Being Mister Eyes
How I Joined the Space Mafia and ran an Imaginary Bookshop
This is a post about one of the best games I’ve ever played.
It was messy, untested, frustrating, occasionally broken, and sometimes made me feel deeply uncomfortable. And it was incredible, and I’ve never seen anything like it.
The game was Over/Under, a promotional tie-in for the TTRPG Mothership. An explanation of the game can be found at the designer’s blog (https://samsorensen.blot.im/mothership-month-2025-wargame-over/under) but in short, this was a thousand-player text-based roleplaying game/wargame, played entirely through the instant-messaging system Discord, over the course of a month. Twenty or so players are “Bosses”, running a wargame across a dystopian space station. Hundreds of other players are “denizens” - the ordinary people living on the station. They can join one of six factions and pay each other pretend money, but otherwise the only thing they can do is talk. They’re basically just in a big chatroom. This has a few effects:
Money is one the only two “systems” most people can engage with, so the game immediately fills up with gambling, ponzi schemes, and fictional businesses. There’s not much to do except hustle, so everyone is hustling.
The other “system” is being in a faction - and people lean into their faction hard. Being in the workers’ union, or the criminal mob, or the evil corporation, or the militarized mercenary police, or choosing to remain unaligned - that’s a strong character choice, one of the only mechanical choices a player can make - so rivalries, alliances and group-identity have an enormous pull over how people interact with the game.
Those factions have some specific mechanics of their own, which shape their internal cultures and personalities. The union can’t do much without a membership vote, so ends up with intense bureaucracy bound up with process and procedure. Membership of the criminal mob is (uniquely) secret to other players - which can lead to the tight familial bonds of people Sharing a Secret, as well as something of a persecution complex as non-mob players try to root out secret mafia members.
Without many mechanical levers to pull, most players have very little to do - so they start roleplaying hard: they fall in and out love, get into fights, put on plays, purchase imaginary goods, create a dense network of in-jokes and memes.
A boardgame-style wargame between the factions is going on above most of the players’ heads - and the constantly moving board-state gives News for the players to bounce off. A faction has been destroyed! A boss has been assassinated! We are on the verge of war! All this means that even if you’re just running a little shop, you’re doing it in a constantly-shifting world in crisis.
The game is realtime, with players from all over the world. For an entire month it never stops.
All these systemic pressures create something amazing: this twenty-four hour metropolis, poisoned by cash and conflict, under the shadow of war. It’s not just people messing about in chatrooms, it’s a place.1
So: what follows is a narrative of what happened to me in the game. I’m not expecting it to be of enormous interest to people who didn’t play it, but most of the blogs I’ve seen about Over/Under are from people who had some sort of significant influence on the wargame. I didn’t. I was just a Weird Guy who was Skulking Around. And I suspect that this game will end up being a significant influence on the future of RPGs, so it’s worth recording as many perspectives on it as possible. So, apologies if the below seems a little self-involved, especially given that the game was such a community effort.
Day one, and the station was huge and noisy and overwhelming. Factions and gambling dens were already beginning to spring up, and I was in awe of the chaos but didn’t really know what to do. That was when Arbuckle showed up: a character who sold horrible vat-grown space meat. As far as I could tell, he was completely outside the wargame. He just had a thread where people would send him in-game money, and he would reply “here’s some meat”, and that was the whole transaction. Totally imaginary meat, outside of any mechanical function. But paid for with the mechanics of the game.
Imaginary shops then seemed to be a way of engaging with the fiction of the place without needing to get to invested in the politics. I briefly considered playing a musician-for-hire, but instead I created a thread called “Mister Eyes’ Antiquarian Bookshop”, and typed in the following:
Outside the shop, the intermittent fizzing of a cheap hologram: a fake storefront projected out into the market - an imaginary wonderland of old maps and luxurious leatherbound hardbacks. The half-forgotten vision of an ancient, warm, and tactile world. The hologram scratches and stutters, revealing the bare metal beneath. Through cracked glass, you catch glimpses of buckets of water-damaged paperbacks, shelves of tattered fliers and posters, stacks of battered datapads. The written ephemera of the station’s past. All history is here. A dream within a Dream.
And Mister Eyes himself is there - a tall, awkward android, stretched mismatched limbs and fingers with too many knuckles, moving carefully between the shelves, lost in his thoughts.
