New game jam idea. About Agrippa, a book of the dead

So, I was reading the excellent Maher’s blog about the excellent Ashbaug, Begos, Gibson’s project about ephemeral art and came with a copycat idea of a game jam where games would burst into oblivion, and with that, we would achieve that precious kairos moment.

Let me copy paste from Jimmy excellent article so the motivation is clear:

But what if we could jettison the plastic permanence from one of the plastic arts, creating something that must live or die — like a rock band in full flight or Chris in the Morning’s flying cow — only as a transitory transcendence? What if we could write a poem which the reader couldn’t return to and fuss over and pin down like a butterfly in a display case? What if we could write a poem that the reader could literally only read one time, that would flow over her once and leave behind… what? As it happens, an unlikely trio of collaborators tried to do just that in 1992.

So, the idea is that, let’s make a jam of games destined to die when the jam is over.

At first, I thought in Itchio, but there you just can’t erase the games, you can remove them from the jam, but they would remain at itchio.

Of course, the idea could only happen with the agreement of the authors, that they don’t preserve the code or the game, less in the hosting side.

Then I have a serendipity, I thought in Inklewriter. Inklewriter was meant to be turned off by August. But it is still there because Joe and Jon are pretty busy with HV, so probably they forgot. It would be nice to have a jam of inklewriter games before turning it off. Maybe 2 weeks for creating the works, two weeks to read the works, and then PUFFFF! Orange smoke.

But Inklewriter games could be preserved with easy. Any reader could just save the html and have instant access to it, and also, the json data is inside the html, so… I wonder if inklewriter could be protected against downloading the games or encrypt the json files or something.

The idea also discourages the use of Twine and any tool that is self-contained with source code included.

Maybe a hosting site with a parchment version that prevents of downloading the z files.

To be clear, this is just an idea, I have no means to produce this, and I have no idea of cryptography and any knowledge that could help to make possible this idea.

Any thoughts?

There are plenty of ways to make a game ephemeral, I believe there are a number of ifcomp games which are now only hazy memories like eg. Sun and Moon (which, hm, I didn’t anticipate the Waybackmachine restoring a glimpse of it), you can no longer play “blueful” due to the vagaries of the internet business – but if you want a nice rigorous gatekeeping bottleneck, make it available only on a telnet BBS or MUD with a baked-in expiration date. The game would only serve up user output.

that’s some 100% grade a prime spam, but spam it be.

The spammer has been disappeared, as if it never was.

[As it was implemented, so is it unimplemented. :nerd: -H]