Instructions: Click on the screen to build a creature that eats the dot. Work with your opponent, who has a different dot but is controlling the same creature.
Summary: An interactive game in which players are forced to work together to reach their goals.
Within my game, players must try to eat the dots placed around the canvas. While each players' dots are in different locations, they are all navigating using the same springular blob. Therefore, they have to work together to ensure everyone eats their dots. This project was an extension of past spring explorations that I've done. I really like the interactive twist though because it forces a sort of collaboration that people aren't always used to. Even though everyone has separate goals, they have to work together to collectively reach them. Based on the nature of the game, it is best played when the two players on are in the same room. If this isn't possible, the game could also be played with players talking on the phone or texting one another.
Add a whisper of text and try to interpret everyone else's whispers as each changes little by little.
In short, this is the game of telephone for random people on the internet with text instead of audio.
I wanted to implement this game (sometimes called "Chinese whispers," evidently) with text instead of voice while preserving the same quality of randomness that it has. I initially thought about using a reCAPTCHA style system to mess up the text, but that would have been too easy to read. Messing with the unicode made it much more difficult to read the messages, and I found a nice library for doing that. What's interesting about the game telephone is that everyone has an important role in playing since they each pass the message along, but all the players are equal in the sense that everyone's job is the same, except for one. In the original game, the person that starts the message is somewhat more important, but I got rid of this dynamic by having each visitor enter their own message, which is then interpreted by the other visitors. In my version, all the players have the same role.
I had the idea to keep the messages so that the next visitor could add to the chain of whispers, which Glitch didn't seem to easily be able to do. I then decided to make my life much more difficult by shifting over to python and making a backend with Django, which I then put on Heroku, which was probably really unnecessary especially for this one feature. However, now the whispers that are added are persistent, so anyone can add to each of the chains and the initial phrases can keep morphing- they don't disappear when no one is online.
Interactive: Hover and move your mouse around the screen in the rain.
This is as a simple interactive environment based on the idea of being together with someone even though you cannot see them.
Below is a GIF of 2 people interacting with it.
The project is a rainy forest in which the only indication that anyone else is there with you is where the rain is falling. If there is a gap, there must be another person present. After testing it out with a few friends, it has become apparent that not only is this something you must be looking and waiting for, but that you may find yourself seeing gaps or "ghosts" that aren't really there. It attempts to combine anonymity and intimacy through the concept of simply being there with another person. You may or may not know who they are, but you share a space and environment that reacts to you together regardless of how far apart you actually are.
Originally, I had many grand ideas for this project. Perhaps a collaborative garden where individuals planted trees and helped care for other peoples' saplings, or a drawing program where individuals had different "parts" - branches, leaves, and flowers.
In the end, this is what I had time for, and while it is simple, I think it has potential. I would like to expand this first to have the drops impact and make small splashes on the ground and on the tops of the entities in the environment, and to create leaves on the bushes that would react to being "brushed past".
Simply click on the small icons to customize the big one. There are 4 clear categories: eyebrows, eyes, mouth, and accessories. There can ever only be one (or none) of each type on the big emoji at once. Click the X if you ever want to clear that feature. You can interact with many people at once who are on their own browsers.
Description:
Sometimes you want to express an emotion that the current range of emoji's just don't cover. That was the purpose of this project. I took inspiration from iconic internet created emoji's like: and wondered how many other emotions we feel but aren't able to express.
Gif of me playing with it along with a few friends:
My process:
For this project, I essentially mashed together two of the given prompts for when we're 'stuck for ideas': making a space where people can only interact with emoji's, and having the participants construct a monster corpse through body parts. And this is what I ended up with.
My process was pretty straightforward. I looked for existing dress up games on glitch to reference from, and found this one for cats and based the majority of my structure off of it. I spent a long time cutting apart emojis, formatting HTML, CSS, and messing with jQuery, all of which I'd never worked with before. I hit some pretty dumb bugs that I fought with for a long time (for example, not realizing I didn't import jQuery). I struggled a little with understanding the client-server stuff in application to my own project, but it was a lot simpler than it looked once I broke down the pathways.
Here are some notes I took on the given templates:
I made remixes of all of the templates and took notes on how each one worked with socket.io. This is how I brainstormed to apply it to my program:
I think a part of this project is that I want it to be kind of chaotic and unpredictable. I want multiple people to be able to explore the different options available and experiment. By having many people on at once, everyone with equal roles, it allows for lots of surprises. It is also good as a solo experience. I think of the multi-user interaction as a feature and not a defining point.
I shared it with my friends, and they had a lot of fun with it. At most, I think there were around 6 people messing with it at once, and everyone was amused at the results we were getting.
By the end of this project, I'd learned a lot about HTML, CSS, jQuery, socket.io, and glitch, and made something that made my friends laugh, so it is pretty successful by my standards.
Glitch App: Ensure Audio is on (Headphones are optimum for the notion of privacy)
To log in:
Do Not Click anywhere on the screen or press any keys
Click on Username Input Box
Enter Username
Click on Password Input Box
Enter Password
Press Enter, and you should enter into the chatroom
If nothing happens, refresh the page and try again
Documentation:
All messages received are spoken out to the user with p5.js Speech, and the only hallmark of them within the chat is 'Received Message'. However all text sent to the chat is posted on twitter with the username associated as well as the text and a hashtag. There is no evidence on the group chat of this occurring though, so the allure of privacy is maintained.
I would like to view this project as a public private chat. I learnt a-lot about TwitterBots in the process of making this piece, as well as html and the connection between servers and clients. I struggled a-lot with implementing libraries initially, with my understanding of where the code should fit into the glitch page. I am happy with the text part of the project, but I feel that more work on the speech element of it would aid in making it seem more polished. I would also dedicate more time to make the chatroom itself more conducive to the audio formatting.
