outlive the popes

Outlive is a game that explores slow experiences, power and data. You play by living. It is a love song to open data sets and Wikipedia.

There are an ad hoc and a long experience of the game. In the ad hoc game, you can check your rating at any time at outlive.it. In the long and slow experience, you can order a notification to inform you when your rank changes. It is the slow experience we are most interested in: will it feel different as time goes by? The game is also an anti-version for all the digital experiences trying to hog most of our attention. You can help by anonymously answering a few questions.

Why popes?

We chose papacy because it is the only occupation that has a publicly available data set stretching back over 2000 years. Popes also have the best outfits. We are also considering adding other rulers and historical figures or maybe even fictional characters. The idea for the game came when reading a biography of Madame de Pompadour, an accomplished woman of her time, who died at the age of 42.

Is this meant to be disrespectful?

No. The game stems from an interest in history and occasional experiences that could bridge our present days to past events. It is also an investigation of power and the range of feelings outliving figures of authority may evoke.

The currently living popes are excluded from being game bosses. We also exercised utmost restraint to not include cheap jokes like "GREAT ENEMY FELLED" in the game.

Isn't competing with age at death in bad taste? Isn't old age for privileged people only?

Maybe. No. Yes. But age is also something all humans have in common, something that ties us to history and the lives of others. Comparison is not really important, and in a lot of ways it can be very harmful, but it could provide perspective. So we thought, why not? However, we are aware that the game is suggesting that living long is a norm to pursue and this might be an inappropriate message. We suggest that everyone should try to live full lives when they can with as small a carbon footprint as possible.

How do we deal with Popes with uncertain birth and death dates?

The statisticians collecting data in the early years of the pappacy were not overly exact. They probably had better things to do, so some pope birth/death dates are vague - to say the least. We have applied following treatment to include them in the game:

1. Vague years
We have calculated a Harmonic mean because it sounds appropriate and provides the most inclusive playing experience. (It is the least of the Pythagorean means.) E.g. Pope #1 St Peter died 62-67 years old. The Harmonic mean is 64.4 so you outlive St Peter in the age of 64 years and 5 months.

2. Arguable months
Exact days are just luck in the first millennia. We round up the months to beginning or end of month. For the popes with only year of birth and death, we surmise they were born on the 1st day of the year and died on the last day of the year.

3. Unknown dates
Additional rules we added for popes of unknown ages:

Who is behind the game?

The game was created by Laura and Matias.

Should you have any questions use the feedback form.

Other Credits

Site template is Epilogue from HTMLTEMPLATED.

Pope images are old public domain art and acquired through Wikipedia. Pope biography extracts are also from Wikipedia. "No image" is pope icon created by Freepik from Flaticon.

Typefaces are Dosis and Source Sans Pro, from Google Fonts.

Other images from Unsplash (View individual image credits)

Other icons are Bootstrap Icons.