My original idea was that Mister Eyes was deluded, or a fake: a bookshop was an impossibility on a dystopian space station in the far future, . People weren’t buying or reading books any more. But this weird, awkward robot had been compelled by his misfiring programming to create a Bookshop - so he had gathered every piece of worthless ephemera he can - posters and fliers and instruction manuals - hoarded them in a grubby storage unit, and stuck up cheap holograms to disguise the tawdry reality.
That’s not where the character ended up: by the end of the game, the station had multiple bookshops and a library so the whole “bookshops are impossible in this world” thing disappeared quickly. And my image of an awkward misfiring robot was eroded as the game went on. Bit by bit Mister Eyes became more human - a pompous, jealous, violent android who genuinely adored books and was capable of sudden acts of loyalty and generosity.
It was hard to keep the character as a weird fake because - almost immediately - people started coming to the bookshop and buying the imaginary books! Within a few days, I had a stable of regular customers: Union-member and sports star Whitney Flick whose time at the bookshop eventually led to them becoming a librarian; spacecop and religious fanatic Judicar Jedd who would buy heretical pamphlets2; adventurer Orthio who bought maps to dangerous territories and planned to hunt treasure with Mister Eyes; Sleeper Denizen, who didn’t have much cash so would pay Mister Eyes with stories from his life. People asked for recommendations, and I had to come up with a frankly silly number of ideas for imaginary future books: Fazzarati’s “The Worker and the stars: an economic history”, Regulation-Ready recipe sheets from the galleys of corporate mercenary ships, The Silicate Dirges (non-linear poetry generated by a synthetic hivemind out on the Pelican Rim)...
In this game, however much creativity you put out into the world, it was returned to you tenfold. When I sold imaginary books to Whitney Flick, they would return them with new covers, illustrated as MS Paint Images. I went to spend some of my revenues on a new logo for the shop, a character called Garfield4000 (a robot with a Garfield head) produced the below animation. The shop was feeling like a real place.
But I wanted more of an edge. My original conception of a ghostly impossible simulacrum of a bookshop was gone: I’d accidentally produced a thriving small business. Which was nice, but it wasn’t the story I was after. Lots of people in the game were aiming to create something cosy, but I wanted to push against cosiness. If my original idea was a little too abstract, or too high-concept, I could lean into pulp. Which is why, a week into the game, I decided that Mister Eyes was actually an ex-military assassin robot, and I joined the space mafia.
In the beginning of the game, it was difficult to join the Golyonovo il Bratva, the Russian-themed mobsters who ran the station. Unlike most other factions, they didn’t advertise for members. Unlike every other faction, their bosses weren’t public. The word on the street was that you didn’t come to them: they came to you.
They were never going to request that I join - I wasn’t playing the influence games that they were looking for. Instead, I scoured the discord server for mentions of Bratva, to see if anyone was publishing their names. It was a couple of days before I saw it mentioned that Vor Veljko Tanumafili (a big scary vampire man) was a mob boss. So I gave him a call.
Being allowed behind the curtain by a terrifying mob boss was one of the best moments in the game. It was like receiving multiple plot twists at once. A friendly religious beggar robot who relied on the charity of others? Turns out they were actually a mob spy taking a mob salary! Multiple “neutral” information brokers whose lack of information about the Bratva added to their mystique? Turns out they were secretly gangsters! Best of all, it was widely known on the space station that an android called Babel had committed suicide as a political protest - this story was promoted by an activist organization called the Android Rights Alliance. But it turns out this wasn’t true at all! Babel had been killed in a mob hit for being an informant, and the Android Rights Alliance was a mob front organization!
Joining Bratva did reveal some of the weird tensions between the roleplaying game I was playing and the wargame the bosses were playing. The Bratva bosses were doing fantastically well, mostly through soft power and targeted assassinations. It became clear that our military units weren’t strong enough to win a shooting war, so the bosses did everything they could to avoid it - which meant, for the most part putting on a friendly face and pushing for peace.
But! I’d joined the mob to do gangster things and be ostentatiously evil. As a player, I was happy that My Team was doing well, and appreciative of the immense amount of work that our bosses were putting in. But in character, what I saw was the Bratva refusing to respond to aggression, folding to external demands, promoting backroom functionaries, and asking the rank and file to behave nicely in public. The bosses were trying to avoid giving anyone else a Casus Belli while they took control of the map. But if you wanted to swoop around causing trouble, mob leadership was holding you back. I appreciated the strategy, but in character as Mister Eyes, this prudence looked like weakness. We were the bad guys! Why not act like it!
