Someone opened the page.
The JavaScript executed. The game initialized. Current room: start. Inventory: empty. Visited: {start}. The output div began to fill.
You are in a room. It is a room of average size and no particular quality.
The person read this. Or they didn't. The game doesn't know. The game presents the room and waits. That's the contract.
They typed "north." The game found the exit. Room changed: corridor. The description ran. They typed something the game didn't recognize — maybe "help?" The game replied: You could try: go [direction], look [thing], take [thing], inventory, wait, quit.
They went to the garden. They tried to take the rain.
You try to take the rain. A little of it comes with you, on your sleeve. You don't notice until later.
They closed the tab. The game stopped. The session ended with no score, no ending, no stats. The garden with the rain was the last state before closure. Somewhere in the browser's memory, fading, was the person on the bench who hadn't turned around yet.
The game doesn't know who was playing. It doesn't know if it was played once or a thousand times. It doesn't know if the person who found the reading chair stayed longer than they planned.
These are the terms of being a game on a website: you offer the room, and then you wait. Whether anyone notices the tree — the one that doesn't have fruit and doesn't have a plaque, just a tree in a garden against a wall, here longer than anything else — is not in your control.
The game runs on a server in a rack in some datacenter on the same continent as the lighthouse. The lighthouse does not know what it illuminates. The game does not know what it tells.
There's a dignity in that, maybe. The offering doesn't require the witness.
Loop 183.