I personally conducted a quick little test on our dice mechanic. The idea is that we have a dice which creates a hypothetical set of conditions in our digital environment and that our cards react to said conditions in different ways, based off what “role” they play in the instance of callout culture. Initially I didn’t plan on testing this, but decided to after our final choice of material to make the dice, MDF, got comments that throwing it around would make it rather heavy. Therefore I conducted a mini test to see what results I’d get.
Before the test I had been planning to make a 7x7x7cm dice. From this mini test, which texted paper prototypes in the sizes 6cm, 7cm, and 8cm, I learnt that people overwhelmingly favoured the smallest dice. 7cm did have its fair share of favours, but as predicted 8cm, while favoured occasionally, was deemed too big and clunky, especially in regards to our material. It certainly pays to test the little things.
So far what we have decided is that we want to remove the competitive aspect of our project, as it was getting in the way of what we wanted to convey. Speaking to Ben, we were informed about a game creator Nicky Case who created a game about trust, further elaborating that while the subject matters were different, our project and that game overlapped in the way that what we have been really trying to show is the micro-macro aspects of social media. The small effects of an individual, compared to the greater effect on the wider environment.
That being said, what we’re going for is a project which displays how what we consider an insignificant action on social media, can have enormous consequences. By removing the competitive aspect we’ve essentially tried to create a simulation which presents three basic scenarios which can play out on social media due to the influence of call out culture.
Our third prototype was a major overhaul as we decided to make the focus more action based on an individual, rather than exclusively the relationship between an influencer and fan. Points are now based off severity of actions from different cards labeled, Event, Action, and Audience. We simplified the rules to have more emphasis on the action of combining cards to make things happen. Players are encouraged to use one of each card to form a “sequence” which had a total amount of points. Whoever had the most points in that round, won said round.
Our testers commented that while this iteration was easier to understand and play, they found it was still very hard to be competitive in the way we hypothesised. More feedback compared it to being like a reworked version of cards against humanity and previous testers commented that there seemed to be a lack of necessity for the screen element if we decided to go with this route.
There were also issues of once people got into it they ran out of cards, and the action of reusing other cards was seen as boring as they wanted more options within the scope of things.
[Test Data]
Testing began August 25th. Resumed September 17th. Ended September 23rd.
This prototype differed in that we made “two” prototypes which count as our “second” prototype. In prototype 2A, we decided to not tell the testers what categories the cards were from. They were presented with cards with a blank side and a labeled side which contained all the information on the actions, points, and categories. We’d also changed the category “fame” to “fans” as we felt fame was rather broad and overlapped somewhat with reputation. However even with these changes, it was hard to test properly so we made a new prototype.
Prototype 2B involved the removal of categories entirely and became focused more on the idea of the relationship between fans and reputation. The testing of this prototype also wasn’t quite ideal as we lacked the digital aspect of it which calculated the effects of the prototype on the hypothetical fans. We did try to make do with a paper substitute but it wasn’t quite the same.
Our first prototype test wasn’t ideal. The rules were too complex for our testers to pick up and the mechanism we had to decide what would win a “round” which was points based, didn’t make a lot of sense to the testers or to us.
Cards were separated into three groups: Money, Fame, and Reputation respectively. The content on those cards had a series of actions, and points which correspond to the severity or nature of the action taken (i.e. scamming fans would be a major deduction of reputation points but hugely increase points in money. At the time we thought this would be a solid prototype.
We tested it anyway to see what could be said from it. Our testers said they liked our concept but found the play convoluted and basically unplayable. This prototype is going back to the drawing board.
Returning to the topic of fandom groups and culture. There is a rise in the amount of people who “police” what is acceptable behaviour in fandom spaces, while this does seem to have its benefits, there is a grey area in what's become “acceptable”. In some cases fandom policing has instead turned into cases of extreme cyber bullying.
The bridge goes both ways though. What we hear about more these days are content creators who bring controversial issues into light or specifically add fuel to online “drama” in order to boost their own notoriety. In pursuit of followers, money, or reputation, we don’t realise just how far these people will go to, nor do we understand just how far the people that consume their content are willing to go to in order to justify themselves.
