Technomancers

There’s a video game that I want to write. It’s called Technomancers. The idea is that you are a hacker and you have to make programs that protect or disseminate different kinds of information. Information is the McGuffin, but it’s also the weapons and the tools to use it. The information reflects real-world issues and if you play the game right, you can affect the real world just by hacking the code and manipulating the information.

The problem is, I don’t know how to write a game like that. I wouldn’t even know how to play it. I’m a fiction writer drafting this story out by hand with a fountain-pen: the very definition of a luddite. I don’t even play video-games, they’re too time-consuming.

But it makes me wonder how many games like this are being played without our knowledge. How many hackers are building and besieging firewalls around fortresses of info-treasures or palaces of lies. How many massive online multiplayers fall victim to coups and find themselves infiltrated. How many social platforms are robbed.

And above and beyond, how many forces are at play in our actual world, tweaking the data and twerking to distract from such magic until the world is unrecognisable, the very fabric of reality altered by these tailors of code.