Faith & Circuitry: An RPG About Signal and Noise
The magnificent beauty of John Harper's Lasers & Feelings is how adaptable (or as the "scene" likes to say, hackable) it is over almost any storytelling premise. We created a YACR (Yet Another Cyberpunk RPG) structured like a Docker container image (yes, we're nerds), steered slightly into a pandenominational evangelists-with-six-guns setting, and then asked "What if God speaks through electronics?"
The Frequency War is Internal
As we unwound the capacitor coil of that bit of charged heresy, we discovered something unsettling: the real horror isn't that divine signals are corrupted, but that they might all be authentic. Every frequency claims divine authority because every frequency reflects some aspect of human spiritual need.
This "game" emerged from a fundamental question about the signal-to-noise problem of faith: How do descended monkeys desperately seeking transcendence distinguish between genuine divine transmission and cosmic static? The answer, it turns out, is that we can't—and that's both terrifying and hilarious.
Three Phases of Theological Debugging
The progression from Faith & Circuitry → DivineOps → Divine Comedy Protocol mirrors humanity's actual relationship with the sacred:
Phase 1: Electromagnetic Horror - We approach the divine expecting clarity but find competing signals, inverse amplitudes, theological uncertainty. This reflects our lived experience: every religious tradition claims exclusive access to truth, yet they broadcast on different frequencies.
Phase 2: Administrative Comedy - When we discover that divine administration is as broken as human administration, horror transforms into relief. God isn't transcendently perfect—God is trying their best with inadequate documentation.
Phase 3: Cosmic Customer Service - The cartwheeling deity represents the ultimate theological insight: what if the divine is just as confused about us as we are about it?
Liturgy as Crowd-Sourced Documentation
The Signal Uncertainty Principle—that measuring divine authenticity corrupts the signal being measured—reflects a deeper truth: the act of systematizing faith destroys what made it faithful in the first place. Every attempt to dogmatize the divine experience creates merge conflicts with lived spiritual reality.
Traditional liturgy says: "Do this in remembrance of me."
Faith & Circuitry liturgy says: "Do this because it worked in the dev environment, and we're hoping it scales to production."
This reframes every theological problem as an infrastructure issue: suffering becomes resource allocation bugs, unanswered prayers become request timeouts, religious conflict becomes competing API standards, and existential dread becomes fear that the whole system might be deprecated.
We're All Beta Testers
The DivineOps framework suggests that every believer is running experimental spiritual software. Our theological disagreements aren't moral failures—they're QA reports from different test environments. Some people are running the Old Testament build, others are on the Buddhist release, and most are using cobbled-together open-source theology.
Characters with different "tuning bias" experience the same signal as completely different entities. This isn't about external theological conflicts—it's about the multiple divine voices within each of us. We're not just searching for God; we're trying to debug the competing spiritual processes running in our own consciousness.
The Beautiful Absurdity of Seeking
The game doesn't ask "Is God real?" It asks "What if God is real but running on legacy hardware with no budget for upgrades?" We descended monkeys keep looking for God in transcendent places—mountaintops, cathedrals, meditation cushions—when the real divine revelation is that God is probably looking for us in equally confused places.
The cartwheeling deity isn't mocking our spiritual seeking; it's celebrating the beautiful absurdity of consciousness trying to understand itself through increasingly elaborate technical metaphors. Faith & Circuitry suggests that theology is just collaborative debugging of the existential condition, and the most profound spiritual truth is that everyone—including God—is just trying to figure out how any of this works.
Every Frequency Carries a Prayer
In the end, this game is about frequency relativism: the recognition that moral and spiritual truth might genuinely depend on which wavelength you're receiving. The most dangerous question isn't "Is this evil?" but "What if this is the only real God, and everything else has been static?"
This isn't theological nihilism—it's theological humility. If every transmission claims divine authority, maybe our job isn't to find the one true frequency, but to become better listeners, better debuggers, better collaborators in the ongoing project of making meaning from signal and noise.
"You are receiving this as technical documentation for the human experience. Bug reports welcome."