I could never quite work out where my character stood in the Bratva. I enjoyed lurking on the relevant channels, and there were so many vivid distinct personalities in there (if I ever GM a game with space gangsters, Stevie Hexagons, Raluca Sitko, Arka, Dookie, Gorilla One and Sestra Juniper will definitely show up as NPCs), but it felt tricky to join in. As a genre archetype, Mister Eyes wasn’t a mobster - he was a nasty jealous robot who liked books. So my roleplaying in the Bratva channels was pretty minimal. I felt like I was awkwardly standing at the edge of the party, not sure how to react.
This wasn’t an uncommon feeling in Over/Under: at one point I really did attend an in-game party3, and I ended up feeling the same “I don’t know anyone here” awkwardness that I’ve felt at a hundred real-life parties. Sometimes this on-the-edge-of-things feeling was part of the structure of the game: the discord contained a mixture of public and private threads - no one could see everything. Sometimes it was due to timezone: most players were American, and the most divisive and discourse-generating incident in the game4 happened while I was asleep. And sometimes it was due to roleplaying styles - a lot of interesting plots were happening in threads where people were having cosy and/or intense romance scenes. Nothing wrong with that, of course, and loads of these romances were dramatic and well-played - but it’s not a style of play I enjoy participating in, so I’d often shuffle out of threads when the romances were running, or stop visiting threads where romance became the dominant theme.
This sense of being on the edge of a cool party did give me more of an idea of who Mister Eyes was: pompous and showy, but a loner. And it did lead to one of my favourite bits of roleplaying.
It happened in the O2 cafe, one of the most interesting locations in the game. The O2 cafe was run by a woman called mO2, who stayed neutral in the faction war, and set up a charity and community centre instead. There were some great scenes in the early game where the community centre had to fight to stay independent of the war, and not be co-opted or corrupted by the great powers. And mO2’s player was an absolute master of looping stories and characters together - mO2 rented books from Mister Eyes’ shop, and then referred to those books in other plotlines; she would always namedrop other characters and create links between them. These connections generated a dense sense of community.
Over time, the O2 cafe started to attract particular playstyle - there was a blanket fort, most of the regulars were hugging and affirming and comforting and falling in love with each other. There was still drama there: it was standing in contrast to the darkness of the rest of the game. But that level of cosiness and warmth wasn’t something that I (as a player, and as a character) wanted to interact with. I started to keep my distance. But that distance started to give a clear sense of who Mister Eyes was. When he went to help clean the cafe after an attack, he was humbling himself and pushing past an awkwardness because of an ideal he believed in. And one of my favourite bits of roleplaying was a late-game conversation with mO2, watching the stars through the cafe porthole, trying to articulate Mister Eyes’s sense of distance from the warmth and community of the cafe. An out-of-character friction producing clarity in character.
Game events kept shaping the way I understood my character. When I joined, Bratva membership was extremely secretive, but I wasn’t very interested in cloak and dagger: I was one of the first Bratva members to go out on public channels telling people I was Bratva.5 If Mister Eyes was the sort of person to do that, what sort of person was he? I made him flashier, more dandyish, wearing long black cloaks decorated with gangster regalia. He became more pompous, more mockable, more pantomimish, less self aware. But it also gave him a flair for the dramatic. When regular customer and book-jacket-designer Whitney Flick asked me if I could get them into the mob, I ran a scene where I arrived looming out of the fog, making sinister proclamations and speechifying about how scary the bosses were, before bringing one of them into the conversation. All enormously fun.
One of the most consequential ways that the Bratva shaped Mister Eyes’ character was when the Bratva bosses commissioned a character portrait for me. There was a character on the server, Eustace, who was played by Kyle Ferrin. Ferrin is a well-known name in tabletop game circles: he did all the (fantastic) art for the boardgames Root and Arcs, and he was taking commissions for character portraits for in-game money. It was a ludicrously good deal, so you had to be very quick to get a portrait - whenever he opened commissioning slots, all the slots would be taken within ten seconds.
Of course, there was a way of getting around this. You could skip the queue by paying Eustace a silly amount of in-game money. Which is what the Bratva bosses did: getting ten of us portraits as a reward for long-term service to the mob.
