Skip to content

The Clockless Clock Maze

Game Venkatesh Rao
researcher academic
Download →

The Clockless Clock Maze is an interactive game designed to embody different temporal experiences across protocol environments by mapping bureaucracies, technical standards, social gatherings, and blockchain systems onto a triangular maze structure. Players navigate between three protocol regimes (I-it, I-world, and I-thou) through liminal passages, discovering how different social actors like nurses, mystics, and entrepreneurs experience protocol-governed temporalities differently.

Related resources

Paper

A Phenomenology of Protocols

Tay develops a phenomenological approach to understanding protocols as human-built systems, arguing that current protocols fail to nurture human flourishing because they were designed without centering human capacity for self-making, character cultivation, and wisdom. She contends that truly human-centered protocols must be reconstructed to be hospitable to human development rather than extractive of human attention and agency.

fiction foundations protocols

Janna Tay

Paper

Four Doors: An Architectural Memory Protocol

This paper presents 'Four Doors' as an architectural memory protocol that applies medieval monastic mnemonic techniques to a contemporary retreat space, using the building's physical architecture and inscribed doorways as mnemonic devices organized around the intercolumnia principle. The author draws on Mary Carruthers' scholarship on medieval memory practices to transform the Lodge at St. Edward Park into a 'gathering site' and 'machine for thinking' where each architectural threshold functions as a gateway to associated ideas.

culture fiction memory

Summer of Protocols

Game

Protocol Cards by Waqar

Protocol Cards is a card-based game designed by Waqar and Mashal that uses archetypes like Outsider, Heretic, Sage, and Maintainer to explore protocol dynamics and social roles. The game serves as a playable framework for understanding how different character types interact within protocol-based systems.

fiction game protocol-watching

Summer of Protocols

Topics

fiction game protocols theory