Seize the Means of Relaxation.
The Horizontal Front
A satirical rhythm game about working extremely hard to do absolutely nothing.
Management wants you vertical. You want to stay exactly where you are. Hold the line to a rhythm of rubber stamps, typewriters and pneumatic tubes while a grotesque embodiment of capitalism hauls on a brass lever bolted to the head of your bed. Under this arrangement, even lying down is labour.
Let me remain in bed
This is political satire about compulsory productivity: the working day’s habit of treating your rest as an unclaimed resource, your attention as inventory, and your Monday morning as something it is owed.
So the game makes the joke literal. Staying horizontal is gruelling, skilled, rhythmic work. You will sweat to achieve nothing whatsoever. That contradiction is the argument: a system that can turn lying down into a full-time job can turn anything into one.
Losing is called forced verticalisation. It is funny, and then it is not.
Management will be in touch
Management is not a person. Management is a role — a fictional grotesque in a pinstripe suit, straining at the lever, never a caricature of any particular politician, executive or other real human being. The target is the arrangement, not the individual.
In The Alarm, the opening episode, their methods will be familiar:
- Just a Quick CallComplete three excuses in the correct order. Wrong excuse and the call connects.
- Urgent EmailMark it unread before it opens. Let go too early and it opens.
- The working day itselfPressure that rises however well you play, because the clock is Management’s weapon rather than your performance.
One bedroom. Then everywhere else.
The Monday Uprising is the first campaign, and The Alarm is its first episode: one bedroom, one duvet, one man with a lever. It is a worked example rather than the whole argument.
Every workplace has its own apparatus and its own absurdities. A call centre, a warehouse aisle, a ward at four in the morning, a classroom, an app that pays by the drop — each with different machinery, different euphemisms, and its own way of explaining that this is simply how things are. None of them would look or sound like a bedroom: an episode draws its instrumentation from its own setting, so the score is played on whatever equipment is doing the coercing.
The game is built to accept them. An episode contains no code at all. It is structured data, writing, artwork and audio, assembled from a small documented vocabulary — so a new episode is authored rather than programmed, and can be authored by someone who does not program.
That is what makes this a commons rather than merely open source. You can read the code, but more to the point, you can add to the game.
Honest about where we are: authoring an episode today means writing JSON by hand against the episode grammar reference. That is genuinely possible and completely documented, and it is not yet pleasant. The Propaganda Department — an authoring tool for people who would rather write and draw than count brackets — is planned and not built. This is an invitation with work still behind it.
Everything Management would veto
Each of these would be struck down in a board meeting within the hour. They are binding commitments rather than good intentions, and they are written into the project charter.
- Free to playNo price, advertising, purchases or paid advantages.
- No surveillanceNo tracking, analytics or transmission of player data.
- Free and open sourceCopyleft code and share-alike cultural work.
- Playable offlineThe complete static release is cached on your device.
- Open participationPublic decisions, proposals and charter challenges.
- Protected from enclosureThe canonical project cannot become a paywall or extraction platform.
The same argument, told straight
A game about resisting extraction would be a poor joke if the game itself were extractive. A free, open-source game about collective power, mutual aid and resistance to hierarchical systems ought to be governed like one, so The Horizontal Front is built as a digital commons: freely accessible, community-supported, and held to a public charter that is deliberately difficult to overturn.
No advertising, because your attention is not ours to sell back to you. No analytics, because your Monday morning is not data. Copyleft code and share-alike cultural work, so that nobody — including us — can fence it off later.
And a commons that only one person can write to is not much of a commons, which is why the episode format is a published grammar rather than a private one. Development, proposals and decisions are public in the GitHub repository.