But the pre-game was for the neos, their time to shine—a moment for the champions to step back and support, to model the importance of the gestalt. The chant was psychemaxxing the neos, sat in their gamerooms at home or in the teamspaces of the tribe, far away from the stadium, stress-testing their hardware as the kick-off timer ran down, reviewing their routines before the game commenced.

Viktor recalled his own neo runs, the adrenaline flutter in his gut as the sound and vision of the stadium assaulted his senses through his visor and gamethrone: the sweet prospect of contest! He added volume to his chanting, a tiny modulation at just the right moment, as a signal of his respect for the waiting neos; their readiness score bumped slightly in response, as did his own leadership metric, already in the upper half of the top percentile. That score privileged him to be here in the arena, high up in the god-boxes of the utmost ubers. But privilege came with responsibility: along with the other ubers of the tribe, Viktor would be running their metagame, shaping the strategy of the avatars on the field below as they fed on the button-mashing contributions of hundreds of thousands of neos all across the continent. The game changed as you progressed, took new forms as you switched allegiances from tribe to tribe, but it never ended. There was always a new challenge, a new aspect of your profile to grind and buff.

So it was said.

As the chant reached its final foot-stomping bars, the avatars of the contesting tribes began to materialise in the arena. Light and colour surged and swirled, and the chants of both teams gave way to a wordless roar of anticipation. The Saurian avatar, Wrex, his scaly skin glistening with the green and purple tones that identified his native IP, tipped back his fearsome lizard skull and added his own roar to that of the crowd, the flames of his devastating breath-weapon reaching nearly to the roof of the arena. At the far end, the endlessly reconfiguring form of the Mechatron avatar, a ten-meter robot comprised entirely of deadly weapons, extruded two titanic arms from its core mass, clashing its chainsaw-fingered hands together with a shriek of tortured metal before clenching them into fists and shaking them at Wrex in contemptuous threat. The colossal lizard glowered back, scraped the dirt of the playfield with his powerful hind legs, his tail lashing the air. Something close to silence came over the stadium as the timer ticked down the last few seconds before the game could begin.

Captivated by the pomp and spectacle below, Viktor hardly acknowledged the arrival of Wilma, reigning ipsissimus of the Saurians. This was a tricky play-off of priorities: due respect for seniority against commitment to leadership and focus at crucial moments. Viktor’s modals informed him that going with the latter had been the right choice—as did Wilma’s nod, seen in his peripheral vision as she took the ceeyo’s seat to his right. As the final seconds were counted off, the metagame interfaces blossomed in Viktor’s vision, overlaid in partial transparency over the arena below.

The clock hit zero, and the contest began.

#

Ninety minutes later the arena echoed again with the Saurian chant, modulated to the key of triumph. The clashing lights, which had represented the ebb and flow of the contest, were now almost entirely purple and green, the last spots of Mechatron red and silver fading away in defeat as Wrex, his holographic form slowly fading, thrashed out his war-dance atop the shattered wreckage of his robot opponent.

Viktor slid off his spex, wiped at the sweat on the bridge of his nose. Ninety minutes… it had felt like an instant, but also an eternity. The flow of the metagame was very different to that of the smaller games, no less important, that one played as a neo. For the neos, every puzzle solved, every platform leapt, every zombie blasted was a contribution of skill that gave the tribal avatar greater power in the arena, greater speed, more devastating moves. For the ubers, by contrast, it was all about channelling that raw power to where it was most needed, playing the long strategies, directing and steering and holding the vision. Utmost focus. Pure flow.

Almost.

“Good game, Viktor?” said Wilma quietly.

“Good game,” he replied.

“You don’t sound so sure.”

“We won, did we not?”

“We did,” she said, staring down into the arena. Members of the losing tribe were filing out of the building, while younger members of the Saurians embraced and danced on the playfield. “Though it was a close thing. The Mechs are very good. We were wise to poach you from them.”

Viktor bowed his head, in the manner appropriate to one receiving praise from a senior.

“And yet,” she continued, “you are not content.”

It was a statement, not a question. Viktor waited.

“You never doubted, did you?”

“Never,” he said—for it was true, and to speak truth was duty.

She turned in her seat to look at him, her expression unreadable behind the ipsissimus overlay.

“You are among the very best, Viktor. You know this to be true; your metrics say it all. But there are metrics that you don’t yet see—aspects that only we ceeyos have access to. Those numbers tell me something’s not right with you.”

