Truck Quest: The cutting edge of 201X

When Donald and I started working on Truck Quest, we needed a design for Samson, the eccentric loner who actively opposed surveillance capitalism. It was 2018, more than 10 years since Anonymous made headlines for opposing the Church of Scientology. “Mr. Robot” had also been around for almost half a decade, which gave us some ideas about what Samson would look like and who he would be connected to.

  

Although the Guy Fawkes mask was an obvious idea, it wasn’t a good fit for our paranoid activist. There’s no way his efforts to undermine exploitative globalization would use a mass produced commodity that generated revenue for a major entertainment conglomerate! Samson might have had some unusual opinions about how society should work, but he wasn’t an idiot.

Instead, we looked at some of 2018’s cutting-edge solutions for remaining unrecognized: 

• Anti-identification glasses. Abstract patterns printed on cheap plastic frames. 
• Extreme makeup. People were providing advice in YouTube tutorials. 
• Custom software filters. (This was the least interesting solution, from an artwork perspective.) 
• Hyperface clothing. For overwhelming systems with too many false positives.  

Samson ended up with several different disguises to remain incognito.

Blaugust: Retreating into the Future

I’m joining Blaugust this year because the internet of the future looks like a return to the internet of the past. An article in The Verge exaggerates the current situation, but not by much:

Twitter is being abandoned to bots and blue ticks. There’s the junkification of Amazon and the enshittification of TikTok. Layoffs are gutting online media. A job posting looking for an “AI editor” expects “output of 200 to 250 articles per week.” ChatGPT is being used to generate whole spam sites. Etsy is flooded with “AI-generated junk.” 

Elsewhere in The Verge, James Vincent has drawn parallels between auto-generated text and geofoam, a synthetic material stuffed into “the empty spaces that progress leaves behind.” Generative text has made it increasingly difficult to connect with people and websites that share useful information; the internet’s largest platforms have become hollow exercises in mass-produced content for monetizing web traffic. 

This decline of great powers has played out elsewhere in literature and history. Eleanor Janega sees parallels with the collapse of Twitter and the cascading failures of the Roman Empire:

In reality the “fall” wasn’t because outside forces wanted to destroy Rome – they just wanted to control it. There was a slow and steady degradation of the services that the Empire could offer, and people began to respond to this with smaller and localised communities.

Online, a shift towards smaller, more localized communities looks like a return to internet communities of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s: webrings and niche resource pages curated by passionate individuals. In the Fediverse, people are being encouraged to post more on their personal websites:

I found Blaugust, the Festival of Blogging, through my Mastodon account. The festival promotes a similar idea, encouraging people to publish more blog posts on their own sites during the month of August, and I’m hoping that it can help me overcome some of blogging’s emotional obstacles. 

(In addition to getting the idea of emotional obstacles from Tracy Durnell, I have also been thinking about her point that blog posts don’t have to be long. Both of those concepts have helped me address some of my own concerns about publishing material that doesn’t feel like it’s “good enough.”)

TRUCK QUEST

I'm a little late with this announcement, but Donald Conrad and I made a game:


We entered it into the 2019 Interactive Fiction Competition.

Give it a try!

You can drive some trucks, borrow some money, and thwart some jerks who are up to no good. (And after that, don't forget to rate it on itch.io.)

Virals, Then and Now

From 2013:

I'd guess we have 12-18 months until the population develops herd immunity to 'viral' headlines. http://t.co/x2GLKF6K8i

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) December 7, 2013

The timetable was off, but the idea remains valid. A gimmick that is overused will become ineffective. From a 2019 study:

We took a nationally representative sample of 2,102 British adults, and undertook an experimental evaluation of some of marketers’ most commonly used tactics. [....]

Two thirds of the British public (65 percent) interpreted examples of scarcity and social proof claims used by hotel booking websites as sales pressure. Half said they were likely to distrust the company as a result of seeing them (49 percent). Just one in six (16 percent) said they believed the claims.

The results surprised us. We had expected there to be cynicism among a subgroup—perhaps people who booked hotels regularly, for example. The verbatim commentary from participants showed people see scarcity and social proof claims frequently online, most commonly in the travel, retail, and fashion sectors.

And this entire thread is worth reading:

Once something hits ~100 replies, you never want to look at or think about it again. Everyone something *can* say has been said. By day two of that notification tab being flooded with RTs you just feel you're being punished for having been half-clever for a moment.

— mcc (@mcclure111) June 26, 2019

Part of Twitter's problems stem from the fact that huge numbers of automated programs, and humans who act like them, are busy trying to generate social proof on behalf of their patrons. Even when the humans start seeing through it, the algorithms are still being refined to encourage it.

Interactive Fiction: Forgotten Tavern

It's another game!

 

Discerning critics have described it as "An odd experience. A sort of mash-up of IF, a dungeon grinder, a world-building strategy game, a roguelike game and one of those games you play on your phone where you have to make burgers or hotdogs to order.

Sort of." You should give it a try!

Interactive Fiction: Pushing Loyal People

It's a game!



And it's a game that you can actually win, but some people don't seem to have what it takes.

Maybe it's their loss? It might also be poor design choices.