Invisible Games » Aristotelian Drive http://invisiblegames.net A Brief Exhibition. (Note to Feed subscribers: Check back to the site periodically, to check for hidden features.) Thu, 13 Dec 2007 23:32:51 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 The Rumyantsev Recorder http://invisiblegames.net/archives/the-rumyantsev-recorder/ http://invisiblegames.net/archives/the-rumyantsev-recorder/#comments Thu, 15 Nov 2007 04:01:13 +0000 Archivist http://invisiblegames.net/archives/the-rumyantsev-recorder/ The first years of the 20th century saw a peculiar fashion in the upper-classes of Imperial Russia, being a mania for elaborate mechanical clocks. Cuckoos were quickly outclasses by gold and silver songbirds of all varieties, as well as revolving princesses and dragons, deathsheads and plowsmen, pulley systems that raised and lowered jeweled suns and moons–in the pre-revolutionary world, time was a trophy to be displayed.

Afanasy Rumyantsev was the son of a modest but inventive toymaker in Novgorod who established a small shop in the capital shortly before being crushed to death by falling wine barrels. Afanasy had had an unhappy life in Novgorod, and by some reports impregnated a banker’s wife with extremely black hair, which forced their relocation. By 1902 he had taken over his father’s shop and conscripted the elder Rumyantsev’s intricate doll-faces and figurines into infinitely delicate clocks, becoming the premier purveyor of time in Moscow. He spoke to almost no one, but was obsessively passionate about his clocks, often visiting his customers to check on them during holidays. His most popular design was a clock which did not chime the hour, but played a small phonograph hidden in the mechanism, whose amplifying horn opened into a golden iris in the arms of a demon with carnelian feet and a swooning empress at his feet. The wax cylinder within played a charming, if slightly sinister melody, and the demon bent to kiss the empress every hour on the hour.

In exactly twelve of these civilized drawing rooms, the demoniac clock did not play its little song, but instead bellowed forth a scratchy, indistinct dialogue between an older man by the name Innokentiy and a young woman called Nadezhda:

My dearest Nadezhda Semyenovna, do not deny me. Meet me again in this place, at this time, so that I may swallow you whole.

Beneath Innokentiy’s voice the Kremlin carillon solemnly bonged out the hours. The demon bent to kiss his queen.

It cannot be ascertained how many of the recipients of Afanasy’s most special clock were kept awake with those voices in their hearts, but at least three put on their hats and gloves and travelled to the carillon the next day at the hour that tolled on the cylinder. They looked at each other surreptitiously, unwilling to question each other’s motives, but eventually one of them must have discovered the discreet red-tissued package tied to the base of a snowy streetlamp, and another small wax cylinder, which the trio hurried to insert into their demon-clocks and wait for the turn of the hour.

Again the ghostly voices, again the imploring Innokentiy, the reluctant Nadezhda. He promised her jewels and black arts and a throne of silver in exchange for her virtue, she insisted on her husband and her child, who lived in a great house in the country filled to the rafters with gold coins. Their voices were so plaintive and lifelike that the younger son of one of the fateful trio reported that his mother wept to hear the unfortunate Nadia in her travails. Distantly, behind their wretched voices, could be heard the doleful bells of the Novodevichy Convent. It seemed to go on and on, and they seemed unable to stop, unable to let the voices go, until one afternoon when they lost the trail or the demonic clockmaker lost interest, and there was no tissue-wrapped package below the bells at Kolmenskoe. They had no satisfaction: Nadezhda had succumbed only so far as to board the train with her suitor, but had turned back at the last moment. The same mother who wept to hear Nadia’s voice was reportedly inconsolable through the season and did not attend Mass for nearly a year, cradling her clock in her arms as she slept days and weeks into nothingness.

The three leisured souls had followed the story through Moscow high and low, collecting the wax cylinders as fast as Afanasy could pour paraffin into his molds. He kept them moving, running, every day, from clanging, hissing Kurskiy train station to sidewalk violinist with a cylinder in his open case. Much has been written on his motives, but it seems somewhat elegant to imagine that they were his clock, his revolving deathsheads and plowmen, pursuing Innokentiy, pursuing Nadezhda. He sat within his father’s shop, among the doll-faces and clock-gears and imagined them, running in circuits around his Moscow. He did not die until 1911, and so his reason for leaving the lovers forever stranded on a train platform remain his own. An earlier example of the alternate reality game is unlikely to surface.

