A Shock In The Dark – Game Design Process

From a game design standpoint, A Shock In The Dark is still evolving. It went through a couple of distinct phases. When it started, it was a game jam game, based around the housing market and Twister.  There is a bit of tension between the physical aspect of being shocked and the explorations of design. Its not enough to just to shock people with a thing, there needs to be some aspect of fun, or problem solving along with it.

paper prototyping
paper prototyping

Sagan and I have spent time exploring that tension. And there’s been a lot of group back and forth about the role of the board, vs maybe having a DM, or the interplay between people between the rules. There is a general feeling that it would be nice to have something where its not just based around the shock.

So after the twister end of it. We started doing some prototyping with just grids, and paper, and thinking about what rule sets are fun. First it started with kind of an “Avoid the shock” idea, and we started playing some basic grids. We toyed with the idea of having different kinds of pieces and making it more strategy based, rather than just “avoid the shock area”.

Sans shocking board setup.

But we nixed the scout / multiple piece strategy just because it started to feel too complicated.  The one common thread, has been the idea of finding, or uncovering shapes.  Eventually we settled on something akin to reverse battleship.  So you are awash in a sea of possible shocks, with some safe spots. This proved to be decently nerve wracking, but also fun in paper form.

We expanded a bit to try some different rule sets. So for example

  • Having an invisible safe or shock area that grew and changed as each turn passed.
  • having different islands, and trying to “steal” people’s islands.
  • Interconnecting safe areas
  • Getting people to draw and develop their own player boards
  • Thinking about clues, or cues, or house rules on trading.

Eventually we started thinking about clues and cards. We compiled everything into a document.

We think that for now, without the actual board, we will have some placement tokens, a third person, and a shock box, and some etched cards. The rule set isn’t too complicated, but has some twists in it. we think it’ll work out pretty well.

A Shock In The Dark – Technical Challenges

Working with RF radios is hard. Hacking them isn’t that bad, but they are quirky. They do things like fall asleep, and don’t work, or don’t have a strong enough signal. They can be pokey, like all technology.

My general exploration of shock radios started a while ago, outside of a game related framework. One summer, some of us were just hardware hacking, and a friend hacked a radio for something called Pomodoro Zap. Which shocked you if you visited a site during “work time”. She showed me how to hack the RF radio.

From there, I started hooking it up to things like the Muse. Mostly to try and do some funny stuff, but also I just really wanted to shock people with my brain.

Then, like all hardware it went in a drawer for a while until this game came into play. The radios themselves are pretty simple, but there were some challenges. For starters, newer versions of the radios didn’t have hard wired LCD screens. This meant picking modes, and channels was sort of blind. Originally I had thought that maybe we could have a 2 to 1 setup, where one radio controlled 2 devices, but that proved to be difficult because there’s no real way to track states of WHERE you are in the setup. Unlike open source devices that are set up to give you feedback, hacked devices just have some things you can’t track.

To work around that we ended up doing a 1 to 1 setup, 2 radios, 2 collars. Which works pretty well.

Guts of shock box

The board itself has been difficult to get going as well. In this case, I turned to my friend Jane, who is a great hacker, and very meticulous. They’ve been a real help to get the larger protoboard going. And tbh, I really enjoy working with people who just take things and run with it.

We all bounced some ideas back and forth about possible sensors to use. I explored some ideas of capacitive sensing, but realized that we’d have to do something with breakout boards, and that would drive the cost up quite high. We also thought about using just straight up buttons, but again, nice clear ones that would be good to use in a grid, were expensive as a per unit cost.

Eventually we ended up on reed switches. There’s been a quite a few interactive chess board projects done with reed switches, and we thought that it would be good to follow suit, because of the documentation, and ease of being able to find answers online.

The catch is that each of our nodes would also need a neopixel. Jane worked out a cool little PCB design, but the lead time on shipping wouldn’t have worked, so we assembled on protoboard.

So far our tests are going well and everything is working out. Which is nice. We’ll have to figure out how to design the enclosure to hold both the arduino and the radios.


I’ve been working on the game logic for a while, which is over on github:
https://github.com/sharkwheels/shock_board

There’s still some stuff to be done around win conditions, but its getting there. And hopefully it will be done in time for April 28th’s DMG showcase.

Staying With The Trouble

I honestly haven’t paid a lot of attention to Haraway since The Cyborg Manifesto many years ago. On the one hand, I think that at this point, humanity is already cyborgs. We offload a lot of who and what we are into our technology. Whether that’s cognitive load, automation of tasks, physical work, etc. So it was nice to read (and hear) a contemporary perspective from Haraway.

Haraway’s outlook has been one of the more relatable ones for me. Maybe because it resonates, oddly enough, with some of the Nihilistic texts I’ve been reading. The idea that what we are in now, is a boundary (vs an epoch), and the way out is just further down into the breach. That idea of working with the unhuman, of thinking about how we’re all basically compost, and how futures could be more livable. How to work with our damaged, tired planet. Because it really is home.

Its weird to look back on “futures” and sci-fi and realize how much of it is about trying not to die. But an organism in death is one in equilibrium with everything. But then a lot of it was written at a time when Climate Change was Future You’s problem, and now, its one of the most looking issues we face.

