Samuel Domian

Samuel Domian (born July 14th 2016) is a French writer, somnogame designer, and the co-founder and former creative director of Moodoo. An influential and controversial public figure, Domian is best known for the development of Finally Awake as the launch title for the Reverie somnogame console.

Born in Dunkirk, Domian started playing and running tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) at an early age, which influenced his design work. Domian co-founded Moodoo with Inès Seghir in 2043. In April 2049, Domian departed Moodoo and his role as creative director of Finally Awake, which resulted in a fan backlash.

On June 13th 2049, Domian lapsed into a coma, which has been attributed to a massive stroke. On October 10th 2049, Domian made a full recovery.

Early life and educationPermalink

Samuel Domian was born on July 14th 2016 in Dunkirk, France as the oldest of four children. His father is Vincent Domian, an HR manager working for various charity organisations, and his mother is Elise Vanel, a school teacher.

After receiving his baccalauréat at a catholic school, Domian briefly joined the Compagnons du Devoir. After he quit because he “wasn’t a good cultural fit,” Domian attended free university classes in philosophy while taking on small jobs, including a brief stint as a sex worker.

ActivismPermalink

Domian started attending flash festivals in the streets of France and Belgium at the age of seventeen. On November 5th 2038, Samuel was beaten by riot police after asking an officer if they could let an arrested woman take her asthma medication. The event left him “traumatised by the ease with which the French police can slaughter a citizen in front of everyone’s eyes.”

In 2041, Domian joined Le Ciel est Bleu, a group of healthcare and social workers advocating for the opening of safe injection sites (SISs) in France, which had the least amount of SISs in Europe at the time.

CareerPermalink

Domian started playing and running tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) with his friends at an early age, often creating his own fictional settings and rulesets. He also worked as a staff counsellor for a live-action roleplaying game (LARP) youth camp in Dunkirk. Domian has stated that his experience with TTRPGs and LARPs was “invaluable” in shaping his writing and design philosophies. Other influences include the works of Hirohiko Araki and John C. McCrae, which Domian has described as “good examples of worlds that are wonderfully weird, yet have the internal coherence needed for enjoyable player exploration.” ^[1]

In July 2042, while attending an Efrim Waite concert in Paris, Domian met up with Inès Seghir. The two had been friends when Domian was organising weekly TTRPG games, but lost touch when Seghir moved to Canada for her studies. In a 2043 interview, Domian described how Seghir helped him after he suffered a panic attack during the concert by “administering a benzodiazepine that she had on her as a treatment for her insomnia. While it was taking effect, she held my hand and recited a dua to protect me from nightmares.” ^[2]

Domian was fascinated by Seghir’s oneirology work, which had resulted in a method of inducing and influencing lucid dreams by using targeted neurostimulation. Domian, who often used his vivid dreams as inspiration for his writing, became interested in exploring lucid dreams as a space for running TTRPGs. He was initially reluctant to use a neural colloid for the purposes of manipulating lucid dreams using electroencephalography (EEG), but Seghir stressed that the method she had developed was dependent on using colloids, which enabled higher data resolutions when compared to standard multielectrode headsets.

After being “blown away” by his initial experiments with lucid dreaming, Domian designed a roleplaying game (RPG) based on his Finally Awake TTRPG setting, which was already rooted in dream logic for its fiction. Domian and Seghir began to organise controlled sleep trials of the game, with Domian acting as gamemaster and Seghir providing technical support.

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In May 2043, Domian and Seghir debuted Finally Awake at that year’s A Maze festival in Berlin, Germany, which resulted in positive player feedback and press coverage. The game won the Most Amazing Award at the festival, with jurors commenting that “this experience opens up a new dimension of interactive storytelling. The format of this game is nothing what we experienced before.” ^[3]

After Domian and Seghir met with Atakan Selvi at A Maze, the two began a correspondence that resulted in a “wild exchange of ideas and tools.” While Selvi was more interested in working with awake players for his EEG-enabled games, he was fascinated with the duo’s focus on the “blurry, ephemeral, evanescent space of dreams.”

