Jinni's Local Singleplayer Mode + Global Multiplayer Mode
Embark on a mystical journey into the realm of Game B, micro-solidarity and social coordination. Where Moloch takes a playful twist, weaving a web of unity through personal growth.
One of the things I mentioned in the introduction to the Jinni game is that I’m most excited to build the multiplayer mode in this new iteration of the game. When i originally came up with the game, I was focused on improving my personal productivity via data visualization of my daily activities. I’ve always been a loner so making my own imaginary friend that reflected me made sense as a way to do this. As I’ve grown over the years I’ve started to experience what its like to have “friends” and the power of community and collaboration.
So I’m adding a multiplayer mode, aka Game B, to gamify coordination and micro-solidarity in large groups. From fun activities like organizing dinner parties at a friends house with 5 people to impactful activities like cleaning up beaches around the world with 5,000,000 people.
In order to help me differentiate the two game play styles I made a list of what exactly I want to show/target in players with each mode
Know someone who would like playing our game? Let them know!
Explaining The Spells In Our Grimoire 🧙🏿♂️
Finite Games Within The Infinite Game
Multiplayer - Keeping a group of people motivated, organized, and efficient over a long time period is near impossible. If we couple this with the obligation for keeping a jinni alive like in single player mode, we’re guaranteed to always fail and that will create resentment within the group. We need to have an end goal and a clear way to achieve it. We want to be able to say we accomplished something great as a group and show/feel that we got something out of it - whether thats intangible like feeling closer to the group or tangible like unlocking an achievement.
Singleplayer - Life is a constant struggle to find yourself and meaning in the world. There is no right answer except to move forward everyday. But that can feel daunting, pointless, and even impossible at times. Especially if you dont have a support system of people that know who you are and what you like (you dont need to know what you want). Your jinni isnt the end all be all but its a guiding light to help you figure out what you can do today or this week to keep you moving forward on your search.
Social → Physical → Digital → Social Cycle
Multiplayer - Social → Physical - A lot of social activity happens online now - because its easier, global, shareable, etc. but people are craving community and connection but they just dont know how to do it. Generally we also enjoy doing things with other people rather than by ourselves. Group jinn handles coordinating group activities by gamifying all the steps for everyone involved instead of complicated todo lists, group chats, calendar wrangling, etc. By making activities social and fun, we get you to do more things in the real world, generating more data (energy) for your jinni to consume and grow stronger, create social rewards outside of the app, and let local economies emerge.
Singleplayer - Physical → Digital - The entire point of the game is to get you to act in the real world and be more present, mindful, productive, free time, creative, etc. Yet we need to be able to document, analyze, and share this information with ourselves without having to manually do it (thus taking you out of the physical). So we use digital mechanisms (phone telemetry, AI image generation for jinni mutations, customizable home screens/dashboards) to facilitate. By bringing this into the digital for you, we then make it easier to share with others, creating more social interactions - conversation starters, multiplayer prompts, etc. to start the activity cycle all over again.
Aesthetics of Jinn
Based on Aesthetics by Edmund Burke. Basically divides everything into object of endearment and objects of transcendence (in good and bad ways). The “feminine” is tiny/cute/beautiful/elegant, the “masculine” is grand/awesome/sublime.
Multiplayer - The great evil jinn and group activities make you feel greater than yourself. The Moloch jinns are a thing to be conquered, owned, destroyed - not loved and cared for. We want to feel like we accomplished something that we couldnt have done on our own. That being part of the group and contributing has a purpose.
Singleplayer - The goal is to create loving, caring emotions for your jinni aka yourself. A tangible personal connection that drives you to do whatever it takes to ensure they are safe in the world. This tiny little creature thingy in your phone is your tiny little creature thingy. You can’t help but dote on it daily.