[[Archive Group: Attic. Lockwords: Tether Systems, Operator Failure, Alternate Distribution Streams, Aristotelian Drive, Karolson Worlds, User Corruption, Mundus Infection. Last Accessed 9.001.6.7.21, UIN# (47)663.5-9]]

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The Loneliness Engine http://invisiblegames.net/archives/the-loneliness-engine/ http://invisiblegames.net/archives/the-loneliness-engine/#comments Mon, 22 Oct 2007 15:06:28 +0000 Archivist http://invisiblegames.net/archives/the-loneliness-engine/ In 1971 a small advertisement appeared in the back pages of Scientific American. It read, simply:

Never Be Alone Again.

It has been estimated that some thirty-five people responded to the ad, and another seventeen the following year. However, it cannot be ascertained at this point whether these fifty-two participants comprised the entirety of mail-in replies or merely selected out of a larger pool. In either case, each of the fifty-two respondents received a package approximately six weeks after enclosing twelve dollars in an envelope and sending it to a P.O Box in St. Paul Minnesota. The package contained a simple lightboard, various cables, a 103A modem, and a black button that depressed with a satisfying click. Those given to perusing the advertisements of Scientific American had little trouble connecting the pieces. The lightboard sparkled with an array of small LEDs, in seemingly random formations — the button alone did not seem to have purpose or effect, lying dormant beside the cables. In fifty-two living rooms, puzzled men and women stared at the board, trying to understand the patterns of light. And patterns there were: around 5:00pm, a great number of lights flashed on, so too around 9:00 am. During business hours there was mostly blackness on the board. Late in the night, clusters shone, and in the pre-dawn hours, there were always one or two. Slowly fifty-two souls began to realize that the tiny lights must ignite when other users turned their systems on, that each LED was another person who had seen the St. Paul ad, so was staring intently at the board, who was alone, who was like them. The button presented a mystery — though each one of them experimented with it innumerable times, the lights did not seem to be affected. Through the winter, fifty-two boards glittered in the dark, and fifty-two people watched the other lights, steady, unblinking, silent and anonymous, but somehow comforting.

In St. Paul, Minnesota, Milo Barnes sat at the switchboard of an AT&T public branch exchange. He worked the night shift, connecting jack to jack, watching the lamps light as calls connected, the drone of human conversation in his ears. He was a quiet man, taciturn towards his fellow operators, isolated in his threadbare chair. One of the only black families in his rural hometown, he had never had many friends. His parents had been farmers: onions, greens, root vegetables. Milo had gone to the city after a brief try at college, and found himself enveloped by the warm arms of Ma Bell. He remained introverted and painfully shy, despite being surrounded by a cloud of lively talk every night. In the eighteen months that the 103A modems were active, he never mentioned his thoughts to anyone, was never caught taking them from branch offices, moved through the PBX like a ghost.

In March 1972, the lightboards began to blink. It was not a very great logical jump for Barnes’ enthusiasts to recognize Morse code, and it was, after all, a short and simple message, repeated endlessly.

All’s well that ends well yet

Rose-Marie Gascoigne of New Orleans was the first to answer. She had sat with her lightboard for hours each evening, accompanied by two disinterested tabbies. She said later that her heart had “just plain stopped” when the lights began to flicker on and off. “The whole world just held its breath. I could hear the blood rushing in my head. I knew what to do–what the hell else was that damn button for? It just took me a couple of days to work myself up to it. It was like sending a message to God.”

She reached out to the all but forgotten black button, and tried to remember what she knew of Morse.

She was not the last. Danny McKitterick sent his message from Portland just minutes after Rose-Marie, by all accounts, and in the very small hours of a Minnesota dawn, Milo Barnes sat breathless among his jacks and his lamps as one by one they flashed on and off, a slow and tremulous human server in the days before the whole of the world was networked thus, finishing his line, answering his brief, quiet message, lights in the dark:

Though time seem so adverse and means unfit though time seem so adverse and means unfit though time seem so adverse and means unfit

Over and over, again and again. Milo must have smiled–it is a comfort to think of him smiling. While the other operators worked around him, oblivious, he sent out a new message to each machine that had supplied the coded response he sought, and this one was simpler than the others, more direct, and more frightening.