Viktor’s heart lurched, the post-flow calm dispelled by something close to panic. “If I have failed the tribe in any way…”

“No, no. Your play is exemplary, as always.” She turned back to face the arena. “You need only look below to see the evidence. I hardly touched the interface this evening. The Saurians would have won this battle without me being here. The metagame was all you—all the bits that really mattered.”

“You honour me, ipsissimus.”

“Enough with the titles; this isn’t a tribecast. As to that, you honour yourself.” She waved a hand in dismissal. “But it’s not enough, is it? Your contentment metric… this is not challenge enough for you.”

“I am not fit for a higher rank in the tribe, Wilma.”

“I’m not offering you one!” she laughed. “Though you’re closer than you believe. But with every game you win, the winning matters a little less. Doesn’t it?”

He bowed his head again, this time in shame. “It does,” he said, because it did.

He had been unable to quite understand it as such: the tiny part of him which, even in the searing high of the metagame flow, seemed to watch with a cold dispassion. It was good to win—nothing was better than winning! But…

“Don’t hang your head like some blundering noob,” Wilma said. “You have not failed. There are always a few like you—a few for whom the satisfaction starts to fade, even at the highest levels of the metagame. A few who need something more.”

“What more is there, but to be ipsissimus?”

“There are harder things than my job, believe it or not.” She deactivated the mask, gave him a thoughtful look. “In the old language, you’d say I’m just a manager of managers. Oh, don’t get me wrong—I’m the best of the Saurians at the upper meta, and one look at the IP leader-board shows that the Saurians are among the best on the continent. The rankings don’t lie.

“But nor do the metrics. I’m ipsissimus because I’m the best, yes—but also because it makes me content, so I am able to give it my all. You are my left-hand meta because you are the best… but it does not make you content. And that presents a problem—because metrics make rankings, and when it comes to tribal management, player contentment matters a lot. It’s how the studios decide which IPs will be given more development budget, which worlds will get more levels and attract more neos.”

A twist of shame coiled in Viktor’s gut—shame such as he’d not felt since screwing the pooch on his first big raid with an adult tribe, years before.

“If you must put me up for transfer, ipsissimus, I would understand…”

“Good grief, no. What I’m trying to tell you, Viktor, is that at this level there are other ways to contribute. Behind the contestation of the tribes, there is a greater unity: the unity of the game itself. On this, the tribes all work together, as we must—for without the game, what would the tribes even matter?

“But to work at the edge of the game is a particular challenge. The inter-tribal council has come to realise that this is where we can make best use of the ones like you, who are not fully content, because you will rise to the challenge. In so doing, you defend and preserve the great game.”

“And increase my contentment metric?”

She laughed. “You see? Always looking for the meta angle. That’s why the Saurians wouldn’t trade you for all the tokens in the multiverse—and believe me, we’ve had offers.

“No, we’ll be keeping you, Viktor—and you’ll still be running the meta. Though we’ll need to bring up one of the understudies to give you a bit of space for your other activities.”

“How will I serve the great game?” he asked.

“Through the toughest, grimmest grind of them all, dear Viktor.” She stood, placed a hand on his shoulder. “Recruitment.”

#

Over the following days, Viktor gained access to wikis and docs that answered questions that he was ashamed to admit he’d never thought to ask. Such as: where did new players come from?

Not in the biological sense, obviously—people had kids, whether within their tribes or across intertribal alliances, and the kids were raised to play, from pretty much the moment they could thump buttons of a basic controller. Often they’d stick with their family’s favoured IP until they reached majority, at which point they’d often be ready to join a tribe of their own; the tribes had entire subgames devoted to attracting and absorbing fresh youngsters, and the competition there was even fiercer than in the arena, so it was said.

But there were only so many children born each year. The great game—which, in this new meta he was learning, was referred to as “the market”—was growing too slowly, maybe even shrinking. This was just as bad as a shrinking tribe, Viktor came to understand: a tribe that shrinks grows weak, and eventually dies.

Viktor had vague memories of it having been different when he was a child: his parents hadn’t had a tribe, as far as he could remember, and while choosing his first allegiance had felt like a big deal at the time, it nonetheless felt no more consequential than choosing what colour T-shirt to wear. Had the great game even been a thing back then? He assumed it must have been—though he couldn’t quite say why.

And so, could the great game die? Well, that was unthinkable! Nonetheless, this new meta took the possibility very seriously. What were needed were more players—and every single recruit was a precious resource, not just to whichever tribe it joined, but to the game as the whole. Still, the question remained: where might new players be found? The answer was a shock, even if it was obvious in hindsight.

There were people who didn’t play!

