The power of a wiki as a storytelling device should not be underestimated. It's almost like a cheat code, allowing endless worldbuilding without the need for a driving plot or much motivation, and allowing articles to both interweave together and for the writer to leave the right gaps. You can tell amazing sounding events with a few mere words, you can get all the information you could ever want across, and a lot of hard work and bad writing can be bypassed by just being blunt and consice. Its very easy to lose hours to something like the SCP wiki, or some anime you'd previously never heard of, or pokemon, or star wars. It's also fun and easy to write, frankly. A common vice of the budding fantasy/sci fi writer is to be way too into the worldbuilding side of things rather than the core conflict, yet the model on display in neurocracy is rewarding to those tendencies - which sounds like it has some great potential.
So when CHUU "Joey" Detchibe put this up on the games club list, I gladly picked it. Cyberpunk future wiki with unpicking murder mystery, yes please, that sounds a dead cert.
But Neurocracy, beyond it's central idea feels like it manages to flub nearly everything to the point where I question why the story was told in this manner at all.
First thing, the worldbuilding - basically the thing this style excels at, is a remarkable combination of being such a tepid cyberpunk world I hesitate to even call it that - and a bunch of elements that are so wild that they completely rip you out of any sense of immersion you might have. You can get away with a lot of handwaving in this style, but Texas being overthrown by a doomsday cult and seceding from the union in 2036, especially when it actually factors into the key murder plot stuff - kinda needs a bit more than that.
It really is not helped by the lack of content. Whilst an element of suspension of disbelief comes with the territory here - these guys cant exactly build a whole wikipedia - the sheer derth of articles and things to read is a big issue that arguably makes the whole project feel moot in the first place. Seriously important elements of the world don't get full pages at all, and literally every single page you can find ties back into the core conspiracies of the narrative without exception. The game compares itself to going down a wikipedia rabbit hole, but its not, because there is very, very little to actually explore. Rabbit puddle, maybe? Even as the in-game days change you get very few new pages and you mostly return to see the changes in the few that exist. The facade that you're uncovering or finding anything wont last more than two pages.
The writing style is also a bit off. It's in the ballpark, and omnipedia isn't meant to be an exact parallell to wikipedia, but it still too often reads like it's leading you down a story rather than presenting facts. The game also has weird tonal issues where it makes frankly oddball takes at satire like introducing "sorrytube, a youtube only for apology videos" which is both not funny and also very discordant with the rest of the content which is played very straight.
Ok, so how about those murder conspiracies? Well, they're better, but that's damming with faint praise. They would probably be fine if the elements of digging around the wikis was actually engaging, but it's not and they end up feeling kind of lacking. I also just don't think this is a really great way of presenting this sort of deep dive? Yeah there's a bit of stuff on information control int he plot here but wikipedia generally isn't as much of an active place to dive on murders and stuff like this so much as forums and social media, which could be done.
Neurocracy just fails on basically every narrative level. God forgive me for what I'm about to say but it is legitimately a way worse tale about going down a internet rabbit hole about murders and stuff than fucking YIIK has.
Joey, can I change my vote?
So when CHUU "Joey" Detchibe put this up on the games club list, I gladly picked it. Cyberpunk future wiki with unpicking murder mystery, yes please, that sounds a dead cert.
But Neurocracy, beyond it's central idea feels like it manages to flub nearly everything to the point where I question why the story was told in this manner at all.
First thing, the worldbuilding - basically the thing this style excels at, is a remarkable combination of being such a tepid cyberpunk world I hesitate to even call it that - and a bunch of elements that are so wild that they completely rip you out of any sense of immersion you might have. You can get away with a lot of handwaving in this style, but Texas being overthrown by a doomsday cult and seceding from the union in 2036, especially when it actually factors into the key murder plot stuff - kinda needs a bit more than that.
It really is not helped by the lack of content. Whilst an element of suspension of disbelief comes with the territory here - these guys cant exactly build a whole wikipedia - the sheer derth of articles and things to read is a big issue that arguably makes the whole project feel moot in the first place. Seriously important elements of the world don't get full pages at all, and literally every single page you can find ties back into the core conspiracies of the narrative without exception. The game compares itself to going down a wikipedia rabbit hole, but its not, because there is very, very little to actually explore. Rabbit puddle, maybe? Even as the in-game days change you get very few new pages and you mostly return to see the changes in the few that exist. The facade that you're uncovering or finding anything wont last more than two pages.
The writing style is also a bit off. It's in the ballpark, and omnipedia isn't meant to be an exact parallell to wikipedia, but it still too often reads like it's leading you down a story rather than presenting facts. The game also has weird tonal issues where it makes frankly oddball takes at satire like introducing "sorrytube, a youtube only for apology videos" which is both not funny and also very discordant with the rest of the content which is played very straight.
Ok, so how about those murder conspiracies? Well, they're better, but that's damming with faint praise. They would probably be fine if the elements of digging around the wikis was actually engaging, but it's not and they end up feeling kind of lacking. I also just don't think this is a really great way of presenting this sort of deep dive? Yeah there's a bit of stuff on information control int he plot here but wikipedia generally isn't as much of an active place to dive on murders and stuff like this so much as forums and social media, which could be done.
Neurocracy just fails on basically every narrative level. God forgive me for what I'm about to say but it is legitimately a way worse tale about going down a internet rabbit hole about murders and stuff than fucking YIIK has.
Joey, can I change my vote?