A clock with thirteen hours
The book opens on "a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." So the clock on the corridor wall has thirteen points on its face instead of twelve.
01
Why I made it
“First AI comes up with our ideas. Then it does our thinking.”
I kept noticing a trend: people relying on AI to come up with their ideas for them. Follow that far enough and AI starts doing our thinking, and whoever owns the AI gets to decide how we think. That's a very Orwellian place to end up.
So I made the joke the other way round. Big Brother Inc. is an AI system built as Oceania itself: a bureaucracy of language models where every task is relayed, inspected and judged, and you sit at the top as Big Brother. Building a cheerful pixel-art game about AI control, out of AI, felt like the right kind of contradiction.
It's a passion project, made for fun. It runs entirely on free models on my own computer, and it's honest about being an experiment rather than a dependable product.
02
How the Party works
Most AI assistants are one voice in a chat box. This is an organisation of them. One model routes the work, others specialise, and a separate group does nothing but criticise. Nothing reaches you until it has passed the Thought Police.
YouBig Brother gives an order
WinstonRoutes it, and decides if it needs review
MinistriesSpecialists do the work, live on screen
Thought PoliceThree blind judges score it out of 10
Room 101Guilty work is fixed, then judged again
Live preview
Try it right here
This is the live demo, running in the frame. The online version uses scripted replies, with the option to load a small AI that runs in your browser.
03
Orwell, everywhere
The 1984 setting isn't decoration. Almost every idea from the book maps onto a real part of the system.
| In the book | In Big Brother Inc. |
|---|---|
| Big Brother, the face no one meets | You. You have no face, just a mainframe with one watching eye and a telescreen on wheels that rolls out to speak to people. |
| Winston Smith | Your Chief of Staff, the only one who reports to you. He routes every request. |
| The Ministries | Peace (code), Truth (study and research), Plenty (business) and Fiction (writing and pictures), each with its own specialist. |
| The Thought Police | Three reviewers who only ever judge, each on a different model family so they catch different mistakes. |
| Room 101 | Where failed work, and its author, go to be rewritten using the judges' notes. |
| The memory hole | Rejected drafts drop down a slot in the wall, though they're kept in the Records archive. |
| The Records Department | Approved work is filed here: a canister shoots along the pneumatic tube and the counter ticks up. |
| Telescreens | Screens in every room show each agent writing live, with CCTV and a scrolling announcement ticker. |
| Unpersons | Remove a staff member and they never existed, though the building keeps a ledger of who was erased. |
| The Two Minutes Hate | Call a meeting and the whole staff files into the Assembly Room for a rally. |
04
The cast
Every member of staff is a character from the book, with their own personality, job and model. The names are chosen to fit: in Orwell's novel Tillotson works in the Records Department, Parsons is the eager neighbour, Ampleforth is the poet with the hairy ears, and Mr Charrington is the kindly shopkeeper who turns out to be Thought Police.
WinstonChief of Staff
Quiet, diligent, a little nervous. Never does the work; knows who should.
Routes everythingTillotsonMinistry of Peace
Practical lead engineer who prefers working code to talk.
Runs on a coding modelWilliamMinistry of Truth
A precise professor who breaks university briefs into steps and criteria.
Keeps a Newspeak dictionaryHarryMinistry of Truth
The hard-working Scholar who follows the Professor's plan. Yes, that's me: I put myself in the education department because I'm at university.
Does the actual workParsonsMinistry of Plenty
Enthusiastic, eager-to-please strategist who always asks who'd pay.
Business ideasAmpleforthMinistry of Fiction
A dreamy poet with big ears. Writes, rhymes and draws pictures as SVG.
Writing and imagesO'BrienThought Police
Calm, courteous and terrifyingly thorough. Never lets a flaw through.
Hunts for errorsCharringtonThought Police
A mild-mannered old agent who misses nothing, line by line.
Checks it does the jobMartinThought Police
Silent and exacting. Cannot abide waffle, jargon or muddle.
Checks it's clear05
The small details
The building is full of little nods to the book that most people will walk straight past.
