C

11/8/2025

What started as an Unreal Tournament and quasi-early 2000s FPS inspired project, was actually never meant to be focused on outright gladiatorial violence. In a sense, I lied.

What I mean by that is not that the main point of the project is not an arena-focused project on violence, high-tech action, mechas, powerarmors and stuff along that line, but the fact that the underlying mechanisms moving the plot forwards are based on other, more relevant and fantastical issues of technological esotericism.

To that end, technology and Claimants are the only esoteric force of the Immaterial Contest that is able to move the plot forwards.

This happens for two reasons.

The first, is an inherent imprisonment of willpower itself. As technology today dictates the voices of politics and culture, so in the far future, it will allow only the refined viewpoint of these people to shape the world around them. IC is meant to be claustrophobic. Not only by way of societal hierarchies, architecture and scenes, but also by the flow of time itself. There is an accelerated rhythm to the project, opting to rapidly swap scenes and focus, to hop from one place to the next as an allusion of robbing people of their free will. The Contestants themselves have little, if none, control over where they are and what they do. There is reason as to why Jorj is only seen eating, suffering in silence, or going after women, as that is the very basis of his needs. Sexualized, self-satisfying slavery, that is no more different than what a lot of people experience today.

This is the overarching writing style of part A. Fast, reductive, dominating. Only pockets of humanity are allowed to poke through. Families, friendships and earnest care for another are still there, despite this brutal characteristic of the age. Pinpoint, human scenes, I try (maybe I fail) to make them small but memorable.

This, I believe, is right for a sci-fi universe where thought is the de facto force. This is, I believe, a future ruled by thought instead of action. Just like today, mankind leans towards rule-by-thought, by interfacing with a screen, virtually with others, by being focused on management instead of creation.

To that end, one can imagine, the hordes of rural men, enlisted by the millions, to fight wars that are started by people behind screens. And even then, at the battlefields of the 21st century, one soldier may not escape handheld liquid crystal screens, piloting drones, watching from places further than the eye, getting orders from a speaker connected to currents and electricity. All is recorded, for the eyes of the many, plastered into webms and videos, forming collective opinions, feeding back into managing those that are still in reality, acting in said records.

Power today, is at the hands of those whose life is sedentary. Tomorrow what then?

Here is the second part of this observation. Evolved into this, trained and bred into a world ruled by how our thought interfaces more and more directly with the real, bypassing at times the physical limitations of our hands, what is to be of these almighty sedentary men?

My opinion is that of esoteric advancement, or more accurately, a devolvement into broader/ more diverse archaic notions and beliefs. Becoming archetypal streams of thoughts, returning to a pagan decentralism where the ego takes the texture of violent, domination-focused forces.

Any and all groups of man fight among themselves and so does this new all-mighty texture of mankind, the battlefield resting in the place between their ears, the mind itself made of belief and conflict. For as it is hell for the men that have chosen action, so I believe is some newer form of suffering for those that have chosen to command. The all-seeing eye, the machine, the grand collections of data, they are useless unless a person exists behind them, to create decision or understand in his own intimate way. And I do not believe that mankind is ever going to rid itself of the person, the individual. It all appears as a tool to mankind and as flawed as mankind is at its core, that flaw is not going to leave anytime soon, becoming itself engraved to the very tools in use.

So this second part is as such. Claimants are these people. Steeped in a battleground of their egos, beliefs and opinions, there is a fertile ground for pitting consciousness versus consciousness.

The inverse dream is nothing but an abstraction of technology. The same story could be writen by writing about people using computers nowadays to influence culture, tech and narratives. I just like to take it a step further where physical interaction is completely optional, where the machine is aware of the farthest depths in anyone's consciousness, mapping any Claimant into fantastical forces that only feed this archetypal measure of will and allow for immaterial conflict.

Take this point further and it only becomes point number one, that the future is an enslaving ordeal. The only thing that matters, is what texture that domination has, how fun or miserable, how hard the whip strikes against a naked back.

One could imagine, the sedentary shift of neolithic cultures to an agrarian lifestyle when crops became domesticated. Nowadays, a similar shift, becoming even more sedentary, creeping in against one's hands instead of his nomadic legs. The distance traveled is shortened, much alike to the nomad who settles a fertile plain. So the man of today and tomorrow, settles for a shorter distance in the confines of connected rooms.

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I try not to be a doomer. Perhaps all I believe appear as bleak, outright evil at their core, but despite all that I cannot imagine it being all that horrible and there is light deeper yet.

Why? Because the sedentary ruler of tomorrow is still human at their core. No matter how much technology grounds a soul down to its primal emotions, there is still space for the things that make us soft, gentle and caring.

And this is what the dynamic between Claimants and Contestants is at its core. Human to human interaction.

A Claimant should be the supporting character behind a commoner. A support, the same way a priest steers and supports a person to virtue, without that person having to go through the battleground of theology, the schizophrenic soup of conflicting opinions.