finleylin

Artist’s Statement

I have always had the habit of daydreaming random made up fantasy scenarios, to the point I would consider those made up scenarios a small part of my identity. Therefore I wanted to create an experience where this process is visualised. daydream is a text and image based narrative adventure game/visual story aimed to recreate this experience. The game is made up of a series of unrelated short stories/scenarios that the player jumps between randomly. It is slow paced, has no ending, with the “goal” being to simply experience the stories.

Some aspects of daydream can be considered to be appropriation, as a significant amount of my daydream scenarios are heavily influenced by the media I consume, especially in the emotions they made me feel, and the immersion I felt while reading/watching/playing/listening into those made up fantastic worlds and the stories that happen within them. These influences are reflected in both the writing and artwork, where I included small bits of paraphrased lyrics and titles of my favorite songs; and that my art style is very draws heavy inspiration from backgrounds and scenery of anime and movies made by Studio Ghibli, Kyoto Animation and Shinkai Makoto. Of course, my creative inspirations is only part of the game, the main theme I’m trying to capture here is my creative process: jumping to and from very different ideas, trying to capture them before they slip my mind. I also tried to vaguely depict some of my artistic frustrations and general regrets in some of the stories, as well as my hopes to growth as an artist.

One more thing I tried to convey with daydream through the writing and artwork is a general atmosphere or “vibe” of peace, calmness and tranquility, both as a personal preference of storytelling, but also to create break from the chaotic and extremely fast paced real world with this game. Additionally, I also wanted to convey a sense of slight sense of somberness and melancholy in most of the short stories, but also to instill a concrete ambience of hope, in a “brighter days are ahead” kind of way. I think I did this both because of my narrative preference, but also because I feel like the real world has been harsh and depressing, but media and creative outlets such as creating art offers an escape and makes me feel healed. While I am unsure if I can get these feelings across with the game, as it is quite possible for players to feel bored given the slow pacing of the game, I do still think daydream can resonate with certain players.

Finally, I want to present a lyric from a song by my favorite artist: Get Your Wish by Porter Robinson

The work that stirred your soul
You can make for someone else

I hope daydream and the other games and artwork I will make in the future can inspire others to create art, just like how I was inspired to daydream, to create worlds and tell stories of my own.

Documentation

Sample gameplay video:

Credits and Game Download

Game engine: Twine 2

Writing and artwork: made by yours truly

Download here, extract and open the HTML file to play

Rules and Gameplay

The rules and directions for this game is very simple:

1. Navigate to the subreddit r/Askreddit
2. Identify a new or rising post asking a question that pertain to opinions, personal anecdotes or anything not about factual information or hypothetical situations
3. To the best of your ability and using any available tools or resources, reply to the post (ideally using a burner account) with a completely fabricated yet convincing and seemingly genuine answer
4. Wait a day and return to your comment and see how much upvotes your fake post have accrued

Artist’s Statement

While most of the examples we saw in tactical media that relates to the internet are somewhat dated, the social commentary they sent are still as relevant now as ever: the uncertainty of who is on the other end, the murky nature of the truthfulness of anything you see online, and just how easy it is for it to be subverted or compromised without you noticing. With those elements in mind, I chose my intervention to take place on reddit, a (mostly) anonymous online forum that frequently see the three previously mentioned elements at play. Reddit is known for its users’ (redditors) hive-mind like echo chambers, and an elitist, know-it-all and often very hypocritical attitude on every subject and opinion imaginable. One thing that especially stands out is that redditors often point out the flaws of other social media sites – that they are riddled with spam and bots, promote misinformation, use pervasive algorithms, have ineffective moderation – to assert how much superior reddit is, even though it suffers from the same problems.

There are many subreddits where users can post questions or personal stories for answers, discussion or advice, and all of them are infamously known to contain made up stories, reposts, incorrect “facts”, “baits“ designed to spark outrage or to farm upvotes, and some combinations of the above. Yet for many of these posts, often despite being called out, still get enough upvote to be pushed onto the front page. My game/experiment seek to contribute by fanning the flames of this problem to see just how easy it is to make things up and to fool others, so I chose to conduct this game on r/Askreddit, one of the largest community on the website with over 40 million users and posts regularly getting tens of thousands of upvotes. There is no limit to what or how you create your response to a post, including copying someone else’s reply to a similar question from a long time ago, to using AI such as chatGPT to generate answers – both have become increasingly common on the website.