I feel the piece is many to many, given that the population of the chatroom speaks to the population of twitter. It is asynchronous given the disjunction inherent within communication. Everyone has equal roles, there is no special communicator within the chat room. I feel the piece is both anonymous and intimate, given the lack of awareness of the public aspect of it. It is remote collaboration, given that those in chat room would communicate across distance as well as the content on the twitterpage reaching a wider audience. I feel the work is self-reflexive and critical of networked environments, highlighting the faith in privacy on the internet despite the public connections that those stem on.
Control your line segment by moving your mouse in the bottom left, collaborate with other line segments, avoid obstacles and get the gold!
App
GIF
Each player is a single line segment, which changes size and rotation based on the location of the mouse or finger. Everyone shares the same goal, but plays a slightly different role in achieving it. As the end segment, your job is often to shrink so as to give the other players room to move, and then finish off the task to get the gold. As the base, you carry a lot of responsibility, and can mess everyone up at any moment. Thus, the roles are subtly complementary. The gameplay is highly synchronous, with time coordination required for many of the obstacles. Despite this, it really doesn't matter if players share a physical space or not. It was fun, however, to have everyone looking at the same computer screen while playing with their fingers on their phones. There is no real critique of the medium, ideally the medium is ignored.
Spectacle is the use of video and mixed digital media as a vessel for existing ideas.
Speculation is the investigation of this digital form, exploring the nature of software and exposing facets of digital medium itself in a way that's self-aware.
A project I learned about this semester is a YouTube channel called alantutorial. The content on this channel is, above anything else, extremely unsettling. The idea behind the videos is that this bizarre character, alantutorial, is recording a series of random and seemingly pointless tutorials to upload to his channel. These tutorials demonstrate how to do things like making mail into square and how to build a weatherized hole. These aren't things that anyone would need a tutorial for, but that's the idea of the project: a series of tutorials that exhibit not the process of doing something, but the strange behaviors of this deranged character as he tries his best to present an informational video for his fans. This work is definitely more speculative than it is spectacular.
It plays off the style of tutorial/DIY videos popular on YouTube in it's earlier days (before 2012 or so). There are a countless number of these no-budget tutorials online which make up their own genre of online video, all following the same vague structure of every other YouTube tutorial. Alantutorial rejects, while simultaneously parodying, the style of production value seen in these tutorials, where they're usually made by some kid in a garage with a 144p camcorder. He even parodies nuances of these videos like struggling to hold something down with one hand while having to hold the camera in the other.
This work stands closer to speculation because of what it presents at face value. At their surface, these videos are no different from any other tutorial on YouTube. He introduces his channel and what the tutorials about, he goes through the steps of some process, and finally presents the product of his efforts and signing off. By making the viewer question not only why they're watching the video, but why anyone would want to watch it, it begs the question of where it came from why it exists, which is not often asked of the videos we watch online.
The idea that you are watching someone demonstrate how to do something you have no interest in doing is what makes these videos seem to drag on and almost be a waste of time. They're only a few minutes each, but because they're essentially nonsense, the viewer is more skeptical of whether watching it is worth their time.
There are many details hidden in these videos that are not addressed directly, but add a layer of surrealism and nuanced cohesion through each video leaning slightly towards the realm of spectacle. You can tell that there was care put into setting all of these videos in the same universe with the same reoccurring imagery and callbacks. It makes for a confusing, unsettling, uninviting, visual spectacle.
The places where he films these videos is usually disgusting. Paint and dirt everywhere, things leaking, things bleeding, dangerous power tools, etc. Most of the time he's pouring stuff on the floor and making a mess, and at the same time there's a sense of neediness and not-having. For example, he makes a video about getting a dollar one day. Watching him operate makes you almost empathize with and worry for him while he mindlessly destroys his things.
I would say these videos touch deeper into the art side of experience rather than the commerce side. When taken at face value these videos have very little substance, and most of the time don't even teach the things they claim to. They require a deeper analysis from the context of the YouTube tutorial genre as a whole, and what parts of that formula are being exploited and distorted.
Spectacle: The use of digital technologies for mostly aesthetic and commercial purpose - wowing the viewer with technological marvel or obsessiveness about craft.
Speculation: Being self-aware of the nature of digital media, and reflecting/expressing this awareness through means of irony. Usually separated from the technical craft of creation itself.
Ugly Dynamics - this example from the video just blew my mind - both in its conceptual brilliance and incredible affect and experience.
Warburton clearly thinks of this as a combination of Speculation and Spectacle - and I could not agree more. It is incredibly self-aware, both in terms of aesthetics as well as conceptual execution (the project is filled to the brim with irony). I also think that this project reclaims spectacle as speculation - looking beyond the normal's of "simulation" and shifting the context of what we think simulation is. It's incredibly subversive - while still pushing the frontier on human experience. I'm incredibly jealous of both the technical and conceptual brilliance shown by Nikita Daikur here, never seen anything like this before.
Here's where it lies:
Drag -----/----- Acceleration
Visibility -/--------- Invisibility
Surplus -----/----- Waste
Commerce ---------/- Art
This interactive environment is called "Bird-Do-Or-Die" where users compete or collaborate to either save or kill the bird(s). This is best played over a period of time. People should use their asynchronous free time to either protect or kill the bird - competing against other users over longer durations.
The network model here is ideally a many-to-many setup - where people form teams to work on saving/and or killing the bird over time. This also makes the system asynchronous - where people can work on increasing the bridge blocks over time, which then others must overcome to kill the bird. The roles are essentially oppositional - where people work to defeat the other's work.
and wondered how many other emotions we feel but aren't able to express.
