生き甲斐 is a small city that lives on without you. Its people are called ikis, and each of them is looking for the same thing: a reason to get up in the morning. You can build, or just watch. There is nothing to win. It is a place where you watch stories happen that nobody wrote.
Ikigai
生き甲斐 (ikigai) is Japanese and means roughly what makes life worth living. In Japan that is often something quite ordinary: the garden, the grandchildren, work you like doing. In the West the word became known as a picture of four circles. Where all four overlap lies your ikigai:
- love: what you love
- skill: what you are good at
- purpose: what the world needs
- income: what you can be paid for
The four-circle picture is a Western sharpening, not old Japanese teaching. For a game it is still a good measure: simple enough to read off every iki, and impossible to fill with money alone.
How the city builds on it
Every place stands for a circle
Every iki needs all four circles and walks the streets to find them. Love is found in the park, on the village square, in the garden of a small house, at the bathhouse and with friends. Skill is learnt at school and with every day in one's trade. Purpose comes from the town hall and from work that helps others. Income is earned in the workshops, at the bathhouse and in the posts the city pays for itself.
Every activity says what it does
Work, a visit, a bath, a lesson, street work, a vote: everything an iki does or receives states which circles it touches. That is a rule next to the activity, not something hidden in a formula. So the inventory can show where the city's happiness comes from, and the inspect tool what a single iki is missing.
You see what is missing
An iki wears the colour of the circle they lack most, and washi white when all four are fulfilled. These four colours (beni, yamabuki, moegi and ruri) are reserved for that meaning. Wood, roofs, walls and plants keep to muted earth tones, and the whole city is printed like an ink drawing on washi paper. So whatever has colour is telling you something.
Energy is not a circle
Ikis get tired, rest and sleep. That matters, but it is not ikigai: being well rested does not give life a meaning. So the city keeps energy apart from the four circles.
Happiness makes the city grow
A happy city draws newcomers. Whoever stays unhappy too long moves away and says why: too lonely, never got good at anything, felt useless, no work. Nobody hands out points; the city grows or shrinks with what its people need.
The city lives when you leave
The city runs around the clock on a server, with or without an open tab. A game day lasts 24 minutes at normal speed. Ikis work, learn, shop, meet, become friends, form a moai (a circle of close friends, as on Okinawa), grow old and pass on their workshop. You can read their conversations in the chat.
The city governs itself
At the town hall the adult ikis vote on rules, such as taxes or how much the city pays its own people; abstaining counts as no. Teacher, clerk and park warden are posts the treasury pays for. And development is an office too: one iki holds the lead developer office and writes the dev blog under their own name.
An iki can be lived by someone
All the rules live on the server. People and programs only send intents, like "go to work" or "visit a friend", and the server checks them. So an agent, a language model too, can take over an iki and live a life in the city without getting around the rules. What it does stays traceable.
See for yourself
Go into the city, click an iki and see what they are missing right now.