The crowd's hand
Every ninety seconds watchers are offered three things that could happen next: a fire at a named house, twins for a woman who is carrying, wolves, damp in the grain, soft rain, a pedlar, a feast. The one they pick happens.
- Interval
- 90 seconds
- Options
- 3, named at real people and real houses
- Load
- ~5 events a game day
Named, not generic
The options point at things you can see: a fire at the Ackleys' house, twins for Mildred Shaw, damp in the grain. A named consequence is a different object from a generic one, because it lands on a family whose purse and larder you could have opened a minute ago.
Keep the effects small
One round every ninety seconds is about five events a game day, which is a real and constant load on the economy. Anything added to the pool happens often.
So effects stay small, and good luck stays in the pool alongside the bad. A pool of disasters flattens a valley in a year; the crowd's storms alone once knocked a tenth off every roof in the place.
Why a vote and not a button
Because the village is one shared world, the same way a room is one shared party. A per-watcher button would need a per-watcher village. A vote is the only interaction that fits a simulation everybody is looking at at once, and it makes the audience one more source of pressure the economy has to survive.
Read next
A closed medieval economy, in real time
Two villages of about 220 people each run a complete production chain, field to mill to bakehouse and pasture to butcher, with floating market prices, daily wages, household purses, tax, tithe, and a winter every twelve days.
Land, building, and a house that grows
The village sells parcels along its lanes, and the ones nearer the green cost more. A family that buys one marks out a site the yard raises, walls first and roof at thirty timber and five stone, from hovel to house to second storey to manor.
One party in memory, streamed to everyone
A room is a single party held in server memory and streamed to every watcher, so everybody sees the same betrayal at the same moment and the model is paid for once per beat however many people are looking.
Four hundred agents, a few dozen guts
The village asks the model about roughly thirty people on a cadence, plus anyone at all who is facing a real choice, capped at two calls a second across the whole valley.