Northdark is a narrative role-playing game for 1-2 players set in a Nordic data center, when the lights have gone out. You create an unfolding story of trying to balance the limited power needed to keep the data centre lights on, with the local town where your friends and family huddle in the cold. How will you keep everything going through the night?
Using simple components (dice, deck of cards, tokens, and a microphone) you record what happens each hour, as the snowstorm passes. Will you make it home? What must the data center become to survive?
I developed the game as part of the research project Megabytes vs Megawatts at the Department of Thematic Studies, Linköping University, where I was a Visiting Professor. It is based on all our fieldwork around data centers and energy infrastructures in the Nordic region.
We brought together all our fieldwork across Sweden to create Northdark as a place. It is inspired by real-world narratives and experiences we gathered during our research.
Many games relating to energy systems are focused on value: creating and connecting kilowatt-hours of electricity generation, or comparing the value of carbon dioxide emissions. We wanted a game focused on the relations that constitute energy infrastructure: the creatures in the forest, the people in the nearby town, the trade-offs and tricky decisions needed to keep data and energy networks up and running.
Northdark invites you to tell the story of a data center as an ecosystem with power, people, processing and place at its heart, literally.
The rulebook is free to download and play.
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