Disobedience

For this project I embarked on several directions some of which were more fruitful than others and others were difficult to achieve due to technical complications. Some of the ideas I pursued were a suicidal creature, an incel creature, a breathing backpack and creating "living" everyday objects by making one modification. I chose an experimental approach not knowing where it would take me. This had of course the risk that I would end up with nothing at all. 

Having to re-calibrate my process the aspect of creatureness I decided to focus on is disobedience. We seem to invent technology that is there to obey our commands. Videogames are an interesting example as an avatar is created to control in a virtual world. This avatar is an extension of our self, but what if this avatar will have behaviour of its own and disobey the player. What if the avatar has preferences the player has to put up with. How would we play a game where we can actually interact with our avatar allowing us to control it but also acknowledging clear preferences and boundaries from the character, what would this do to how we immerse in games? 

Disobedience can also be scary. In general humans like to create and adjust our environment so that it is predictable. Various movies explore the topic of disobedience, think of Ex Machina, Westworld, 2001 a Space Odyssee. These are very enticing examples focusing mainly on robots interacting with people in the actual world. For this assignment I was curious what the effect of a disobedient character in a video game would do to the immersion of the player. I created a low level game with very a minimal but familiar design. The game is a game we all recognize and that is what it was chosen for. I wanted to play with the expectations of the player and create something that would not reveal its mechanics easily.

In the first version the character was simply disobedient and would not follow the commands of the user. I also implemented code that would render the character uncontrollable after it had eaten and decreasing the amount of control if it started to loose tail elements, aka, its starving. Starvation would occur if it the snake did not eat for a while. If the snake ate, it would become easier to control having gained its trust by successfully controlling it. The top image is a screenshot of this first version.

In the second version (second image) I implemented all the aforementioned functionality but I added a type of food that would decrease the amount of control you have over the snake and give it more freedom but also making it more likely the snake would starve itself and essentially commit suicide. This is an important dilemma I wanted to impose on the player relating to freedom and security as often found in opposition in the political landscape. It also could be extrapolated to our control over technology, and how much control should be or could be exacted over it.

The other ideas are still very much in the back of my mind and are something I would like to pursue as these directions did not deliver the quality and result I was seeking. The breathing backpack turned out much less convincing than anticipated. And working with drill to create certain animal movements requires more experimentation. The incel creature was too technological advanced to conceive in such a short time frame.