EVENT SUMMARIES.
» MOVIE THEATER
As announced in the satisfaction survey post at the beginning of the month, the film festival being advertised on posters outside the newly-opened movie theater is set to open on March 19. Promotional material begins appearing around the city toward the second week of March, encouraging residents to make a trip to the movie theater to see what the offerings are—the festival promises to be a diverse and interesting experience, featuring a variety of different film genres for residents to enjoy.
However, because the festival is free, the theater is looking for volunteers to help act as ushers and escort guests to their seats—and if not enough residents volunteer to assist, the organization may have to voluntell some characters, compelling them to work in the cinema for at least a few hours during the event. Don't worry, it's fairly light work, and not too much of a time commitment.
Characters who choose to go to the movies alone will find themselves witnessing a series of perfectly normal (and actually quite well-made) short films in a number of genres, whichever they choose to view—maybe they're a fan of the romantic comedy, or perhaps they prefer horror. The films are typically about an hour long and contain no credits or even necessarily a title, and interestingly, it seems that no two characters will be able to see the same movie. As long as they're alone in the cinema, the viewing experience will be entirely unique and not replicated for anyone else.
Characters who go to the movies with a friend or a date, though, will find themselves watching a double-feature of short films that bear a striking resemblance to the real-life experiences of someone else in the cinema. The films may reflect the life of their date, or their friend, or maybe even the resident who's been roped into acting as an usher for the duration of this afternoon's showing. Interestingly, the two double-feature films are always tonally quite different, as if the festival wants to contrast the highs and lows of the human experience—one film may be a tragedy while the other is a romantic drama, or maybe one is a slasher film and the other is a comedy.
And lastly, some characters may find themselves being subjected to a final film, a surprise triple-feature. The final film doesn't appear to be a dramatization at all; instead, it seems like a documentary short film featuring, well… them. Or, not exactly them—rather, the film features a version of them from a previous iteration of the city, showing the course of their life during that time period.
The purpose of the film festival, from an IC game mechanics perspective, is to encourage characters to share both the highs and lows of their pre-city existences with each other, allowing them to share not only their sadness but also their joys. This is based on the hypothesis that a key facet of building community is to find common ground between people even from very different backgrounds.
Because this is, OOCly, a CR-building event, it doesn't have an associated experimental document nor a title/satisfaction survey.
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» HOSPITAL (CE-50-193.48 – Just What the Doctor Ordered)
The hospital became available to residents as soon as District 6 opened at the beginning of March, so residents were able to access much of its services, including its emergency room, pharmacy, and surgical suites. However, the double doors leading to the administrative records room and the mortuary/morgue area were sealed completely, and keen-eyed residents were able to glimpse through the inset windows a dark stain on the floor that looked suspiciously like blood.
In the newsletter at the beginning of April, characters would be made aware of the existence of medical records in the administrative room pertaining not only to all previous iterations of the city experiment, but also to the current residents themselves, in their current forms.
Beginning in late April, residents would be able to get through the doorway and into the wing of the hospital containing the records room and the morgue. They could do this in one of three ways: they could find a badge in the nearby nurse's station and use that to open the door; they could brute force bust the doors open; or they can "play dead" convincingly enough that the door unlocks itself to let them (and presumably a friend) through.
In the first two cases, the going will be tough. It would be clear that the hospital is resistant to residents being in this wing if they don't need to be, and the layout of the building would reflect that, either by creating spooky illusions (screams from behind closed doors, ghostly visions, and so forth) or by changing the length of hallways such that it's more difficult to get where they want to go. Characters who successfully convince the hospital that they're dead (or grievously injured), however, will be able to walk down the hallway without issue to reach the records room, which is attached to the hospital's morgue.
