Game

Neurocracy

2021 · Web browser · PC (Microsoft Windows) · Mac · Puzzle · Indie

About this game

Solve a murder in a near future world by diving into the Wikipedia of that world. Have you ever lost yourself in a Wikipedia rabbit hole? Imagine doing that for the Wikipedia of the year 2049. This is Neurocracy, an interactive narrative experience that offers an anthology of compelling sci-fi stories inside and between the hyperlinked articles of an online encyclopedia. It is both a single-player alternate reality game and an epistolary hypertext novel, opening with a high-profile assassination that you must investigate and solve. Playing out entirely on a website with no download required, Neurocracy invites you to go it alone or join forces with others to piece together what has happened, and what is happening, in the world of 2049. Using the narrative power of your imagination, chase implications and interpretations by reading between the lines and arranging a story from a deeper pool of potential stories. Find clues, draw connections, compare notes, and ultimately solve a murder.

The story of Neurocracy is episodic and unfolds across ten consecutive days in the year 2049. Each episode represents a snapshot of a single day, with new articles uploaded (and existing ones updated) to simulate bouts of frantic editing that reflect the global fallout of the assassination. Each article offers a unique narrative thread to follow, detailing a person, organisation, technology, or event relevant to the story and themes of Neurocracy. You can even click Random article and dive in that way. In addition to the sense of realism conferred by the Wikipedia format, Neurocracy uses accurate science and plausible sociopolitics to craft the world of 2049, which exists at the intersection of surveillance capitalism, consumer-grade neurotech, and biosecurity. To build that world on top of our own, Neurocracy extrapolates the science behind artificial neural networks, implanted neural devices, and neurodegenerative prion diseases.