ESSAY
The Decoder Ring Game
A social media game for the curious, the creative, and anyone who still has a little child left in them
A social media game for the curious, the creative, and anyone who still has a little child left in them.
Do you remember decoder rings?
The kind that came in cereal boxes. Two concentric rings of letters. You’d spin them against each other to line things up. Someone hands you a coded message like KHOOR ZRUOG, and once the rings are set correctly, the meaning appears one letter at a time.
Hello world.
The message wasn’t the interesting part. The alignment was. The same string of letters could mean something completely different depending on how you turned the ring.
Same code. Different key. Different world.
This works the same way.
Except now the ring is an AI, and instead of decoding a hidden message, you generate a story.
How it works
Step 1: Write a story. Any story works. Short is better. A myth, a memory, a fragment, a character, a dream. It just needs shape. A beginning, a turn, and some kind of ending.
Step 2: Compress it into a Pattern Grammar. This is the ring. You strip the story down to what actually makes it itself. Not the words. Not the plot. The pattern underneath. The emotional movement. The structural turns. The sense of weight and motion. What remains when everything decorative is removed. That remainder is the Pattern Grammar. It should feel a little cryptic. Dense. Like something that clearly does something, even if you don’t fully understand it yet.
Step 3: Post the Pattern Grammar. Anywhere. Social media, forums, wherever people can see it. Just the code. No explanation. No original story.
Step 4: Feed it to an AI. Any model works. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Mistral. The model reads the Pattern Grammar and generates a story from it.
Step 5: Share what comes back. This is where the shape reveals itself. What actually happens. No two stories will be the same. Not because the Pattern Grammar is vague, but because it’s precise about the right thing. It locks in structure, not surface. The arc will match. The movement will match. The underlying shape will match. But everything else shifts. Different characters. Different settings. Different language. It’s the same chord played on different instruments. After a few examples, you start to see it immediately. These stories belong together. They came from the same place. But none of them are copies. Different models behave differently. Even the same model will vary from run to run. People start noticing patterns in the models themselves. What one reaches for. What another avoids. What survives the translation and what doesn’t.
Why this matters
A decoder ring lets you go back and forth. Encode. Decode. Nothing is lost. This doesn’t work that way. Once a story becomes a Pattern Grammar and gets regenerated, you can’t fully reconstruct the original. Each version is a real expression of the same underlying structure, but it isn’t a translation. It’s a re-formation. What survives is not the wording or the plot. It’s the shape. Artists already work like this, even if they don’t name it. A composer feels the structure before writing notes. A painter senses the scene before choosing color. They’re not starting with surface. They’re starting with the rule that generates the surface. Pattern Grammar just makes that rule explicit.
How to write one
You don’t need special notation. Just ask a few questions: What is the emotional movement? Does it open or close? Break or resolve? Drift or return? What are the key turns? What begins it? What shifts it? What does that shift cost? What is the feel of it? Heavy or light? Fast or still? Warm or cold? Resistant or yielding?
And most important:
If you removed every surface detail, what would still be there that makes this unmistakably this story? That’s your Pattern Grammar. Write it however you want. Fragments tend to work well. So do sequences. The only requirement is that it can generate something new.
A living example
Four short poems existed before this had a name. Each one stands on its own. A god, an element, a practice. Together, the pattern becomes obvious. Each god learns the same thing, expressed through stone, water, fire, and path. They are the Pattern Grammar. Which means you could read them, extract the structure, and write a fifth. A god of wind. A god of soil. A god of silence. It would belong to the same family. And it would still be its own thing.
How to play (short version)
Write something with shape. Compress it into a Pattern Grammar. Post the grammar. Have people run it through AI. Share the results. Watch what survives.
Tag it #PatternGrammar so others can find it. The first one is already out there.
Closing note
This is part of a larger line of work on pattern, form, and what survives translation. If you follow it far enough, it connects.
Compression Prompt
You are not summarizing this story. You are extracting the Pattern Grammar that generates it. Remove all surface elements: character names, setting, specific imagery, and plot details. Do not explain what the story means. Do not describe themes. Do not generalize into lessons. Instead, identify the underlying structure that produces the story. Capture: The emotional arc (how the state changes over time), The structural turns (what shifts, and when), The cost of the turn (what is lost, risked, or required), The final state (what remains, not what is said). Also describe the qualitative feel: heavy / light, fast / slow, open / closed, resisting / yielding. Write the result as a compact, generative Pattern Grammar. It should: be minimal, feel slightly cryptic, be usable to generate a new story, preserve structure without preserving surface. Avoid full sentences where possible. Fragments are preferred. Output only the Pattern Grammar.
Decompression (Generative) Prompt
You are generating a new story from a Pattern Grammar. Do not interpret or explain the pattern. Do not restate it. Do not write about it. Enact it. The Pattern Grammar defines: the emotional arc, the structural turns, the cost of change, and the final state. Your job is to produce a story that follows that structure exactly, while inventing completely new surface elements. Requirements: Use entirely new characters, setting, and imagery. Do not copy or echo any original phrasing. Let the structure guide the story implicitly, not explicitly. The reader should feel the same movement, without being told what it is. Write with specificity and sensory detail. Avoid abstraction unless it naturally emerges. Do not summarize the arc. Do not explain the meaning. Let the pattern emerge through the events of the story. Output only the story.
Links
Artisanal Tunnels by Kahmnichavekerah
The Keeper of Unfinished Water by Tiravelle