In the records room, which is large and absolutely stuffed with file folders, characters would be able to discover the following information:
Records pertaining to all residents of all past iterations – those already mentioned explicitly in story clues would of course be there, but we would also allow for flexibility in terms of whose names can be found
Records pertaining to the residents in not only this current iteration of the city (CE-50), but also the previous two iterations, CE-48 and CE-49, which have been conspicuously not documented
Related to the above, from the available documents characters would be able to learn that CE-48 lasted 9 months between 3067 and 3068, and CE-49 lasted 10 months between 3069 and 3070
Characters may also note that the documentation on these two iterations is significantly less robust than the other documentation available, and that unlike records related to iterations CE-47 and earlier, there are no comments or notes from scientists or doctors included in the folders
Should characters decide to leave the records room and enter the morgue, the first thing they will notice is that the morgue is considerably larger than it should be, given the footprint of the hospital complex. There is an autopsy table and supplies in a separate room walled off by glass, and the rest of the walls are lined with cooling drawers to contain bodies.
Characters are able to open the morgue drawers. Many of them, they will find empty; even more of them are full, but with bodies that look like the mannequins from the mall event in August 2023, except with softer and much more human-feeling flesh.
A few of the drawers, though, do contain fully-formed people. These may be friends from home, or may be duplicates of characters who are currently present in the city. Characters who encountered a ghost from their past during the August 2023 mall event may find that exact person, with their body still bearing any marks or wounds that were left on them during that interaction. Characters who were not in the city during the August 2023 event, or who did not interact with their ghosts during the event, may still find intact and unharmed friends or people from home in the drawers. In all cases, the bodies are warm to the touch and don't seem to be experiencing any kind of rigor mortis or decomposition; in fact, it feels like they're just deeply asleep and unable to be woken.
From additional records found in the mortuary office, characters would be able to glean the following:
These mannequin-like bodies are the "blanks" that were referred to in a number of the story clue records that have been discovered so far
Before CE-40, which was the experiment's first attempt at porting residents in their real physical bodies, a digital copy of a character's consciousness would be integrated into these blanks, and a facsimile of their physical appearance would be applied on top of the false skin
Once the event ends at the end of April, the morgue wing door would once again be closed. It can be opened again, but characters who enter that wing of the hospital will find an extremely sparse records room with heavily redacted records, and a normal-sized morgue containing absolutely no bodies whatsoever.
The name of this experiment is "CE-50-193.48 – Just What the Doctor Ordered," and on May 1 following the event, characters would receive the following satisfaction survey:
Thank you for participating in CE-50-193.48 – Just What the Doctor Ordered!
Please rate your experience on a scale of 1 to 5.
[ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ]
A person in front of you is in medical distress. You have the skills to help them, but know that there is a 50-50 chance that the procedure will not go as planned. If the procedure succeeds, the person will be entirely cured and will go on to live a long, fulfilled life; if it fails, they will die a slow, agonizing death. You…
( ) Do nothing
( ) Try to help the person
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» LIBRARY, PARTS 1 & 2 (CE-50-829.82 – The Oldest Trick in the Book)
The event taking place at the city library was meant to be a two-part event, taking place across May and June.
The library itself opens in May, and most of the materials and books it contains would be available to residents immediately. This includes every genre of fiction and non-fiction, as well as two special areas of the library: the archive, located in the basement, and the special collections, located on the topmost floor of the building. The archive contains things like copies of newspaper articles and microfiche that can be examined, while the special collections floor contains things like hard-to-find copies of books, rare tomes, and a set of extremely thorough bestiaries that detail all the different types of fauna represented in every origin world seen so far in the city experiment.
The newspaper articles and microfiche can be looked at, and the bestiaries can be read, but at least toward the beginning of May they would read as though they're being read in a dream, with nonsense words and images that aren't quite clear or don't make sense.
Throughout the month of May, characters would be able to visit the library and search for information. Unlike other locations which have contained very little information about the city itself, the library contains information on just about everything, up to and including historical records on resident worlds as well as records on the city itself.
The records related to character worlds might reveal events that take place in residents' futures, as well as biographical details about residents and other figures from their worlds as appropriate. These would not be medical records as were available in the hospital, but rather, biographies (or even autobiographies) written with the goal of entertaining and informing a literary audience. The nonfiction sections also might include geography, geology, and biology books about flora and fauna of resident worlds. Essentially, any information that anyone might care to know about a resident's world would be available in the library as long as it hasn't been checked out already.
