiative of storytelling viable alternatives to Hypercapitalism, which is currently the only game we play. This open community encourages people to join and build alternative worlds and explore radically different concepts together. It hopes to inspire and foster a creative ecosystem of cool spin-off projects to explore new things.
The set up is a bit weird and you have to figure it out. Much of the worldbuilding discussion takes place on a discourse forum. But it gave me 2 ideas:
The Fedijams wouldn’t change much compared to how they are currently organized, except that with this world in the background they’ve found common ground. There’s more of a uniting factor, and more focus on collaborating on the Fediverse and with other fedizens. The world we started at Sci-Fi Labs is the substrate to which Fedijams are tied.
What’s interesting is that - as the world gets richer - there’s more and more game-building material available. Different storylines to explore, characters to develop, etc. Candidate submission can give different twists to submissions from prior fedijams, maybe completely different perspective, atmosphere and game type. All the narratives and the world itself serve to attract a broader audience to explore further than pure gamejams ever could (they’ll mostly appeal to gamedevs that are able to crank out some game in a week).
On all levels building blocks become available that make Fedijams easier to participate in. On the technical end, if we imagine a future fediverse, there’s a lot of potential if we manage to move from silo-first to task-oriented app design. Where this will lead us might be close to the radical vision of MercuryOS (read also: Introduction to Mercury OS). For fedijams available building blocks might include e.g. some core federation library, so that is doesn’t have to be reinvented for every game submission.
As for setting all this up, instead of the forum associated with sci-fi labs, we might tie this to Fediverse Town for non-technical parts and SocialHub for tech aspects and @Houkime’s Federated Game Store once that shapes up, hence binding communities together.
See also: Sci-Fi Labs Federated Worldbuilding