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.
Protocol Gameboard is a parlor game designed to explore different social roles and archetypes (Outsider, Sage, Heretic, Drifter, Clinger, Maintainer) through interactive gameplay mechanics. The game transforms abstract protocol concepts into embodied social dynamics, allowing players to experience how different participants navigate shared systems and rule structures.
Summer of Protocols
Samuel Chua of Seapunk Studios presents 'reverse-imagineering,' a methodology for protocol studies that starts from speculative fiction worlds and works backward to infer the protocols that would need to exist to make them plausible. He illustrates this through three Seapunk worlds—South(east Asia) with neoanimist distributed AI and 'ghost machine' commons-hardening, SNOW Society's shanzhai-inspired peer-to-peer climate adaptation supply chains, and the 67th World's longevity/automation governance where immortality requires earning social legitimacy—arguing that building fiction first surfaces protocol ideas that direct present-to-future design work would miss.
Samuel Chua
Daniel Schmidt argues that mazes are a minimal formal instantiation of protocols, not just a metaphor, using his own maze-drawing history and games to illustrate concepts like hard vs. soft protocols (physical walls vs. crossable paper lines), scale-entangled vs. scale-lined navigation, and stigmergic memory. He demonstrates an ant colony pheromone simulation, a multiplayer infinite maze with shareable 'pebble' markers, a maze-design platform separating protocol-author from protocol-navigator with heatmaps of friction points, and an art-gallery maze as medium. Venkatesh Rao joins to explain his 'clockless clock' maze, a topological map of thought-space (rat/goat/crow vertices) designed by Schmidt to represent arrested development and spiraling toward nirvana.
Daniel Schmidt, Venkatesh Rao