Setting

The game of CCITI Life is set in a near future version of twenty-first century Earth where technology has become advanced enough to create near perfect virtual environments for people to inhabit, with full integration into all aspects of social, financial, and political life. It is inspired by cyberpunk, dystopian, and alternate reality themes and set in a world where nation states have ceded to corporations and the environment has collapsed.

The players assume the role of people who have discovered how to transcend the technological limits of civilization so that they might pass through the dimensional boundaries between the physical world of Earth and the virtual world of CCITI Life giving them the power to directly manipulate the latter. But, as the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility, and each such person who has passed through that boundary also comes to understand that there is some entity behind the CCITI and it is violently intolerant towards transgressors.

The inhabitants of this universe use two broad terms to refer to the physical and virtual worlds: "the World" and "the CCITI", respectively.

The World

Earth, the physical world, prime reality, meatspace. Whatever the local term, when folks speak of "the World" they mean all the people and places that are part of the environment we are born into, things that we can touch and feel without technology. The stuff that was here before, and outside of, CCITI Life.

The World has become a harsher place to exist since the turn of the twenty-first century. Environmental decline has accelerated, wealth disparity has grown, and the ideas of reasoned self-governance have given way to the cruel efficiency of corporate authoritarianism.

Humanity has been forced to huddle closer to its former industrial and commercial centers. Building large arcologies to house the masses in as efficient a manner as possible. Life around and outside these arcologies is sectioned into city zones so as to best conserve and utilize the few usable pieces of exposed surface that still exist.

All hope is not lost though, technological innovation has interceded to battle the ills that trouble humanity. Lifesaving medicines and bio-machines, unlimited energy production and storage, and sustainable food growth are just the top of a long list of upgrades which make daily life not only survivable, but tolerable.

The CCITI

Early in the twenty-first century a technology was invented that changed the internet at a magnitude similar to the level that the internet made on civilization. That invention is named the Continuous Cloud Integrating Transport Interface, or CCITI, known affectionately by its creators as "the city". The CCITI was part hardware, part software, and part raw chaos that combined to form a tool which allowed mankind to unify all data and communication into a singular stream of unified schematized information processing.

The creative innovation produced by nearly all humankind collaborating together through the CCITI reached levels unseen in recorded history. Technological advancements were made that empowered humanity to survive as the Earth's environment became increasingly hostile. But as nature became more hostile to human life, and human behavior changed to meet the new reality of daily existence, people again turned to the CCITI for shelter from the storm.

Devices that were once recognizable as cell phones, virtual reality interfaces, and contact lenses were upgraded to become windows into the CCITI. With nearly unlimited computing and storage power, the possibilities for creating ever richer virtual worlds grew exponentially. The people of Earth had now found a way to protect their mental health in addition to saving their physical health.

In the early days the CCITI was akin to cross between the "wild west" of the mid to late nineteenth century North America and the "dot com boom" of the late twentieth century internet. A place where rules and regulations had not yet gained control of the space; where bravado and reputation were seen as tangible factors that could be traded like gold. Then came CCITI Life, and everything changed.

CCITI Life

CCITI Life was billed as the biggest integrated virtual world social interaction and trading platform ever built, and it delivered. It included virtual reality spaces that could be built, destroyed, changed, owned, bought, and sold. For the first time in the CCITI, people could easily create unique things and experiences which were exchanged and collected with other people. A thriving economy rapidly grew around the interest in this new world. People from all walks of life began devoting more and more time and energy into the upkeep and grooming of their "city life".

Over the last five years, CCITI Life has grown to include nearly half of the Earth's population. The global economy has been refactored to direct the majority of non-essential production towards creating and maintaining the ecosystem around CCITI Life. From device creation and infrastructure management in the World, to the flurry of activity that happens in the CCITI, almost all humans are impacted by it in some way.