Recruiting such non-players was the ultimate meta, in a way—an extension of the great game beyond its boundaries. There were no training levels available, no tutorials. Each mission was effectively unique. The stats suggested a shockingly low rate of completion; no part of the great game came close to being this hard, or so completely lacking in systems of incentive and encouragement. Statistically speaking, it was basically impossible.

Viktor hadn’t felt so excited in months.

#

Recruitment came with no formal system of levelling, but it nonetheless took Viktor a few weeks to achieve what he thought of as the equivalent of learning the interface. Every day, he would leave his gameroom and his apartment and switch off the game layers in his spex, using a softswitch that Wilma had burned into the firmware by the Saurian tech team. The world thus revealed was deeply uncanny to him: roads and buildings were exactly where they’d always been, at least in the parts of the city where he lived and played, but beyond the game they were strange, drab and colourless by comparison to the endless surfaces of information and interaction to which he was accustomed.

He found this drab world strangely distracting; there was something queasy, almost nauseating, about the level of detail on even the most ordinary of surfaces, which seemed to carry a level of information far beyond what was needed of them. How had people ever achieved anything in this environment, he wondered? And the people themselves were likewise baffling: where he would usually see a crowd swatched out in the colours and emblems of their tribal IP, broadcasting their metrics and memberships in a contest for clout and attention, he saw instead figures who from a distance looked mostly the same, but who on closer inspection carried as much detail and variation as the walls and the floors.

As for the sky, he lacked the words to describe how it made his stomach lurch to look at it.

After a few weeks lost to ambling aimlessly around the map, staring at things, his missions forgotten, Viktor had the Saurian techs lash up a layer for his spex that would simplify the world without covering it over, allowing him to move through it without too much distraction, but still interact with it. This was their world, the world of the non-players; he had to be there to find and recruit them. The filter layer, he reasoned, was like a difficulty setting: he’d dial it back up once he got the hang of it.

Finally feeling like he had a grasp of the world in which he had to operate, Viktor called up the list of potential targets for recruitment that Saurian HQ had provided, selected the hardest-rated target within walking distance, and set off for the big, blocky building in an unfashionable and underpopulated neighbourhood where the map said his target could be found. It took him a while to figure out how to tell one apartment from another—there were no tags to push info to your spex, so you had to look at little physical labels on the doors until you found the right one—but eventually he found himself pressing a grubby black button next to a door on the fourth floor.

The door opened to reveal a short, round-faced man with greying hair, wearing a T-shirt whose logo and colourway didn’t match any IP that Viktor could recall. Who or what had been LOWRIDER, he wondered? Given the holes in the shirt and the damage to the logo, he guessed it was a tribe that had died or been subsumed long, long ago.

“Yeah?” said the man, slowly, tilting his head slightly to one side as he looked up at Viktor.

“Greetings, my friend!” said Viktor, spreading his arms wide and smiling just as he’d been trained to do when taking to neos. “You are Jakob, I believe?”

“That’s me,” said the man. “What do you want?”

“I seek recruits for the Saurians, Jakob! Will you join us?”

The man’s eyes narrowed as he stepped back into the gloom beyond the doorway. “Not into church stuff, sorry.”

“Church… stuff?” Viktor blinked around in his systems for a FAQ, but nothing of any use was coming up.

“Yeah, like the Jehova people.” The man looked puzzled, scratched at his chin. “They used to come by from time to time. Don’t recall this Saurian thing, though. Or is that the Scientologists? Did you guys have a rebrand or something?”

Viktor felt his jaw hang slack, his thoughts spiralling as he tried to process Jakob’s meandering speech. There were no metrics to help, no allegiance graph, no tooltips, no walk-through. Who even was this person? How was Viktor supposed to engage with him at all, let alone recruit him?

“Hey… hey, man? You OK?”

Viktor shook his head. Nothing seemed to make much sense.

“Nice cup of tea’s what you need, I reckon.” Jakob stepped forward, took hold of Viktor’s arm lightly. “Come on, let’s get you sat down, at least.”

Viktor soon found himself sat on a tatty, sagging sofa in a small, gloomy room that looked like some psycho’s idea of a loot stash. A chipped mug full of hot liquid sat steaming on the low table in front of him, among what he guessed were books—a sort of paper-based game that he vaguely recalled his grandmother playing when she came to visit in his childhood. You had to turn the pages to scroll the text, and the story would appear inside your head… something like that? Pretty inefficient compared to spex, but grandma had been wild for them. Looking around, Viktor saw that the room was full of them, stood in teetering stacks on the floor, piled on the arms of the sofa.

