The 1st of June the “Naked on Pluto” residency at NIMk, BALTAN Laboratories and Piksel started!

Naked on Pluto is a Massively Multiplayer Text Based Sandbox Adventure Game on Facebook. When you enter the game, you find yourself on Pluto, in a city under the rule of Elastic Versailles revision 14 (EVr14), an Artificial Intelligence functioning as an entertainment colony. It is the Las Vegas of the Solar System, a true paradise for consumers and corporations alike.

Versailles is a capital of convenience, a non stop 24hr zone of endless pleasure, provided by Pluto’s huge entertainment corporations. Amuse yourself and your friends for hours on end collecting meaningless tokens, talking to our bland robots (genetically engineered to be enjoyed by the average plutonian for exactly 4.3 days, and programmed to mention their sponsors name four out of every five sentences), or you could always just relax and take in the staggering conformity of your new home.

Take absolutely no notice of the areas you aren’t allowed to go into, even if it were possible to break out of the control zone around the Palace, why would you possibly want to – or indeed why change the core structures of this world when they have been so excellently taylored to fit your every desire?

The game explores the limits and nature of social networks from within, slowly pushing the boundaries of what is tolerated by the companies that own them, carefully documenting this process as we go. Story and play are combined with an investigation on how exposed we are on social networks, and how our data are being used.

The project will be developed during a shared residency at NIMk, BALTAN Laboraties and Piksel, between June and November 2010, by Dave Griffiths, Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk. The project is licensed Copyleft. The research and development process will be documented and can be followed on http://pluto.kuri.mu and the game can be played on http://naked-on-pluto.net (teaser only a.t.m.).