Why I made this¶

I wanted to watch feedback loops play out.

The list of what can go wrong is short. Seven domains, six kinds of trigger, six stressors. It takes five minutes to read. Working out what happens when those pieces act on each other takes far longer, and I could not do it in my head.

So I wrote the system pages, one per domain, each built on failures that really happened somewhere in Europe, with the loops drawn. The loops do not stay on their own pages. A power cut turns up on all seven.

On Cockbill Street a power cut stops the pump. Nobody reports it, because the street learned long ago that complaining changes nothing. The failure runs longer, and teaches the street the same lesson again. The Palace hears on the Saturday, from Vimes. Any one of those arrows is easy to write down. All of them at once, across seven pages, do not fit on a whiteboard.

So I am building the whiteboard: a game in which players sit in the Patrician’s chair, know only what the Palace has been told, and run into the loops the way the city does. Its architecture is agreed on paper first.

The game cannot be won. The contract names no victory, and neither does the city. A term ends with a record of which loops a player fed and which ones fed the player.

The contract lists what the simulator models and what it refuses to. No packet captures, no named hackers, no risk matrices, no high scores. No real elections lost, no real water cut, no real Watch officers reassigned to Lord Rust’s carriage. Just a city that keeps showing, in small mechanical ways, that everything depends on everything else.

I want to see how that lands.