As characters visit the library and find all of these pieces of information—information that characters were never supposed to have access to, and which they can only access because of the breakdown in the firewalls that separate experimental data with other data—the city itself is, meanwhile, trying its best to re-compartmentalize. Characters around the city will begin experiencing strange phenomena. Some of the phenomena affect the entire city, such as huge thunderstorms, mild earthquakes, and unexpected cold or hot snaps; some of them affect only certain characters, such as seeing ghosts, finding themselves getting lost in the city, and having doors slam on them only to open up to a totally different location.
Toward the end of May, whatever was preventing characters from being able to read and understand the contents of the microfiche and bestiaries has finally given up. Characters will be able to finally dig in to the information related to the city itself, up to and including the following:
The city project has been underway for 124 years, having begun in 2946 (the current year is 3070)
It was originally the brainchild of an NGO think tank brainstorming ways to address socio- and geopolitical issues facing their society
Faced with the potential for total societal collapse, the core question to answer was: If we have to abandon our home world and terraform another planet, what would be the fastest way to rebuild a civilization without falling into the exact same issues that plagued us down here?
As evidenced by the continuation of the experiment, the scientists were not able to find a satisfactory answer to that question
At first, when they were using blank bodies and ported consciousness, there was always a pivotal moment where the residents became aware that they were merely simulated consciousnesses, after which ennui set in and society inevitably devolved. Only after they began to use real bodies did they begin to see successes with the program, culminating in CE-47, their longest-running iteration with the largest population and most successful society establishment
The program was threatened with defunding during CE-47, which is what caused that iteration to end; however, it was not actually defunded, and CE-48 began in 3067
At the beginning of June, then, is when things really start to go wrong. The environmental phenomena continue to worsen, and the city itself seems to be struggling to keep up with itself, resulting in strange shifts to the layout and a total absence of replenishment for resources.
When it all comes to a head, it begins with the 3D printers in the science center. Even though no one is there to see them, they begin to work overtime, printing out copies of any of the animals seen in any of the bestiaries in the special collections floor—maybe these are dogs and cats and kangaroos, or maybe they're the horrifying monsters that characters were fighting back home. Monsters also spill from the bank vaults, from the mall maintenance tunnels, from the hospital morgue. It quickly becomes dangerous to go outside. Businesses start to shutter, services break down, and characters become responsible for defending themselves against the threats outside.
In the middle of June, finally, a siren starts to go off. When characters look outside, they may see that the fog that had previously sealed off different parts of the city is beginning to close in again, forcing characters to flee or get caught in its haze. Over the course of two days, the fog slowly closes in until all characters are enclosed in the area around City Hall, and all that remains open is a single straight path between City Hall and the beach to the northeast of the city.
And then the fog starts to close in again over the course of six or so hours, forcing characters to fight their way through to the beach and then north to the train station there, where a train is waiting to take them away.
Despite being a plot-focused event, the content of this event would have focused mostly on things that the residents were not intended to know, so it would not have been accompanied by a satisfaction survey afterward. Instead, characters would have spent the latter half of June and most of July away from the city, at the beach, while the city put itself back together.
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CHARACTER IMPACT.
» MOD OBSERVATIONS
The main way that characters' decisions and actions were able to influence the course of the game was through participation in the events, particularly events that had an associated satisfaction survey. The satisfaction surveys were designed to have one rating question (we jokingly called this the city's CSAT score) and one question that was meant to reveal something about the overall community orientation of the current group of city residents.
The CSAT question was mostly flavor, but the multiple-choice question was impactful. Each of these questions had one answer that indicates an orientation toward individualism, and one answer that indicates an orientation toward community. We kept track of how many characters answered which way and used that as guidance for how future events should go, whether they would be more intense (the city's attempt to guide characters away from individualism and toward community) or less intense (as a reward for community orientation).
