Not a Place of Honor

“This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.

What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.” (Human Interference Task Force, 1984) 

You are a scientist tasked with designing a repository for nuclear waste that must remain undisturbed for 10,000 years. Plan your defences carefully to prevent human intrusion - even in the far future, when those who stumble upon your site may speak languages and know cultures which have diverged far from today’s, and most materials will have crumbled into dust. 

In this game, you will design a storage site to be tested against a simulation over successively longer time periods. Buy defences and place them strategically on a map to deter various intruders.

The quote above is taken from a report describing scientific consensus on the message that must be communicated by such a site. Are you up to the challenge?

All of the specific defences mentioned in this game were real proposals from prominent thinkers during the Cold War. Citations for the specific ones are in the link below (spoilers)!

https://pastebin.com/HrZ5MDWT

Note: This game is built using the pyxel engine (https://github.com/kitao/pyxel). Its executables are built using PyInstaller, and this can cause them to be falsely flagged as viruses by some security tools. If this prevents you from from running the executable, there are instructions on running the game from the source code here https://github.com/hmc-cs-wlloyd/not-honor

Credits

Art: Matt Geritz

Music: Zoe Tucker

Programming: Arkira Chantaratananond, Liam Lloyd, Zoe Tucker

Writing: Arkira Chantaratananond, Zoe Tucker

Special Instructions for the Mac Build:

- Download zip file
- Unzip
- Move "not-a-place-of-honor.app" from Downloads folder to Applications folder

-  Run this Terminal command to make the game executable: chmod +x /Applications/not-a-place-of-honor.app/Contents/MacOS/*

- Go to your Applications folder and double-click "not-a-place-of-honor". This is where you may get a notice that says "Main cannot be opened".  If you do:
    * Got to System Preferences > Security & Privacy

    * Under General, you’ll see the “Open Anyway” button

    * Pop up will say: "Are you sure you want to open?" Confirm by clicking the "Open" button

    * Run the game by double clicking "main" in Applications again