Pick up the phone at midnight.

As the moon came up in St. Paul, Milo Barnes closed his eyes and slotted a silver jack into place. And another, and another. San Francisco to Cheyenne. Phoenix to Charlotte. Seattle to Sacramento.

New Orleans to Portland.

Milo sat among his lamps and wires, his hands taut, and held his breath.

In Louisiana, Rose-Marie Gascoigne held hers, and put her ear to her receiver.

“Hello?”

[[Archive Group: Attic. Lockwords: Operator Corruption, Aristotelian Drive, Tether Systems, Ur-Net, Lachesis Syndrome. Last Accessed 9.001.6.7.8, UIN# (47)663.5-9]]

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Karolson & Hobshack http://invisiblegames.net/archives/karolson-hobshack/ http://invisiblegames.net/archives/karolson-hobshack/#comments Mon, 15 Oct 2007 04:01:00 +0000 Archivist http://invisiblegames.net/archives/karolson-hobshack/ In 1879, a curious phenomenon arose among telegraph operators, especially among those assigned to non-essential traffic areas. It could be generally compared to the habitual, even compulsive playing of Solitaire or Minesweeper among modern office workers. What evolved was, as is often the case, far more difficult and complex than later, more technologically advanced iterations.

The Phelps Telegraph Machine (pictured) was at that time in widespread use throughout North America. Oskar Karolson, an operator in rural Ontario, a young-to-middling man of Jewish-Polish extraction with a love of puzzles, who taught the wheat farmers’ children mathematics and piano, had had a new Phelps delivered to his remote station sometime early in 1877. The telegraph traffic of dairymen and the odd dentist was low, however, and Oskar had little to do. In his boredom, he reached out across the wires.

Given the Phelps black key letters A-N, which is to say 3 vowels and 11 consonants as well as the fifteen white keys which sufficed for four essential punctuation marks, an execute command, four elements, four directions, and diurnal/nocturnal information, Karolson sent a now-famous message to an unseen counterpart in Chicago. Had the equally lonely Illinois telegraph operator been distracted, this missive would surely have been lost in the detritus of a metropolitan office, but luck was on the side of history.

The quiet telegraph upon which so much depended read as follows:

“I am alne. North–fire. South–water. East–earth. West–Air. Cme, fnd me. Execute.”

Curiously, when the corresponding Phelps Machine’s keys were depressed, a melancholy little melody emerged. The song echoed through Baxter Hobshack’s office, and through trial and error, the asthmatic operator managed to return:

“I am cming. Head East in the evening.”

Thus began the game of Karolson and Hobshack, in which Hobshack was led through a simple, charming world of Karolson’s imagination. Slowly, Oskar taught his friend a vocabulary which allowed all manner of expression that the simple commands could not alone indicate. East came to stand not only for the direction, but for child, mountain, gold ring, sparrow, ambush, and so on. Karolson’s code was whimsical and seemingly random, designed only to allow Hobshack to encounter the dairymen’s sons and dentist’s daughters of Ontario metamorphosed into magical children with rings on their fingers that led the Chicago man further and further into an invisible world of mountains and forests and battles.

Baxter Hobshack, sickly since he was a child, died of pneumonia in 1882. Karolson was devasated, not at first understanding that the telegraph he received, “Bax died in hospital May 4. Stop.” was not simply a new gambit in their old game. Through the wires he sent an orchard-owner’s daughter transfigured by a bicuspid helmet and granny smith spear to lure him from the “land of the dead” (indicated by the phrase “nightnorth”) in which Karolson assumed Hobshack imagined himself sorely lost.

He did not receive an answer.

Eventually, Karolson reached out again, and again. His primitive text adventure would expand through the network of American, and later British, telegraph operators, becoming the first known massively multiplayer game.

[[Archive Group: Attic. Lockwords: Karolson Worlds, Aristotelian Drive, Ur-Net.
Last Accessed 9.001.6.7.7, UIN# (47)663.5-9]]

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