The Topology Game

Here's an updated list of topological properties that I use to play @topoillogical's Topology Game. The rules are as follows. You roll a random integer between -N and N inclusive, where N is the number of properties below (currently N = 114). If the number is negative, you get the negation of the property whose number is the magnitude of the number. You come up with a topological space satisfying this property. This was round 1.

For all future rounds, you start by rolling another property. If the new property follows from the previous properties, prove this. If the new property contradicts the previous properties, prove this. If the new property is independent of all the previous, come up with two spaces satisfying all the previously rolled properties, where one space has the new property and one space has its negation.

You 'win' the game if you manage to solve round 10. You can never truly lose as you can always come back to a given game.

List of 114 properties:

New Media Jedi Order

“Okay,” Rey said. “I don’t know if you can use the Force, yet. Not really. It’s… not something where I had a lot of training myself. But…”

She shook her head. “Okay, I’m already not expressing this right. But the way the Force works, it’s… a mystical energy field, that fills the whole universe. And that might mean that everyone can use it. Or it might mean that it’s just easier for some people, and harder for others. But the most important part of it all is that… the Force is there. It’s real. It binds the universe together, and once you start to understand that… that’s when you can start to understand the rest.”

sunday drive

I memory-wiped my instance of Ryoko in Roommate and started the file over - I am determined now to figure out how people played this game and experience it for myself. Booted up the game this morning, and Ryoko wasn't home - but she left me a note, explaining she will be back by 6. I have evening plans so I left her a note explaining I will be back by 11. My testing has generally shown she might not show or will get angry if I am +/- an hour late on that, so I added a reminder to my own calendar to make sure I visit now that I made the plan. Then I logged out of the game, and told the person I am seeing this evening I need to be home by 11.

No one told me they made a 10/10 realistic marriage simulator in the year 1997. No notes, this is exactly what it's like, the simulacra peaked.

Today I logged in at ~6ish after work, as Ryoko in the morning told me she had club activities and would be home then. Our "convo" of the day was me knocking on her door, her saying "look buddy I am studying, is this important?", me going...no not really, and being shoo'd off. So I turned off the game because there was nothing else to do.

A few days before, I also logged in after work, only to get a phone call (on the land line, which I was teleported in front of) from Ryoko telling me she forgot about a friend's party after school so she wouldn't be home until 9. But she would see me then! So I...turned off the game, now with the obligation to turn it back on ~3 hours later.

This is, of course, insane. But! I did log back in at 9. And Ryoko was there at the front door, with her friend who was dropping her off. She was stressed since she wasn't sure if she was allowed to just shift plans like that and we hadn't discussed it yet:

So we talked it out. And today I logged in a few hours later, and Ryoko was done studying - we chatted about her English lessons, career stuff, etc.

When you look past the bullshit, the realism really works, in a way that is almost impossible to do today. The way the game is just openly hostile to your attempts to bend it to your will are, yeah, how real people function. Her personality too matches the tone - she in fact a flawed, "normal" person with her own stuff going on, even if ofc there is some moe-inspired sanding of the edges. And the "story" it is telling - slice of life anecdotes and the day-to-day frictions of living together with a normal girl - would completely fall apart into boredom as something you sat down and played for 20 hours straight. When it is someone you talk to for ~10 minutes each day, though, it is rationed out in doses you can handle.

And the time gaps really do create spaces for affection to fill! I am, of course, doing this for my weird meta 90's-otaku research motivations, but within that framework I can buy what this game is selling; I wanna hear what she says next, precisely because I can't right now.

Today this game would clearly be a mobile game, right? You would log in each day, do your "convo" daily, get some kind of log-in bonus, maybe do a decorating or outfit making minigame. And it would be better, to be clear, in a lot of ways? Games are better now on average. But here, all of that smoothing out would shatter the simulacra - real people don't give you bonus rewards for a log-in streak, or are available at your beck and call for a convo. Even being on the phone - being in your pocket - detracts from the illusion. Ryoko lives in a specific place. My desktop PC, sure, but still - if I wanna talk to her, I have to go there. Her home is manifested, fullscreened, nothing else going on. And the only reward for talking to her is that I got to talk to her.

Because today you have played far, far easier games to interface with, almost everyone would drop this immediately, and as such it would simply not be made. But since back then there wasn't that same cultural expectation, this game could be made and somewhat succeed. Temporal specificity seeps out of every low-render polygon in the house in an infinitely charming way.

It isn't all charm though! While some of the game's hostile inconvenience is load-bearing realism, not all of it is. I mentioned in my initial post that you walk around the house (aimlessly) to trigger events? That is true...like 3 times. 99% of the time when you log in the events auto-trigger, and then when they are done walking around gives you absolutely nothing because Ryoko has retreated to her room. The only physical mechanic of the game, the entire "setting", is actually virtually pointless. Something you only learn by playing - it tricks you into thinking this will be relevant, and then it isn't (except when it is, 1% of the time, after you have learned to stop bothering - what fun!). Why was walking even included?? For the "simulacra", yes, so the house feels lived in - but trust me you can't make this minimalist mind prison feel homey:

Certainly not when walking into my own bedroom results into empty nothingness every single time.