Micro Solidarity + Self Actualization
Multiplayer - Slaying Moloch and prosocial impact is a goal of multiplayer mode but only for the purposes of the game and having an objective outcome to reach. The real goal is creating accountability groups, mutual solidarity, and support networks that will help you progress things you are trying to achieve in singleplayer mode. Its not about defeating evil jinn, its about the friends we make along the way. Idk exactly how it will work yet, but everyone will get to pick what actions they want to take to defeat evil jinn and the group is responsible for making them do it, ideally by supporting them and not berating them for failing the quest.
Singleplayer - The main goal of playing the game is to help you achieve your best self. We dont define what that is, you tell your jinni what your intentions are and construct the game for yourself and then we give you prompts and a support network for continuing to play your game. The reverse-Maslow theory is that you need a purpose to live before you can even think of going out to get food. For myself I just need a reason to wake up every morning and do something. Jinni is a way for me to feel motivated to do even tiny things like go for a walk in the park. I want to help others succeed in life and I believe that Jinni is the best way to do that. Building the game is playing the game for me, and playing the game helps me build the game.
Feature Unlocks
Good games have difficulty progression - you unlock new abilities, items, enemies, areas, etc. as you accomplish things to keep the game interesting and challenging. How you unlock these things and what they then unlock for you (within you) is an important part of Jinni. Here are some of the things that you can do to unlock new features in the game.
Multiplayer - communication (style, effectiveness - NOT frequency), prosocial impact, diversity of skills required, number of people simultaneously doing an action together, physical proximity, [YOUR IDEA HERE].
Singleplayer - adding different data sources, upgrading skills (diversity, expertise), forming habits (frequency, stacking, ), self-experimentation/meta-learning, [YOUR IDEA HERE].
Let me know how you want to play the game, what features you want to see,
and how they should be unlocked in the comments 😇
Hard vs Easy Mode
Multiplayer - Because it has a definite end and you have people to support you, we make multiplayer much more challenging. There has to be a reason to play it over singleplayer though. First off there is a concept of winning and winning has rewards but losing doesnt really have consequences. Playing with friends is also part of it. And for the more competitive among us, if you dont do multiplayer are you even a good player?
Singleplayer - Jinni should be making life fun, not stressing you out. Your daily life with better defined goals, feedback loops, social support, etc. There’s no way to “win”, you play because its fun to play. Of course that requires some difficulty but not much.
Self & Knowledge of Self
This is getting too long already so I’ll make it its own post. Its fascinating, trust me. If someone could remind me in the future to do it that’d be great thanks (ya I know my Jinni is supposed to do that but I havent built the game yet 😜)
Current Progress
EVERYTHING IS AN INVENTORY ITEM! Physical items, digital items, 3rd party integrations like Spotify and Twitter, location sharing, everything. Allows for progressive opt-in to unlock features and giving us access to data
Customizable homepages like myspace to display stats you are focusing on leveling up, your Spotify profile or favorite playlist, and shortcuts to apps you still need to manually enter info into to play with your Jinni.
Tzolk’in page to track Mayan astrology cycles. This is a feature im building for myself (like the game itself) but i hope to indoctrinate players by incorporating it into game lore as Jinns belief system and to design groups for multiplayer mode. Currently only have “serial time” for the calendar so it looks like what you are used to. I’m designing data visualization and animations for “synchronous time” to show inter-relations of your actions, intentions, and time in multiple dimensions at the same time. We will make this an interactive interface so you can play with your data through time and space to understand and predict your trends and habits (trippy af ik, if you have ideas please DM me)
Got the GraphQL server in Clojure running yesterday and hooked up with Neo4j graph database for queries.
Next Steps
So far I’ve only worked on the frontend to figure out game mechanics and how i want people to play the game. With the progress on inventory system, home page customization, and health data integration from phones I’m ready to start formalizing the game system and saving player data to a database.
Clojure backend tasks this week
initialize codebase
Normalize steps data from Android into game :Actions
Save :Actions to database from App
Figure out how to dedupe :Actions before saving so we dont double count
ecrecovermajik card signatures to verify identity and authenticate with APIGet oauth request/response working for spotify
Create Spotify profile and playlist widget backend for homepage customization
Allow custom home page configs to be saved locally on your phone and to our database
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