Lot
You are one of 117 billion. The lot decides which.
About 117 billion people have ever been born. Lot draws you one of them, fairly, weighted by era, place and station. So you are most often a peasant long before 1800, and nearly half of the time you don't live to five. The life is written into a parish register, a page at a time. At each fork you see every door, including the shut ones and why they are shut. Each life leaves one thing in the chest, and a great-grandchild can inherit it. Free, no ads, no account, no internet.
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How it works
- Draw a lot. Shake the sack and a wooden tag rises out of it with the year, the place, the family and boy or girl burnt into it. The odds come with it: how many of everyone who ever lived were born like you, how many children here live to five, and how many people around you can read.
- Read the book. The life is written into a parish register in the registrar's hand. Each page turned is a few years: childhood, work, a match, hard times, old age, death. About 2,000 everyday lines across six ages are tied to region, family, sex and years, so China reads like China.
- History from the side. 465 real events reach a life as rumours and consequences: the Black Death, the Mongols, the silk caravans, the Partition, the first satellite crawling across the sky. Rarely you pass someone later written about: Socrates arguing in the square, Ibn Battuta writing down how you bake bread.
- Doors. At each fork every door is shown, but some are shut, and it says why: Girls are not taught their letters. You are not free to leave. The elders have already agreed. Inequality, without a lecture.
- Everyday forks. About 150 dilemmas meet a life at 19, 27, 39, 51 and 64: a stranger asks for shelter, the recruiting sergeant comes, a cousin abroad offers work. Outcomes are weighted, not judgements. Or be a witness and let fate choose at every fork.
- Choose the lot, if you like. Before the draw you may ask for an era, a part of the world, or to be born a boy or a girl. Within that the lot keeps the real weights.
- The chest. Each life leaves one thing: a bone needle, a clay tablet recording a debt, a greatcoat button, a push-button phone.
- Great-grandchildren. After a life with children, draw a great-grandchild's lot, born 70–94 years later in the same place. They inherit the surname, the family's means and the same thing. The thing gathers its holders, generation after generation.
- A question for you. At the end a life asks one quiet question about you today, such as This person never saw the sea. When was the sea last in front of your eyes? The answers gather in a notebook.
- Atlas, census, chronicle. Your birthplaces are pinned on an old map with a slider through time. Your lots stand next to the real spread of everyone ever born. The chronicle gathers every real event your lives have met, and the encounters every famous person seen in passing. New lives prefer what you haven't read yet.
Every life is replayed from its seed and your choices, so every book in the archive can be read again in full.
Build
./gradlew testDebugUnitTest assembleDebug
./gradlew -Pdemo assembleDebug # app.lot.demo with thirty lives already lived
./gradlew testDebugUnitTest -Prender --tests '*RenderArt*' # the sack, the things, the map and every screen to app/build/art
python tools/shots.py app/build/art # README screenshots from the renders
The engine is domain/Life.kt, the eras, regions and families are in domain/World.kt. Content is in app/src/main/assets: lines/<era>.tsv, history.tsv and dilemmas*.txt; tools/CONTENT.md is the guide for writing it, python tools/validate.py checks it and python tools/coverage.py <era> shows the thin spots. Everything is drawn in code: the sack and tag in ui/art/Sack.kt, the things in ui/art/ThingArt.kt, the map in ui/art/MapArt.kt. The birth weights follow the Population Reference Bureau's estimate of how many people have ever lived.
Fonts: PT Serif and Marck Script, SIL Open Font License.
