You have just taken power in Averno. You have twenty-four seasons.
Every season you will be offered three ways to act. The loud ones work. They work immediately, they work almost every time, and they are almost always the right move this season.
You will be the demagogue. That is the point. This game is rigged the way the argument says the world is rigged — so the only way to find out whether the argument is any good is to lose to it once.
Ten minutes. Free, no signup, nothing you do here is stored or sent anywhere. Averno is invented; so is everyone in it. There are no real people, parties, countries or events in this game, and it takes no political side — its subject is the machinery, which every side has used.
Capture was the correct move almost every season, and it was correct because attention is taken — it arrives fast, it answers to whoever is loudest, and it decays the moment you stop. Authority is different in kind. It is granted, it accrues slowly, and it can only be granted through something: a court, a council, a count, a press. That is why dismantling those things felt free and turned out not to be.
The argument is older than the feed. Max Weber separated Macht — getting your way over resistance — from Herrschaft, the standing that makes commands obeyed as legitimate, and spent his career on the conversion problem between them. Hannah Arendt put it flatly: violence appears where power is in jeopardy, and it can destroy power but is utterly incapable of creating it. The wager of this game is that the attention age has made the conversion much harder, and made the substitute much more convincing.
Nothing here is about any living person. It could not be: the whole claim is structural, which means it applies to anyone who has ever needed a room to agree with them — and to you, about eight seasons in.
If you want to run this with a class or a seminar: one email with the mapping from each mechanic to the concept it encodes, a set of discussion questions, the citation, and explicit permission to use it. After that: new tests and teaching material as they go up, and sometimes something I am selling. No schedule and no newsletter — usually one email a month or less, occasionally a short run when something launches, then quiet again. Leave in one click.
Averno, its offices and everyone in it are invented. The game depicts no real person, party, country or event and takes no political position. A self-reflection and teaching tool based on Conferral Theory — not a model, forecast, or assessment of any actual government.