MoodooPermalink

In May 2043, Domian and Seghir founded Moodoo, with Domian taking the role of creative director while Seghir worked as managing director to raise funds and hire staff. While initial funding rounds saw limited response, Seghir organised a successful application to Zhupao Campus, which drew the attention of Xu Shaoyong because of its novel use of colloids and the endorsement of Waite, who had “fallen in love” with an early version of Finally Awake.

Seghir initially focused Moodoo on dream imaging applications through custom-designed neural colloids supplied by Sanial, while Domian worked on a release version of Finally Awake. This tandem development process resulted in the first prototype of the Reverie somnogame console, with Domian claiming there was “a feedback loop that made sure one couldn’t have been realised without the other. Finally Awake is Reverie, and Reverie is Finally Awake.”

Because of its long development time, the release of the Reverie was repeatedly delayed, resulting in a string of cancelled preorders and accusations of abandonware. Xu came out in support of Moodoo, stating that “there is unlimited potential for this technology, but it requires thorough vetting and quality assurance. We are dealing with people’s dreams after all.”

Finally AwakePermalink

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On November 27th 2048, Moodoo released the Reverie with Finally Awake as its launch title. The Reverie was lauded as “a revolution in somnogames” while Finally Awake became a critical and commercial success, with particular praise for its pioneering use of subjective dream logic. Domian has described being uncomfortable with the celebrity status that resulted from his work on Finally Awake.

In the following months, Finally Awake became notorious for the public outbursts of Domian. During a game that he was managing in March 2049, Domian was confronted with a player who was abusing Finally Awake‘s roles and abilities to create hateful allusions in the dreams of the other participants. When this player refused to stop at Domian’s repeated requests, he intentionally trapped them in an endless fall for six hours.

On April 11th 2049, Domian announced that he had “involuntarily departed” Moodoo and his role as creative director of Finally Awake. In his statement, Domian revealed his discovery that the technology behind Reverie was being used to create a form of neurocarceration, which is undergoing a Zhupao-organised trial in the United States (US). ^[4] Domian claimed to have had no awareness of Moodoo’s role in the development of neurocarceration, which Seghir had organised “to keep Moodoo afloat during the long development time of Reverie and Finally Awake.”

Domian’s fanbase reacted to his departure by boycotting Finally Awake and harassing Moodoo employees. ^[5] Domian was repeatedly criticised for refusing to intervene in the harassment campaign, which led to Seghir having to relocate from Paris after her address was leaked in far-right circles.

In June 2049, Domian issued a public apology, explaining his actions as resulting from “ongoing tensions” over Moodoo’s development of neurocarceration. Domian also hinted at legal action against Zhupao for its role in organising the neurocarceration trials, condemning the technology as a human rights violation and claiming that it presented “invisible risks to the individual and collective psyche.”

ComaPermalink

On June 13th 2049, Domian suffered a massive stroke and lapsed into a coma. Domian had reported that he had started to experience blankouts in the months before the stroke occurred. No conclusive link has been established between Domian’s blankouts and his comatose condition. ^[6]

On October 10th 2049, Domian made a full recovery from his coma. The news was announced at 07:06 CET by Seghir, who posted a photo of Domian awake in his hospital bed with a raised fist and extended middle finger. The photo was captioned with i lived, bitch followed by raccoon and opossum emojis, alluding to the animal masks used in Finally Awake.

In a follow-up post, Seghir supported Domian’s condemnation of neurocarceration, adding her tentative discovery that Reverie’s interaction with norepinephrine to maintain the dream state may be “subjecting people to the influence of their raw, unfiltered subconscious in such a way that leaves no memories of this potentially traumatic experience upon waking.”

Personal lifePermalink

Domian has mentioned in interviews that he hasn’t kept a romantic partner “for longer than a year.” He identifies as bisexual and is “mostly attracted to men.” ^[1]

See alsoPermalink

• Moodoo
• Finally Awake

ReferencesPermalink