The only empty space was on a table facing a brightly lit screen that was showing an incredibly high-res but extremely boring image: a space where two drab buildings met at a corner. Every now and again small critters would sweep across the image, which led Viktor to conclude this was Jakob’s preferred game world, and he’d just found a quiet respawn spot while he answered the door. But what sort of interface was this?

Viktor stood up and walked over to the desk with its sloping console, which was lit by a lamp like something out of one of those spooky detective RPGs. There were a bunch of odd-looking styluses on the desk; Viktor picked one up, felt its unexpectedly sharp tip with his thumb. The sloping console was mostly showing a white background, topped with with a half-rendered wireframe of some IP Viktor couldn’t remember seeing before.

“That’s what I was working on when you knocked,” said Jakob, re-entering the room. Viktor hurriedly slipped the stylus into a pocket. “Sorry it took so long, but when I’m in the zone it’s hard to stop. I can kinda see the lines, you know? But if I don’t get them down while they’re in my head, it can take ages to imagine them again. Sometimes they don’t come back at all, and that’s the end of that; gotta start a new one.” He gave a laugh that could have been a cough. “Back to the drawing board, amirite?”

“What IP is this?” asked Viktor.

“Eye pee? I’m not up to date on the slang, man.” Jakob was nudging Viktor’s hand with the mug. “C’mon, sit down. You look pretty spaced—you taken something? Don’t sweat it, I’m not gonna call the cops or anything, you can ride it out here…”

“I haven’t taken anything.” Had Jakob seen the stylus? Should he confess and give it back? It was like an interactive cut-scene, Viktor thought to himself as he sat back down, but detached from the level it belonged to. What was he meant to be doing? He blinked for his quest-list.

“I have come to recruit you, Jakob,” he said again. He felt a bit more confident now he could remember his mission.

“Right, this Saurians thing. Not a church.”

“It’s a tribe. An IP. The greatest IP, by many metrics.”

“Ah, one of your gaming things?” Jakob was sitting on an uncomfortable-looking chair facing Viktor, his back to the desk and the big screen. “I don’t do that stuff, sorry.”

“We know. But the great game needs you! The Saurians—”

“Oh no, I’d be no use. Never was good at games, couldn’t see the point. Haven’t played for years.”

“But what about…” Viktor trailed off, pointed at the big screen behind Jakob.

“Huh? Oh, you mean my drawing!” Jakob’s turned to face the console, rattled the styluses on the desk with his hand. “It’s a sort of game, I guess. Game for one, you know? Keeps me occupied.”

“How do you win?”

“Win? I get pieces into galleries from time to time, but that’s mostly luck of the draw. Luck of the draw, amirite?” Jakob coughed his little laugh again. “Nice to get things seen, but it’s not like anyone’s gonna buy anything. Yoobies ain’t got the money, right? Just us yoobies at the galleries, man. Nice to hang out, check each other’s stuff, cuppa tea. Sometimes we swap pieces.” He gestured at the walls, which were covered in still images of all sorts. “S’not the winning, it’s the taking part, mum used to say. Bless her.”

“You make these?” Viktor lowered the filter layer to take in the walls, which were covered with IP—characters, monsters, sets and scenes, nothing he’d ever seen before. It was impressive stuff! Jakob was probably too old to start out as a neo in the gamepits, anyway, but maybe the techs could find a role for him, something IP-facing? Maybe they could transfer him to the studios, once he’d levelled up some. He’d heard of that happening, the studios recruiting out of the tribes. Rare, but not unheard of… and rarity was good for the ratings.

“’Bout half of the stuff on the walls is mine. The rest is swaps. But yeah, I draw. You like that one?”

Jakob detached a character from the wall, handed it to Viktor. The thing it was on was like a book page, but bigger, kind of floppy. Still, the character seemed almost alive, even though it was apparently just a screengrab, not even an animated loop.

“You can keep that one. My little gift.”

“You must come with me, Jakob,” said Viktor, setting down the mug. “The Saurians need you.”

“No, no, man. I keep telling you. Nice of you to offer, but I’m good here.”

“But you make these characters—you could win at that!

“You think? I thought so too, once. Back when you were a kid, I guess? Maybe earlier. But they didn’t want people who took their time, you know. Bad for business, inefficient. Got an interview once. ‘Why d’you wanna do this the hard way,’ they asked. Because it’s fun, I said. Because if it’s not hard, I end up not caring. And if I don’t care, then it comes out crap, right?” He coughed again. “Yoobie was a thing by then anyway. Told ‘em they could keep their job, and I’d keep my art. Never cared for winning. Never wanted to be the best. Wanted to be the only, you know? To do it my way, like Sid sang.”