Here's the data for the four satisfaction surveys that were completed by city residents:
CE-50-185.43 (Mall)
Respondents: 53
Median CSAT: 1.9
Individual: 22 (41.5%)
Community: 31 (58.5%)
CE-50-361.74 (Haunted House)
Respondents: 53
Median CSAT: 2.21
Individual: 7 (13.2%)
Community: 46 (86.8%)
CE-50-949.38 (Science Center)
Respondents: 33
Median CSAT: 2.39
Individual: 13 (39.4%)
Community: 20 (60.6%)
CE-50-173.28 (Hotel)
Respondents: 15
Median CSAT: 2.13
Individual: 4 (26.7%)
Community: 11 (73.3%)
As you can see, while the city itself consistently scored low in terms of resident satisfaction, nonetheless a majority of responses to each satisfaction survey indicated an orientation toward community involvement. As a result, we adjusted the mechanics of certain events moving forward, both to include more compulsion elements and to change the type of mechanics that were present. If the residents overall had presented as more individualistic, then we would have written in harsher mechanics to "punish" residents for going it alone.
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THE STATE OF THE CITY.
The big question about all of the above data is, of course, "So what?" After observing the way the resident group was leaning, our plan was to close out the first year of the game and then change the landscape of the entire city in response to the prevailing orientation.
If the trend had been toward individualism, then the damages done at the end of the June event would have left permanent marks on the city, further reducing the availability of resources to residents. There may also have been residual monsters left over that would prove threatening to the residents and would need to be dealt with in order to make the city safe. These changes wouldn't be totally unfixable, and a shift back toward community orientation would have allowed residents to overcome the challenges and fix the city, while also trying to unearth the mechanism by which they could end the experiment and go home.
However, since the trend was largely toward community, residents would have come home in July from their forced beach holiday to a much smaller city, enclosed by walls to protect the residents from the monsters remaining outside. However, because operating a much smaller city requires much less processing power, the smaller city would have been one populated by birds and animals and NPCs—not real people, of course, they would have been made from blank bodies. The events would also have become more "mission"-oriented in the sense of sending characters out in groups to retrieve resources or deal with threats while they tried to figure out how to end the experiment and get home.
(They would also have figured out what exactly happened to the city project—since we're not going to see that plot, we'll just tell you, the scientists were killed midway through CE-48 and the city's programming has been running itself ever since on a skeleton crew, so to speak. This is why CE-48 and CE-49 aren't documented the same way the previous iterations have been. It's also why there are no NPCs or animals/birds, and why the regeneration stops working as well when several places get damaged at once. By reducing the overall size of the city, the computer is able to direct power away from things like fixing superficial damage and replenishing stores in closed-off zones, which in turn allows it to provide other resources that are less necessary to survival, but still necessary to a thriving society, like "more people to interact with" and "the simple pleasure of hearing birds in the morning.")
Once the game closes, the above will be essentially the state of the city. It will be a much smaller layout, with many of the purely residential areas walled off and with narrow passageways available to get to the more critical infrastructure and services in the city, such as the hospital and the library. There are animals and birds in the parks again, and while there won't be a whole city's worth of population, there are NPCs around operating the stores, cooking the food in restaurants, and working in the pharmacies and hospital. Anyone who chooses to remain and use the comms as a sandbox, please feel free to be creative about who the NPCs are and what they do—we leave them in your capable hands.
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CLOSING COMMENTS.
Even though we've already said this about a thousand times, we feel that it bears repeating—the players in this game have been truly fantastic. Even though the game itself didn't go quite how we envisioned it, it's been a wonderful learning experience to mod for you all and we wish all the best for all of you.
As of tomorrow, April 1, comments will be closed on all mod-operated pages and the City will cease to be a moderated game. We will continue responding to comments on this entry (comments are not screened!) through the week in case there are any clarifying questions or comments folks want to leave, but after that, please thread responsibly as we will not be here to enforce rules or behavior.
Thank you for your stay!
The City mod team
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cityooc2024-03-31 09:30 pm