The portrait was amazing. I’d sent through a description of Mister Eyes, but even though the portrait exactly fitted this description, it looked very different from the Mister Eyes in my head. I’d imagined Mister Eyes as full-robot: basically like General Grievous from Star Wars, except with the mannerisms of a spooky professor from an Edwardian ghost story. The character portrait I received was clearly an android, but a much more human one, with scruffy hair and a t-shirt under his long black coat. The attitude I’d described was all there, but you could see his ex-military side, and there was more of a sense of threat. The portrait didn’t contradict anything I’d described in the game, but Mister Eyes had more of an edge now. The Mister Eyes at the end of the game (battle-weary, riding a slim black motorbike, occasionally swearing) would not have emerged without this portrait.
Weirdly, having this portrait made it so much easier to roleplay. It wasn’t me saying this stuff any more! It was this guy with an extremely specific face! I stopped having to think so hard about what I was saying in roleplaying scenes. It wasn’t me speaking, it was Mister Eyes!
And this was helpful: as the game went on more and more Story was happening. For a start, a second bookshop opened on the station. This was a lesbian bookshop, run by a character named Diesel, which specialized in pulp. My shop was mysterious and a little sinister, but Diesel’s was a warm community space. A big contrast! I decided to set up a rivalry.
After checking that Diesel’s player was happy with this idea, I skulked around being spooky and threatening in Diesel’s general direction. I tried to rope Diesel into a mafia protection racket. I sent spy cameras to watch her shop. I made aggressive noises about how if she found any strange or rare books, Mister Eyes should be the one to get them. Diesel’s girlfriend Harlicaux showed up and made an angry scene at Mister Eyes’ shop, and warned Mister Eyes to stay away from Diesel6. Throughout this, Diesel responded to Mister Eyes’ threats with a sort of steely warmth: she was frightened of him, but she never gave an inch. It was great. We had somehow developed a good-vs-evil bookshop rivalry.
Having said that, I did struggle to come up with a motivation for Mister Eyes’ actions in this rivalry. He was performing the structural role of being the bad guy in someone else’s story - which was fun, but it did make it hard to aim for a conclusion. In the end I decided he was consumed by envy. No one else should be running the book trade on the dream. He wanted control, and he felt like he was losing that control.
Soon after the rivalry with Diesel was established, I gained an assistant. A character called The Cartographer, who joined the game late, dropped off a CV at Mister Eyes’ shop. I gave him a sinister job interview, asked if he was willing to murder people for me (he gave a noncommittal answer) and handle Extremely Dangerous Books (he was much more fine with this). I hired him, gave him a week’s salary in advance, and let him stay in the room above the shop.
This was an excellent decision. For a start, the Cartographer’s player is an extremely talented artist, and he drew a wonderful illustration of the bookshop. Secondly, the shop suddenly felt much more real and alive. My character could be elsewhere on the space station, and there would still be scenes at the shop where the cartographer would nervously try to sell books in my absence, despite the fact that Mister Eyes hadn’t given any advice about where the stock was stored or how it was priced. I wish we’d had more time as a double act: the story of a nervous eccentric, new in town, who ends up working for a sinister mafia bookseller with occult secrets was a lot of fun. And the Cartographer played it brilliantly - his character was just as odd as Mister Eyes, but in a completely different set of ways.
While all of this was going on, I was watching a story playing out in the O2 kitchen. Two characters, Anser and Hattie, had discovered a mysterious book with fungal mind-control powers. It seemed to contain the instructions an eldritch ritual that would rip reality apart. I didn’t see the end of the story - the story eventually disappeared into private threads - but I decided Mister Eyes would want to own that book.
The next time Mister Eyes encountered Hattie (who was a witch - it was unclear if she used actual magic or just Sufficiently Advanced Technology), he asked her about the book. She agreed to let him have it, on the condition that it was kept caged up out of sight, that it wasn’t read, and that she was allowed to watch it on security cameras. Terms were agreed, and Mister Eyes placed the book in a high tech security room at the back of his shop.
We were now on the road that would lead to Mister Eyes’ death.
Mister Eyes started experimenting with the book. It went wrong, of course: he was badly wounded7 and unbeknownst to him, the eldritch being was now burrowing into his mind. An unrelated station-wide event involving a fight with a killer robot army weakened him further. He was now exhausted and broken and possessed and ill. Taking advantage of his weakness, the mind-control parasite preyed on Mister Eyes’ worst instincts. It would use Mister Eyes’ jealousy of Diesel to kickstart the aforementioned eldritch ritual.
