Like all the men of Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave. I have known omnipotence, ignominy, imprisonment. Look here — my right hand has no index finger. Look here — through this gash in my cape you can see on my stomach a crimson tattoo. It is the second letter, Beth. On nights when the moon is full, this symbol gives me power over men with the mark of Gimel, but it subjects me to those with the Aleph, who on nights when there is no moon owe obedience to those marked with the Gimel. In the half-light of dawn, in a cellar, standing before a black altar, I have slit the throats of sacred bulls. Once, for an entire lunar year, I was declared invisible — I would cry out and no one would heed my call, I would steal bread and not be beheaded.

— Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Lottery in Babylon.” In Andrew Hurley (Tr.), Collected Fictions. New York: Penguin Putnam, 1998.

We have talked a fair bit about designing a game in which the name, rhetoric, or ostensible genre is mismatched with the mechanics of them game itself. For instance, I previously suggested a scenario that we present to players as Hunger Games, leading them to think in terms of a harsh arena-style world, PvP combat and victory through elimination. Instead they would find themselves in a world that was extremely safe and tame, with plentiful resources, and some combination of tricks (potion effects, beacons, lack of effective weapons) that would make direct PvP killing extremely difficult. Would the players focus their efforts on finding ways to kill each other, or would they find something else to do instead? (Or would they just get bored and leave the game?) Regardless of the practicality of this specific proposal, it is just one example of a broader category of bait-and-switch designs, which I got to thinking about after email discussions with Darren Wershler, who suggested the basic form of making players think they are playing Hunger Games, when “the real project was something else entirely.”

Those email discussions have also prompted me to think about Minecraft scenarios that play with the concept of ascribed social roles. Bart Simon suggested a Minecraft-based police kettling game, while Darren speculated on the possibilities of extending the spectator role (a typical part of Hunger Games maps) by having two teams who are able to affect the world but are completely invisible to one another. Something about this stirred memories, and I ended up re-visiting some of Borges’ strange mini-universes for inspiration.

In The Lottery in Babylon, the narrator tells of a curious social institution called The Lottery. It began as what we would think of as a lottery (a fee to purchase tickets and a cash prize for the winner), evolved over the centuries into an inscrutably chaotic system (with mandatory participation) that regularly shuffled individuals within the social order (often creating new stations/positions/castes and eliminating existing ones in the process).

I envision a scenario, perhaps within a competitive-play frame or with the vague suggestion of Hunger-Games-like mechanics, in which players are assigned random roles, powers, game modes, equipment, territory, and so on, with (of course) the possibility that these will all be changed mid-game, perhaps on a fixed schedule, or perhaps only as a result of some collective effort on the part of the players. I particularly like the idea of arbitrary factions that take on different roles and relationships at different times (like the aleph/beth/gimel castes of Babylon), as well as the notion of a player or players being “declared invisible.” Invisibility could be accomplished in a variety of ways — a potion of invisibility hides one from sight (as long as one is not wearing armour) but still leaves one vulnerable to attack. A player in Spectator Mode is not only undetectable but also completely intangible and unassailable, and can even move through solid walls. There is also the possibility of literally declaring someone invisible and seeing to what extent people play along. The invisibility described by Borges’ narrator isn’t just about being unseen either — with mods, it would be possible to suppress a player’s chat communication so that no one would heed his call. Implementing the mutual invisibility suggested by Darren is possible, but would require modded servers and clients.

Although modding is not really within the scope of this project, it is worth considering how gameplay can be radically changed, and how truly unique situations can be created, with only some quick edits to the code. Perhaps, at a later stage in this project, there will be an opportunity for experimenting with the possibilities offered by something like a lightweight selective chat suppression mod.