“All this time, just doing this… aren’t you, don’t you get bored?”

“You kidding? Every day’s different, man. Every drawing feels like starting from nothing all over again, sort of.”

“How will you know when you’ve beaten it?”

“You don’t beat it, man! Hell, it beats me, most days. Wouldn’t have it any other way, either.”

Jakob stood up, took the character from Viktor’s hands and folded the page gently across, then across again. He slipped it into Viktor’s pocket, where the stylus was hidden.

“That’s for you. Show your friends, if you like. You feeling better now, eh? I need to get on, see. Nice having you by, but I can’t work with you here. Besides, your Saurians’ll be wondering where you got to, won’t they?”

Once again Viktor found himself be-spelled by Jakob’s monologue, allowing himself to be guided around and out the room, out of the apartment door and onto the landing. As the door clicked shut behind him, the magic wore off.

Out in the streets, the surfaces and characters once again screamed irrelevant detail at him until he blinked the filter layer back on and then, after a few moments, reactivated his usual tribal overlays. Neon kaleidoscope of colour, icons of allegiance and enmity... the world was legible once more.

Viktor blinked up an optimal path challenge, and set off for home. He stuck Jakob’s character up on the wall of his gameroom, and got back on with his life.

#

After a few weeks without any success, the Saurian recruitment project was put on hold. There were still non-players out there—surprisingly many, in fact—but they seemed quite determined not to get involved with the great game, and no player had yet found a way to bring them round.

Viktor returned to his full-time role as left-hand uber to the Saurians, but the nagging sense of discontent never left him. Rather, it seemed to grow—and while his metrics for the meta never dropped, one day there was some young neo sat in his old seat next to Wilma, and Viktor found himself on the transfer market, slowly slipping into ever-more-downmarket IPs as the months passed. He was mildly surprised to find he didn’t care very much.

He ended up freelance, helping start-up IPs build neos into teams that could pull off a fast raid against a better-known rival and make it out with lots of loot. Sometimes they’d win, sometimes they wouldn’t. It was fine, but it didn’t demand much of his time, and he didn’t feel very connected to the people he played with. In his time off, he messed about with unfamiliar mechanics, stuff he’d bounced off as a kid, got quite good at some of them—but it didn’t matter, somehow.

One evening he found himself staring at the drawing on his gameroom wall, as he often did. He peeled it down, went hunting through his things for the stolen stylus. He sat down, looked at the character one more time, then turned over the paper.

He picked up the stylus, and began to make a mark.

SOURCE SCENARIO: “THE LUDIVERSE”

Games have become integrated into daily life to a degree where the two are inseparable. They are the operational layer on top of the scaffolding of reality; reality provides stability and resilience, games provide the dynamic elements. Life outside of games is the shared reality, while games themselves have become another reality that adapts to the individual, their tribe, the context and the moment.

This has allowed people to have more agency over their lives, opting in and out of specific aspects of life and society, selecting what their reality should include and how it should behave. Games guide us to where we need to be to fulfill our needs, either directly through play, or by leading us to interactions in the shared reality. Games have become temporal: they no longer loop back to starting conditions, but are persistent through time—just like life.

Games have also become fluid, meaning we connect through genres and particular kinds of experience rather than in specific titles. The persistence of games means that they are totally intertwined with your life, and are even passed down like heirlooms to your descendents. But the fluidity means that the shared social history of games across society has become blurred, every version of the story specific to the context of the individual and their tribe.

Hardware, software and experiences are entirely composable. If you can think it, you can have it: insight becomes implementation, instantly. Imagine any type of digital creature as your pet, and it’s yours; it can even play alongside you, or navigate gameworlds on its own. Meanwhile creative pursuits like music have become more accessible, as the game interfaces lower the bar.

With this new life come new measures of progression, as your achievements across various games become a key indicator of your advancement. Various scores and currencies indicate the aspects of life you need to work on: empathy, persistence, productivity, community cohesion, and more.

Games observe and interact with the player directly. Technology is the invisible interface that games make use of to keep you evolving; it adapts to you—for your own good. UBI keeps tokens in everyone’s wallets, and the old physical borders have been erased, replaced by a new world order that allows for a new level of diversity and inclusion—an OMNIculture, a shared game in which everything is possible.

The removal of struggle from life has left a void for some people, who feel that some vital friction is missing. They go in search of frictions more fundamental, or attempt to invent new ones beyond the scope of the games.