Book of Rice

Book of Rice started as a joke inside LOCKDOWN Protocol, where I kept showing up with a bag of rice. On paper it is an innocuous item. In practice it dealt far more damage than anyone expected, and I could kill players with it easily enough that it became a running bit.

People kept noticing the rice. I leaned in, became “The Rice Father,” and started preaching about the grain: its power, its humility, and the sacred art of wielding it in combat. That turned into the Book of Rice, a parody scripture written in the voice of a rice-centric faith, and later into bookofrice.com, where the full text lives online for anyone to read.

The site grew a little beyond the book itself. A students page lists other players who joined the Church of Rice as followers, turning a one-off gag into a small community artifact tied to the game.

Work

• Website design and development
• Writing and publishing the Book of Rice
• A students page for in-game followers of the Church of Rice

Context

LOCKDOWN Protocol is a social deduction game: most players are trying to complete objectives, a few are trying to stop them, and nobody knows who to trust. The bag of rice fit that world perfectly — easy to overlook, ridiculous to fear. The website carries the same spirit: a sincere-looking home for something that was never meant to be taken seriously, except by the people who kept showing up to hear the sermons.