I think the idea of making Kin and not babies should be practiced and taken to heart. Anyways, here’s the new game Everything by David O’Reilly, which I feel really speaks to some of these ideas.

Vibrant Matter

So Object Orientated Ontology is something I’ve also been doing some reading up on and it was nice to see things about matter and materiality presented in class. It kind of ties into this idea that things are a lot more “flat” than we currently see them, and that material can have its own agency.

After seeing this prez and checking out the reading though, I started to sort of tie some threads into Feminist Performance artists, who used their body as material. Out of them though, Orlan in the 90s really stands out. She uses her body in the context of plastic surgery to re-make herself into references or abstractions of female beauty. Its quite disturbing, but also sort of alien. I won’t link the video, but it really throws the idea of body as material into stark relief.

Devices

Devices for disinterest
Devices for discontent
Devices that hate you
Devices that only speak when spoken too
Devices with agendas
Devices that don’t care
Devices that die
Devices with their own lives
Devices that roam
Devices that stay put
Devices that don’t play well
Devices that are not about you
Devices that troll
Devices that are relentless
Devices that spy
Devices that inform
Devices that occult
Devices for urban witches
Devices that are haunted
Devices that are demons who run daemons
Devices from the future
Devices made of dark matter
Devices for the modern dystopia
Devices with ethics
Devices that reject ethics
Devices that reject everything

Nihilistic Devices?

shocking games

So, sometimes you do a game jam with some friends, and you all come up w/ a weird idea about smashing up Twister and Monopoly with shock collars. You then decide to hang the idea off the Toronto Housing Market (which is pretty bleak). It turns out to be a really strange prototype. But oddly scary / fun.

Fast forward a week, and you decide to re-do that into more a chess board / reverse battleship idea. Where you are literally moving around a sea of shocks looking for safe land.  You decide to call it Sea of Pain, and start working on some design things and prototyping a smart board

That’s sort of where this game is at now. Tiny Oracles is being put on hold to finish this instead. Currently we’ve got some solid, but simple game mechanics, and we’re working on getting the board to auto generate islands.

The big challenge we are going to have is wiring and doing the logic for the board squares. A 9×9 board is going to be 81 inputs. The outputs can be handled by a neopixel strip / grid and co-ordinates, but its going to be difficult.

As a back up, if we can’t get the board together, we’re going to do a DM style, with a third person who is the computer, drawing their own islands. Both versions are pretty solid, but we want to try and tackle the board, for the general challenge and to learn new things.

Hopefully it goes well.

Documentation:

bench cat
bench cat
notebook
notebook
paper prototyping
paper prototyping
paper prototyping
paper prototyping
radios_2
radios_2
radios
radios
bad screen on newer radio
bad screen on newer radio
shock out of unity
shock out of unity
tape prototyping
tape prototyping

 

Reading Response – Post Humanism


I know these video responses might seem kind of cheeky. But really, post-humanism is wrapped in thinking about you as an entity, but not quite you. We spend a lot of time thinking about WHO we are, and how we are reflected in our own tech. From avatars, to data, to interactive representations. I really believe that we are all already cyborgs, and while reading things from 1991 is historically interesting, it doesn’t feel tied to the way we are now, in 2017. Its a base, and a layer, and there’s been a lot of things built up on top of that since then.

Regardless. I love memes. And I feel that memes, and memedom is a weird side-effect of our continual cyborg-ing. Born in the internet, set free to live, and grow, and die, there’s a weird kind of Chaos Magick that comes w/ memes.

So when I found the expanding brain meme, which has been done with everything from words to pizza, I figured: Yup that fits.

Cyborgism…finding out who you are by making memes about it.

IAMD – Chance

Chance was my favourite project. Mainly because I decided to make a markov-tumblr-bot based off of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. I really like making bots. I find there’s something fun, and reflective about making a chatter box internet thing.

In this case. I decided to make a bot that not only remixed a text, but also paired up remixes with images it found based on search criteria it pulled from its remixed text. The results range from utterly random, to just down right meta. You can see the whole thing chugging along here: https://computerfreud.tumblr.com/. And the code repo is here: https://github.com/sharkwheels/markov_tumblr

Here are a few favourites:

https://computerfreud.tumblr.com/post/159223835743/it-is-quite-true

https://computerfreud.tumblr.com/post/159241907343/this-gave-rise-to-them

https://computerfreud.tumblr.com/post/159167928693/i-begged-her-to-both-sexes

https://computerfreud.tumblr.com/post/159101994928/as-i-remarked-nearly-all-the-other-hand-possess

https://computerfreud.tumblr.com/post/158062703008/from-a-trifling-occurrence-of-perception-as-known

Its neat to see what this bot comes up with every hour. The program itself isn’t that complicated, but it doesn’t have to be complicated to be interesting.

Also there is some weird shit on Bing.

Hypersigils, Chaos, and Memes

Extending from the conversation about Drumpf and simulacra, The Internet gets down on another level of fucking weird with some theories of Kek, chaos and memes. This is one of those things that I never thought I would read about in 2017. Like, tecnho-witches are a thing, and a thing I like, tbh. But to have this kind of strange interwebs mystic war going on is another level of bizarre.

Frankly, I never thought I would be living in William Gibson Novel in my lifetime. But here we are.

Read up on Broadly
Maybe also take a note of Xeno