Jamverse Jam
Announcing Protocolized’s fourth contest: we’re looking for artists and writers to extend and connect interoperable worlds
You’re a storyteller, a poet, a comic artist. Suddenly, you find yourself dropped into a near-future world of cities with strange AR protocols, a train that travels halfway around the globe on a single continuous rail line, murderously smart infrastructure, and layers of mythic folklore that lurk under bridges. You’re in the Jamverse, an extended fictional universe comprising four intersecting story cycles on Protocolized.
The Jamverse gets its name from Frederik Pohl’s famous edict that “a good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.”
This contest, designed by the four founding contributors of the Jamverse – Sachin, Randy Lubin, Thing Party, and Spencer Nitkey - Writer, between them the authors of a host of Protocolized stories – invites you to help build out the extended Jamverse. Let’s take it to the next level!
We’re looking for artists and writers to create small in-universe artifacts that build, extend, and connect the Jamverse. We want thought-provoking, traffic-jammy pieces that explore the theme of Stigmergy. Contest rules, the current Jamverse stories, and a bunch of materials to help you get started are available on the Jamverse website.
You can submit up to three worldbuilding artifacts (poems, posters, comics, encyclopedia entries, and more – see some fun samples here and here) for a chance to win a $1,000 grand prize, with at least 10 other artifacts receiving $200 prizes.
We’re building something new, collaborative, and exciting, and this is your chance to get involved and potentially win one of our contest prizes.
How to Enter
Read the entirety of these contest rules and check out the Jamverse website, which will host the winning stories and artifacts. (Further details in the following sections of this post.)
Create up to three thought-provoking fictional artifacts that can live within the Jamverse. Example artifacts might be:
Comic panels
Job postings
Poems
Forum threads
Historic documents
Encyclopedia entries
Anything you can think up!
Submit your artifacts via this form by July 31.
The Jamverse Worlds
There are currently four interconnected sub-worlds in the Jamverse.
Each of the primary authors of these sub-worlds has put together a “toy box” specifically for this competition. Contestants are encouraged to explore these toy boxes, find a character, setting, technology, or thematic concern from at least one toy box and build an artifact around, towards, or with it.
The Stockton Chronicles: Set in near-future Northern California, where automation and other innovation causes massive upheaval to people’s careers, communities, and culture.
Legends and Ledgers: Set in a timeless, folkloric realm of rugged logging camps, isolated island states, wandering shows, and woods with long memories, Legends and Ledgers is a linked collection that reimagines American tall tales in a parallel America, one town and one folk monster at a time.
UET-Trainverse: A political thriller universe set on a train that travels from Lisbon to Laos, through eastern Europe, Siberia, much of China and south east Asia. The train is a moving special economic zone that has to balance its priorities with various legal jurisdictions.
Zoothesia: In a city with widespread AR adoption, a predictive algorithm colloquially referred to as the “Zoo” shapes every citizen’s sight based on a simple rule with wild consequences: Perception Must Preserve.
Stigmergy
Stigmergy has emerged at the Protocol Institute as a deeply generative coordination mechanism. Stigmergy is a mechanism of indirect coordination where agents communicate and collaborate by modifying their environment. Across robotics, business, formal theory, fiction, biology, AI, and more, stigmergy is everywhere:
How do ants who never communicate directly with one another all know to travel to a fresh apple slice that a single scout found? When that scout ant returns to the colony, they leave a pheromone trail along the way. Other ants, who have never met or communicated with that scout, are stimulated by those pheromones to follow that trail. The more ants that follow the trail and return with food, the stronger the phenomenal trail becomes, creating a self-reinforcing path.
How do termites build structures that can be up to 40 meters tall without any architects, language, or planners? When one termite processes mud, their saliva leaves “cement” pheromones in their deposits. When another worker senses this chemical mark, it triggers them to layer more mud atop that spot. The structure becomes its own blueprint.
How have 16 million Wikipedians created more than seven million sourced articles without any centralized editor? When a user fixes a typo, adds a citation, or alters a section, they leave a digital trace, a changelog, which stimulates the next user to expand, refine, or correct their work.
How can a mindless automaton with no map, no memory, and no sense of where it has been explore every corner of a complex maze? In 1978, Manuel Blum and Dexter Kozen showed that all an automaton would need is two pebbles. Walking a maze’s boundary, the automaton drops one pebble on a corner and keeps moving. To understand how far it has traveled, it drops a second pebble and walks back to the first, counting its steps. In doing so, the maze environment itself becomes a stigmergetic memory substrate that the automaton can use to explore the entire maze.
All of these are examples of stigmergy.
The Jamverse, a shared near-science fiction universe, is being built stigmergetically. For our first contest call, we’re welcoming artifacts that explore or incorporate some aspect of stigmergy.
Traffic Jams
Traffic jams are the complicated effects that novel technologies, structures, and protocols produce. They aren’t exceptions to technological or protocological structures, but emergent features of those structures. Something important about traffic jams is that they exist even when cars and roads work perfectly.
We want artifacts that reveal a surprising jam, an “ah-ha!”, rather than simply explicate something already existing in the sub-world. What strange rules, consequences, failures, and successes do you see emerging from the interstices between and within the Jamverse sub-worlds? This will be a central judging consideration.
Contest Details + Logistics
Create up to three thought-provoking fictional artifacts that can live within the Jamverse.
Length <1000 words (200–700 is probably the sweet spot), or visual equivalent (comic panel, advertisement, etc.) We ask that your artifacts include all of the following:
At least one element taken from one of the sub-world stories. Follow the links for summaries, a toybox of elements curated by each universe’s author, and links out to the full stories.
A surprising “traffic jam.”
A relation to our theme: Stigmergy.
Submit your artifact as a public Google doc, including:
The artifact.
A one-paragraph explanation of why you chose to make what you did, including which worlds/toy box components you’ve used, and a simple explanation of how your piece relates to stigmergy and explores a traffic jam.
If using AI, documentation of your protocol/recipe explaining how you used AI/LLM assistance.
Multiple submissions: You may submit up to three artifacts.
Note: Multiple submissions from the same creator can win multiple prizes.
Prizes:
One artifact will receive a grand prize of $1,000, including publication on the Jamverse website.
At least 10 additional artifact submissions will receive $200 and be published on the Jamverse website as part of the growing universe.
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