For some Wikipedia it is a resource, for others, however, a playground. you can practice, for example, the Wikiracing, a sprint speed contest to bounce as fast as possible from one article to another through hyperlinks within the articles themselves. A sort of stone skipping, not practiced on the water but on the slippery space of theencyclopedia.
Then there are charades drawn from random pages. There is also a game called "Wikington Crescent" which consists in accessing a random article from the "Wikipedia:Random" page and from there reaching the article on the Mornington Crescent underground station with the least number of clicks possible. London.
The winner is the one who arrives with the least possible number of articles consulted. I read that from the page dedicated to Monte Cervino you can reach the goal in just three links.
There is also the Wiki Cup which every year rewards the most active and meticulous volunteer editors in the enrichment and maintenance of the encyclopedia.
It was only a matter of time before someone was inspired by Wikipedia to create a gameplay, that is, an interactive narrative based on its encyclopedic model.
Omnipedia a Wikipedia of 2049
And here, in fact, appear Omnipedia, a website which resembles Wikipedia in all respects, but which has little to do with the online encyclopedia. it actually hosts an experimental work of fiction called Neurocracy cloaked in wiki-like pages.
Simply put, it is a neural narrative game whose goal is to find out how the killing of the Chinese tech tycoon happened, Xu Shaoyong, the man who founded and launched Omnipedia right in fiction.
Xu's is a murder deserve it mysterious occurred in the year 2049. The clues and traces are scattered among the articles, previews and chronologies of the same Omnipedia articles that describe the knowledge of the world of 2049.
The director of the game is the young fiction writer and designer Joannes Truyens he describes it as a combination of “alternative reality game, epistolary novel and hypertext fiction”. In reality there is nothing analogous to which it can be assimilated or compared.
The style is similar to that of an adventure book, but does not follow a narrative linearity to allow the player-player to move through a network of information scattered, intertwined and to be discovered.
To say: there is a world of clues and signs that manifests itself in the logs of the various editors of the web pages that are used as a postmodern narrative tool.
How Neurocracy unfolds
Each week, players have to immerse themselves in new items and sifting through the version history of existing ones for clues to the murder of the tech mogul, whose helicopter was shot down by a hacked drone. The game goes on like this.
The Omnipedia article on the day of Xu's death contains basic information; the next day, the comment of the Chinese government indicating a “possible link” to a collective of hackers; the day after that, the connection became a certainty. The narrative proceeds in this incremental/decremental fashion.
By piecing together and comparing a myriad of trivial information like this, but not necessarily all reliable, it will be possible to reconstruct what really happened to Xu.
It is a information maze in which you have to find your own way. Players are forced to analyse, question and weigh information that can be misleading and actively compromised.
The application
Neurocracies it was first released in 2021, but was radically revised in the second release.
The game remains price quotation, but to make the process more enticing, a standalone desktop application has been created that is affordable for $12. The application is simply a browser dedicated to browsing the pages of Omnipedia with a notebook to collect impressions, suspicions and theories.
Players also have the ability to upload their notes to an area that developers have access to, who will be able to consult an aggregate of materials to decide which parts of the story are worth exploring. It is added every week new material.
“It is no longer a simple passive reading, but an active manipulation of information, a selection for the benefit of the gaming community,” says Truyens.
Sources:
Neurocracy: futuristic murder-mystery fiction as told through Wikipedia, “The Guardian”, September 16, 2021
Chris Allnutt, Neurocracy and when Wikipedia leads to murder, 12 July 2023