Other than the often repeated “don’t trust everything you read online” bit, the other problem I want to raise – which of course also isn’t exclusive to reddit – is the nature of these kinds of online content and how we are consuming them: as most of the posts and replies are about opinion or personal anecdotes, how much do we really care about the authenticity of them? Are we reading these posts to genuinely engage with others’ opinions, or are we just reading for a quick laugh? All of us are ultimately vulnerable to misinformation, yet we still have to place some amount of intrinsic trust into other strangers online – no matter how much we tell ourselves “don’t believe everything”. And since some of the things we see and read may never be truly verified, what do we make of this fact?

Results

Unfortunately the result of this game/experiment is mixed, as none of the posts got anywhere near a large amount of upvotes and barely any engagement. This is somewhat expected however, as luck plays a massive role in whether your reply or the post you replied to “takes off”. Repeat enough times, it is almost certain one of the posts will make it to the top.

The most successful posts:

talking about the dangers of garage door springs is a reddit classic that pops up in every single thread that asks a question like this one

this lengthy reply is almost completely copied verbatim from under another similar question months ago, and it also got a reply!

other completely made up scenarios

Overview

This game tackles the topic of appropriation by combing a medium that cannot exist without appropriation – AI generated images – and appropriating the rules of pictionary and the rules of drawing telephone games such as Gartic Phone. In this game however, the creation of pictures are completely left up to the AI with the players only writing the prompts and guesses.

Rules and Gameplay

• The game can theoretically be played by any number of players, but at least 4 players recommended. Additionally 1 person is needed to be the game master.
• The game takes place in a chatroom or a Discord server, and the game master is in charge of managing the players’ prompts and images, as well as stringing the final results together.

1. At the start of the game, each player writes down a phrase of no less than 5 words, and send it to the game master.
2. The game master then sends each phrase to the next player, and each player enter the exact phrases into an AI image generator (craiyon is used for playtesting). Each player chooses an generated image and send them back to the game master. The players must not alter the images in any way, and it does not matter if the generated image does not resemble the input prompt.
3. The game master then sends the images to the next player, and each player describe the content of the image as reasonably detailed as possible (they are also allowed to twist and remix their own interpretation of the image if they wish).
4. The players sends their new descriptions back to the game master, who pass them to the next player.
5. After at least as many rounds as the amount of players have taken place (the game can go on for longer if there are few players or if the players wish to), the game master presents the result of the telephone game.

Artist’s Statement

When I think about the word “appropriation”, my mind immediately jumps to the current hot and controversial topic of AI image generators and how all of them are based on the countless amount of harvested data from across the internet to generate new images based on these data. As a hobby digital artist, I definitely agree with the many ethical problems raised with generative AI, especially in how their data are overwhelmingly gathered and used without the original artists’ or photographers’ consent. However, I also think that there is one area that AI is almost perfectly suited for: making memes and “funny internet pictures”. Since memes already appropriate by nature, AI mashing them together to create something new is basically the next step in memes’ evolution. One particular game that lends well to this are the pictionary type telephone games such as Gartic Phone or Jackbox Civic Doodles, which is the other part of the game I appropriated. I think letting AI do the image making spoofs on the concept of a drawing game and also enhances the collaborative nature of telephone games – in this case collaborating with all the unwitting data used to make the AI image generation possible. While not explicitly stated in the rules, I trust the players will try to write the most ridiculous prompts and choose the weirdest AI generations. After all, to laugh at the results is the point of the original telephone games.

Originally, I wanted the players to draw the pictures themselves, but only closely following that the AI has generated; as I thought this would create extra variance in the game to derail the telephone chain. However, after observing that there are some aspects of AI generated images – the overall blurryness, the weird human hands and the smudged text – that cannot be easily conveyed by drawing in a reasonable timeframe; and the fact that the AI can and will misinterpret the input and generate something completely unexpected, I decided to let the AI completely take over the creation of images. Unfortunately, I was unable to find a online telephone game that allowed direct image uploads, I had to switch the setup to be somewhat clunky and require a game master.

There was another idea I toyed with when iterating with the game, that being instead of needing the players to input descriptions or prompts, the players would put the generated images into AI image identifiers and use that to generate descriptions for the images. I thought it would be a fun parody on the endless cycles of online data harvesting and the corruption of digital data and their meaning. However, currently the AI image identifiers can only use words and not sentences or phrases, this idea had to be scrapped. But I think this idea may be revisited with our current rate of advancement in AI.

Playtest Results

2 sample telephone game chains