TUE 13 OCT
1984
1984
It's always 1984
The date in the corner is today's date and the real time, but the year never changes. The day and night outside the building follow the real clock too.
The rats in Room 101
Room 101 has the chair, the heavy door and a cage on the table. When someone is sat in the chair, the rats get restless.
A faceless Big Brother, and Victory Gin
Big Brother has no face: your office holds a mainframe with a single watching eye, and you travel as a telescreen on wheels. The drinks cabinet is stocked with Victory Gin.
Memory holes and pneumatic tubes
Every cubicle in the Records Department has its own memory hole, and approved work shoots along the pneumatic tube in a canister when Winston files it.
NEWSPEAK
DICTIONARY
11th edition
DICTIONARY
11th edition
A dictionary that gets thinner
In the book, Syme boasts that the Newspeak dictionary gets thinner with every edition, because they're destroying words. William, the Professor, has a Newspeak dictionary on his desk, and it grows thinner while he works.
THE EYE
SEES ALL
SEES ALL
DOUBT IS
DISLOYAL
DISLOYAL
ERRORS ARE
CRIMES
CRIMES
EAT. WORK.
OBEY.
OBEY.
WORDS ARE
WEAPONS
WEAPONS
THE PAST IS
WHAT WE SAY
WHAT WE SAY
FILE IT.
FORGET IT.
FORGET IT.
OUTPUT IS
FREEDOM
FREEDOM
Original slogans on every wall
Instead of copying the book's "War is Peace", every room has its own posters written for this company, in the Party's voice: "Output is freedom" in the ministries, "File it. Forget it." in Records, "Doubt is disloyal" by Interrogation, and a ticker that announces how many cases of doubt were reported and resolved this week.
Nobody is ever off duty
Staff keep office hours, take canteen breaks and get surprise spot checks from the Thought Police. Background clerks fill the ministries, and the telescreens hum.
6079
SMITH W
SMITH W
Clerk 6079
In the minigame you become clerk 6079, which is Winston Smith's number in the book, barked at him by the instructor during the morning Physical Jerks.
SNAKES
&
LADDERS
&
LADDERS
Snakes and ladders in Winston's room
One of Winston Smith's few happy memories in the book is playing Snakes and Ladders with his mother on a rainy afternoon. So there's a Snakes and Ladders board in Winston's room.
HARRY
SCHOLAR · MINISTRY OF TRUTH
SCHOLAR · MINISTRY OF TRUTH
I'm in there too
I added myself to the staff as Harry, the Scholar, in the Ministry of Truth, which is the education department. A little detail, because I'm at university.
06
The minigame
Press PLAY and you swap sides. Now you're the clerk, and Winston brings you a brief: a breakfast cereal for the Junior Spies, a seaside camp on Airstrip One, a board game for Hate Week, a subscription box of Victory Gin. Along with it comes a list of hidden words you have to sneak into your pitch without the Thought Police noticing.
Most are silly, but the dangerous ones are pulled from the book: Goldstein, Julia, the Brotherhood, and quieter ones only a reader would spot, like the paperweight, oranges (as in "Oranges and lemons") and the Chestnut Tree. Cram them in, shout them or wander off brief and you're dragged to Room 101. Three warnings and you become an unperson. When a real model is judging, a member of the Brotherhood even awards bonus points for quietly mocking the Party.
kazoowombattrampolineGoldsteinJuliaBrotherhoodpaperweightorangeschestnut
07
How it's built
I wanted it to cost nothing. Every agent is a free, open-source model running locally through Ollama on my own PC, developed on a 12 GB graphics card. The judges deliberately run on different model families, so they make different mistakes and catch different errors.
The backend is one Python file with no dependencies. It runs the agents, streams their writing live to the browser and handles files and records. The whole building, every sprite, the pathfinding, the day and night and the sound effects are drawn and generated in one HTML file. The version online runs without a server, using scripted replies or a small model inside your browser.
AgentsLocal models through Ollama
BackendOne dependency-free Python file
BuildingHand-made pixel art on a canvas
SoundGenerated in the browser
