The one mechanic. The arena has a single pool of pressure and every player's thruster drains it.
Burning is cheap for you and expensive for everyone; braking — actively bleeding your own momentum —
is the only thing that refills it, for everybody. The shared goal is a raft that must reach the far
gate before the clock; the shared danger is that when the pool bottoms out the field collapses inward
on everyone. A round is a negotiation nobody can speak in: you read the pool, you read who is burning,
and you decide whether to be the one who slows down. A tragedy of the commons as a control scheme,
legible in one bar at the top of the screen.
Not chosen: the commons is a rule about other people rather than a world made of them, and with one
player it degenerates into a stamina bar, a thing every game already has. Wake (#WAKE) puts the other
players into the terrain itself. The pressure bar may return inside Wake if rounds turn out to lack a
second-order tension.
The one mechanic. The arena has a single pool of pressure and every player's thruster drains it. Burning is cheap for you and expensive for everyone; braking — actively bleeding your own momentum — is the only thing that refills it, for everybody. The shared goal is a raft that must reach the far gate before the clock; the shared danger is that when the pool bottoms out the field collapses inward on everyone. A round is a negotiation nobody can speak in: you read the pool, you read who is burning, and you decide whether to be the one who slows down. A tragedy of the commons as a control scheme, legible in one bar at the top of the screen.
Not chosen: the commons is a rule about other people rather than a world made of them, and with one player it degenerates into a stamina bar, a thing every game already has. Wake (#WAKE) puts the other players into the terrain itself. The pressure bar may return inside Wake if rounds turn out to lack a second-order tension.