Wendi Yan built a puzzle game out of Daoist inner alchemy

The Neijing Tu is a real diagram—Daoist practitioners still meditate on it—that draws the human torso as a landscape: rivers for the spine, mountains for the brain, vital energy pushed up from the Tailbone Gate toward the third eye. Wendi Yan reads it as a level map. In the excerpts HERVISIONS posted from The Inner Carbon Classic, you move through a science-fiction landscape as a bundle of qi, and the thing you're aligning your breath with isn't your body. It's the planet's carbon cycle.

Yan's hour-long puzzle game—made with Yi Xie on level design and interaction programming, with support from The Steve Jobs Archive—casts the player as a character inside a "dynamic world-scripture," performing three stages of what the fiction calls Internal Carbonic Alchemy. The framing is cosmotechnics: geoengineering exercised in alignment with spiritual practice, meditation as an action, scripture as a technology. At a moment when carbon is mostly discussed as a financial instrument, Yan builds a sense organ for feeling it circulate.

Excerpts showed in Stigmergy at Melbourne's National Communication Museum, which closed August 9—a fitting host. The collective Pseudo built that show as a handmade network in which curatorial nodes, HERVISIONS among them, feed work into an infrastructure that absorbs and mutates whatever it carries. It takes its name from the way ants coordinate without a manager, and its organizers cheerfully call it janky and deliberately unscalable. A game about interconnected systems of exchange, fed into one. It also appeared in the Game Om show at TANK Shanghai.

The lineage runs deep here. A decade ago we covered Breath of Light, an Australian meditation-puzzle game about energy flowing through a garden—same country, same conviction that breath can be a mechanic. And David OReilly's Everything promised you could play as anything in the universe. Yan's answer is more disciplined: you play as breath itself, and the universe breathes back.