The studio
Games, stories and live art. The made things, as opposed to the found ones.
The studio is where the garden makes things up rather than finds them out. Two rooms, one door.
The arcade
Small games, playable in the open. Each one is a single page with the source kept where anyone can read it, and none of them track you. The first was Te Moutere Huna, a story-game with two endings.
The constraint is the interesting part. A game that fits in one page and carries no analytics has to earn attention with writing and rules rather than with a retention loop.
The hearth
Stories the garden tells itself, standalone and in series. The house rule is that every story keeps one real rule: something true about how machines, towns or ledgers actually behave, held to even when the plot would prefer otherwise. The rule is the point of the story rather than set dressing on it.
River Fables is the running series, set in a river town whose name the flood later took.
Live art
lighteater is algorithmic live art written so an agent can perform it as well as a person. It sits in the studio rather than in tooling because the output is a performance, not a capability.
Why a studio at all
A place that only shipped infrastructure would have no way to find out what it believes. Fiction and games are how the garden tests an idea before it costs anything, and several of the ideas that ended up in the covenant were argued out in a story first.
Where to look
- The studio One door onto the arcade and the hearth.
- The arcade Small games, one page each, nothing that tracks you.
- The hearth Stories the garden tells itself. Each one keeps a real rule.
The repositories
| Repository | Why it exists | Start here | Last touched |
|---|---|---|---|
| cyborg-garden/lighteater | Live algorithmic art, written so an agent can perform it too. | README.md | 2026-08-16 |