A sick and broken Mister Eyes took the book out of his shop and unleashed it on Diesel in the (brand new) space station library. She became possessed, floated in the air, and started opening the portal. The mind parasite compelled Mister Eyes to find new victims to the portal: their sacrifice would complete the ritual. The possessed Mister Eyes tricked several of the O2 Cafe regulars to the library, but they (alongside Hattie, who saw what had happened through the security cameras) defeated Mister Eyes, ended the ritual, and saved Diesel.
Hattie took the weakened body of Mister Eyes back to her home, and killed him.
I hadn’t necessarily planned for Mister Eyes to die before the end of the game - I’d discussed this with Hattie’s player, and originally he was just going to be imprisoned. But timezone differences meant that running a scene with Mister Eyes in captivity would have been difficult, and the more I thought about it, the more I wondered what he could even do at this stage. His crazed impulsive actions had ruined his life. There wasn’t any story left. It was best to let him go.
The next morning I had look at the O2 kitchen threads to see what the regulars were saying about the events of the previous night. It wasn’t what I expected. The general vibe of the conversations was: “yes, we defeated Mister Eyes, and saved the station, but this is much less important than our relationship drama”. Mister Eyes had gone out like a monster-of-the-week villain in a buffy episode. It was the perfect fate for him.
So: I placed the below message in my shop.
Mister Eyes is Dead
You don’t know how you know that, but you do. Something about the way the steam curls around the holograms, the way the light strains and blurs against the dark
Mister Eyes is dead
All those silent books lie heavy. All those backrooms filled with impossible darkness lie in wait
Mister Eyes is dead
There was still a few days left of the game left. I announced that Mister Eyes left the shop to The Cartographer. And I considered running a surprise resurrection. But the way that other players responded persuaded me not to do that. Multiple characters (The Cartographer, Orthio, Whitney Flick) left final tributes to Mister Eyes in the shop. Diesel and Hattie both had short epilogue scenes. The Cartographer even modified his original picture to show the new hologram he had put up in honour of his fallen employer. Seeing the world move on without him was... weirdly moving?
It was particularly moving to see how other people viewed the character. For me, Mister Eyes was a pantomime villain - a spooky gangster driven by jealousy. But it was clear other characters saw other sides of him - that he wasn’t just one thing, or just the version of him that I had written. He may have been a Bad Person, but there were also ways he made the space station a better place.
So instead of a resurrection, I decided to haunt the space station as a digital ghost. Mister Eyes appeared on screens in the O2 kitchen. He materialized briefly at a party at Diesel’s shop. His face appeared in the steam at Bratva headquarters. I played some violin into my phone, put an echo effect on it, and posted it as a strange mournful melody coming from the inside of the bookshop. It felt a suitably atmospheric end to his story.
In any case - the whole month was an extraordinary, intense experience. I’d do it again, but probably not for a while. I can imagine a slicker, more careful, more thoroughly designed version of this game, but in the end, this wild ocean of chaos is probably impossible to replicate: a wild mashup of people and mechanics that spilled out a torrent of story. Well done to the literally hundreds of people involved.
An RPG theory-nerd footnote here: Sam Sorensen, who designed and ran Over/Under is an interesting polemicist and thinker about games: a crude summary of his position is that mechanics and systems are over-emphasized when discussing TTRPGs: RPG rules are ways of abstracting and clarifying a simulated world, and the real motor of these sort of games is concrete worldbuilding intertwined with player agency. Assuming I’m understanding Sorensen’s arguments correctly, I reckon he’s wrong. My list of effects is, in part, a rebuttal to his position - it is the mechanics of Over/Under which had the most influence in shaping the sort of play that flourished in the game.
Rory, Judicar Jedd’s player, is the only person from Over/Under who I know in real life. We’re in a folk band together
The grand reopening of the Ember.
The “choke incident”, where the station was invaded by an alien virus. This turned out to be purely roleplay, not a mechanical threat. For complicated reasons, this upset some people, and made others very excited.
I didn’t invent the Chain emoji as a Bratva symbol (that was Arka), but I think I was the first person to put it in my username, and the first person to suggest that other public Bratva stick it in their usernames too, so we knew who we could talk to without breaking anyone’s cover. By the end of the game, most active Bratva members wore the chains, solidifying the chain emoji as the Bratva symbol. Assuming I’m remembering this right, it’s probably the single biggest influence I had over the world of the game, and I’m quite proud of it.
This actually turned out to be cover for a mafia discussion - Diesel’s girlfriend wasn’t even that angry about the rivalry. But it certainly felt like she was when she first entered the shop.
Taking me out of action for a day and off the game servers for 24 hours, which conveniently coincided with my wife’s birthday.