Drift Mine Satellite2023

A maintenance text adventure about a person living underground in a limestone mine and their work maintaining the local communication network that has sprung up there.

Stemming from a (real!) visit to a decommissioned limestone mine that is now used to house RVs and boats over the winter (and a subsequent phone notification, under several hundred feet of rock, that the space station was visible overhead), Drift Mine Satellite imagines what a post-apocalyptic community life might look like among sleeping vacation vehicles. It is a utopian apocalypse fantasy, a forever-camping world narrowed to linear miles of RVs parked under a mountain, the people who live in them, and the systems that interconnect them, both social and material.

The game was commissioned for Solar Protocol, a network of solar powered servers that connects from whatever server is in the most sunshine. It is programmed for the browser, with low-energy use and computational power front of mind. The entire story is told via spatialized text – no images, no libraries, just divs and textboxes and basic javascript.