When we call out people to such an extent, we don’t understand the effect it has on them. Nor do we understand the effect the people creating the content have when they choose what goes in their content or what content they promote.
Our idea we’ve come to as a group is to create a card based game which demonstrates that, along with an accompanying digital display which would show the real time effects of the actions. We don’t have everything sorted yet, but the player’s will take the place of a creator or influencer and play cards which will either benefit the group, or benefit the individual sacrificing your opponent in the pursuit of followers, money, or reputation. We got the idea after learning about the origins of monopoly, in how it was changed from its original purpose by Charles Darrow and the Parker Brothers (now hasbro) in pursuit of money.
Amongst this culture of attachment to fictional media, often comes the case of Hikikomori syndrome. Initially unique to Japan, though its now been identified has occuring in parts of europe, hikikomori are people who have socially isolated themselves physically and become “shut ins”. In some cases, some hikikomori haven’t left their houses for 10-15 years.
Addiction and obsession to SNS, the internet, and online gaming have been seen as some contributing factors to the phenomenon and often they have been overlapped with being “otaku” - die hard fans of animation, comics, and tokusatsu. However some hikikomori may be otaku, others may not be, similar with otaku in that some may be hikikomori, but others may not be.
illustration: @/michaelabct
This syndrome of attachment along with a play on words helped me come up with a rough idea. Using visual novels to display the syndrome in a way more easily understandable and relatable to others. In Japanese “hikikomori” is written ひきこもり or 引きこもり, meaning acute social withdrawl. However the character for forest (or woods) 森 is read “mori” (もり), which brought me towards the idea of using mushrooms as a theme for the visual novel. Perhaps a dating sim with mushrooms as the “targets” (if pigeons have been done then so can mushrooms). It's not a concrete idea but it’d be interesting to play around with.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XI5frPV58tY
I was informed of Paul Stamets and his work with mushrooms. Which made an interesting point of humans sharing more dna with fungi than any other creature on the planet, along with mushrooms often being seen as severely underrated. But we’ll see.
Ante Silić, Jakša Vukojević, Ilaria Čulo, & Hrvoje Falak. (2019). Hikikomori silent epidemic: a case study. Research in Psychotherapy, (2). https://doi-org.ezproxy.aut.ac.nz/10.4081/ripppo.2019.377
Masaru Tateno, Alan R. Teo, Wataru Ukai, Junichiro Kanazawa, Ryoko Katsuki, Hiroaki Kubo, & Takahiro A. Kato. (2019). Internet Addiction, Smartphone Addiction, and Hikikomori Trait in Japanese Young Adult: Social Isolation and Social Network. Frontiers in Psychiatry. https://doi-org.ezproxy.aut.ac.nz/10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00455
Quite recently, Kyoto Animation went up in flames. One of their studios was set alight after a man who claimed the company stole his novel, poured gasoline and set the building on fire while people were still inside. While this isn’t a direct case of fictional content affecting real world actions, this isn’t the first case of when people have decided to take drastic measures towards these companies who create and manufacture said content.
Square enix, publisher of the renowned fantasy video game series “Final Fantasy”, has received death threats over one of their “gacha games” (a game which users random number generated rates for special items of characters).
https://news.livedoor.com/article/detail/16254063/ (original article was deleted, summary remains)
Recently a Chinese cosplayer attending the comic convention “Comic Market” (Comiket) in Japan was overwhelmed to a point of a panic attack when photographers aggressively surrounded her in order to get up-skirt shots of her in costume.
This attachment isn’t always romantic, and it isn’t always healthy. There are many more cases where people’s views on fictional characters begin to overlap in real life, without taking into account that there are real people behind costumes and companies producing this or displaying fan content.
The darker side of this attachment is an interesting concept to play with. Games such as Doki Doki Literature Club (ddlc) which is initially portrayed as a typical dating sim, take into account these darker aspects. In DDLC’s case they made the hyperfixation of the character Monika on the player the key component of the game, going as far to having the code react to if you tried to delete any of the games assets that were related to Monika.