You also run headlong into the fact that while Ryoko feels real, you don't. You have a distinct personality, but no life around it - you are trapped in the house, no job, no school, waiting for her to return. The idea, of course, is that you aren't trapped - you are you. You go to work or w/e each day, and come home and say hi to your new roommate. Conceptually neat, sure, but since Ryoko isn't a moe-blob she needs to have actual convos with an actually-written person, and that person as written is too distinct to be you. And particularly when you are told to log off and log back in 3 hours later, the idea will inexorably take over that the protagonist just...sits there. Waiting. Starting at the staccato ombré of faux-voxel light beams reflecting off a beige wall until Ryoko deigns to notice you again. It is unsettling, precisely because the game tries so hard to make this place feel like home.

I feel like a game designer could take a meat cleaver to this game, add some mechanics, strip away some others, streamline the experience, etc, and make a truly intriguing game. Obviously not something that will ever happen to an orphaned IP like this in the year 2025! It is sadness nonetheless though, because there really is something uniquely neat at the core here. Gotta find the bankrupt remains of Datam Polystar and ask about a remake, clearly.

Hmm, but phones have location functions. If the game designer had the courage of their convictions, they can make her only show up in your phone when you're home.

Or, indeed when you're not home but only if you've scheduled in advance! You're building a relationship, so you'd go on dates to restaurants, and such, right? The game would probably have to trust the player to pick the location, but you'd have to actually go somewhere to meet her for the date.

Oh for sure, this is by no means the only way to approach the design concept. I can even imagine improvements - like right now I am awake super early, but I can't log into the game, it has taught me she will be asleep. And she should be - but my phone could confirm that, and therefore could add times where *sometimes* she is awake and notifies me, allowing for flexible and unique interactions. (Honestly not sure if the PocketStation for the playstation port did this)

But yeah as you mention in the tags the specificity of place in the game is both core to the emotional experience and very much not in vogue for phone game design. "Finally, a mobile game... that isn't mobile at all!", gonna be an awkward pitch ^^

Siivagunner getting into the April Fool's spirit by providing high quality rips from games that don't exist

Outer space is impossibly vast, but it’s really not that difficult to learn all the important types of objects that are out there (kinds of stars, kinds of planets, kinds of galaxies, whatever), which sort of weirds me out. There’s a lot of complexity within that, and a fair amount we still don’t know, but it’s eminently plausible to get the gist of it. A precocious preteen could handle it all. We aren’t there yet, but I find it very easy to imagine a future in which space is well understood and seen as nothing but a dull, endless repetition of the same few dozen building blocks. There should be more variety to it!

Hard disagree (says the planetary geologist). Almost every planetary body in our solar system is the only known object in the universe that does [x], and a good chunk of the larger moons too.  Some of these are probably common in a larger extrasolar framework, and we can expect to see them in many solar systems; but others may be very rare, and very precious.  Consider the hemispheric dichotomy of Mars, which places its northern hemisphere kilometers below the southern half of the planet, or the equatorial ridge around Iapetus that circles it like the seam from a cheaply molded plastic toy.  Consider the sulfur raining down on the surface of Europa as its orbit trails in the shadow of Io’s volcanic emissions, gently mixing water ice with potentially bioavailable nutrients from two worlds.  Consider the plumes of Enceladus, the ice of Mercury, the shining salt domes of Ceres. This is true in time as well as space; Mars had a hydrological cycle and surface weathering processes unlike anything we ever saw on Earth (which is causing all kinds of trouble trying to pick up the pieces here in the present, let me tell you); I myself participated in some research not long ago suggesting that mountains on Mars might have grown from the top up.  Earth has had several major climate regimes with a radically different character, none of which exists elsewhere in the solar system.  Venus almost certainly had a very different surface and atmosphere than it does today; whatever that looked like, it’s a safe bet that something unique was lost forever. We have models of planetary formation with some granularity; within broad strokes, planets will evolve along certain pathways and within certain limits.  Yes, the cosmos is ordered.  But those limits are broad enough to encompass literally everything you have ever experienced, and we have not begun to exhaust even the simpler possibilities of worlds that are barren of life.  Other systems with other worlds will do things we never imagined, and probably never will imagine without first going to see what the universe has to offer. In a sufficiently vast universe, all of these will come again.  But then, in a sufficiently vast universe, so will you.  Below that threshold, these things really are incredibly interesting.

Shou Xin aka 手訫 aka Xin Shou (Chinese, based Henan, China) - A group of mischievous little line-drawn cats is pouncing your way!, Drawings: Pencil, Eraser, and small Knives for added texture

the secret lives of real birbs!

Kitty

mmm powerful... watch out!!!

Something about maths that'll never not amaze me is how sometimes you'll read a certain topic and it'll be kinda out of reach, like you kinda get the idea but the details go over your head. But then a few months later you'll come back to it and somehow it makes so much more sense. Maybe it's cause you've realised something that makes it click or sometimes you'll have learnt other things and it'll put it in a new perspective. And it's honestly one of the best feelings

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