Storyline

After downloading the 'Doutalk Metaverse', you are able to earn coins while watching funny short videos.

By becoming 'superfans' with a new content producer Hua and sending gifts, you formed a close bond with them and might be influencing their further development...

Yet, the success and failure Hua was made eventually made them give up this work.

Eventually, you were offered the choice of whether to leave the digital world or keep following the original gameplay.

If you decide to turn off the digital system, you are able to explore a new scene, the home.

Unlike the bright and colorful scene Metaverse is showing, the home is a dim place with dust and leftover takeaways. However, you can make a change to the home.

Design the game: The loop

As Anyó, 2015 concluded, a game loop is "an elementary control structure of computer programming and as a characteristic narrative form of time structure in video games", and "puts in tension the participation time with the story time", influencing the process of players under the rules and get a better understanding of the game.

During the design process, I tried to mix a bunch of loops together. The first one is an 'Idle Game loop'. To achieve my goal to simulate a similar one in digital marketing such as that one will see in advertisements inserted between videos, and incentives in games such as getting resources after watching the advertisements. I applied a loop to idle games such as Cookie Clicker, Universal Paperclips, 'Exoptable Money', etc. The loop within these games is extremely simple. By player accumulates resources over time. The fun for these games is also mostly from the accumulation of resources and increasing efficiency while accumulating. In this game, the player accumulates the resource 'likes' and 'coins', which can be used to unlock further storylines and improve the efficiency of accumulating the resources. 

Screenshot from the game: The Shop

The homepage

The loop combines with the use of UI. It mimics social networking and short video apps and reflects the 'gamification' designs in these apps. Specifically, the background of the UI references 'Douyin Jisuban'(Titok Speedy version), which is another version of Tiktok in China, where you earn coins while watching short videos, and the coins can be converted to real money. It exchanges attention to a small amount of money, and it focuses on lower-tier cities and groups and elder people exemplifying the exploitation of attention and how it influences more groups than usual assumptions.

The second loop is the narrative loop, where players are granted freedom in their speed to access the stories. The stories are also incentives for more accumulations. One of the key challenges is to ensure the story is less didactic but more engaging. In the demo, there are two stories to explore- The story of Hua and the story of the main character. 

Their story draws inspiration from Yuka Kinoshita, who was an eating competition champion, famous for her eating Youtube Channel, receiving comments such as 'it's comforting to watch her eat'. Yet, eating large amounts of greasy food can be detrimental to health, and to draw attention, she had increasingly eaten these kinds of food. Similar things happen to many eating video creators, including eating excessive amounts of food with heavy seasoning and eating endangered species. The story's topic is alienation and commoditization of people and anxiety of attention.

The story of the main character aims to discuss the problem of alienation and reliance on them from a personalized and psychological perspective. As the script shows previously, the main character spends most of the time immersed in the digital world, as well as believing their true self is the online digital self. In the end, they looked at the room, which is a dim place with dust and leftover takeaways. The environment is made to hint at the loneliness, alienation, and ignorance of real life that the digital world might bring to individuals.

The user interface was built using free assets from kenny.nl, poloviiinkin.itch.io, and azagaya.itch.io/. The filler texts, such as the dialogues of the short videos, are generated using ChatGPT. I did all the other content, including stories and dialogues of Hua and the main character, coding of the program, and drawings of the room.

Conclusion and updates

As mentioned in the title, this is a draft version, as I would keep developing to create more stories and upgrade the gameplay.

From the story's perspective, the game is successful in creating an immersive environment to discuss the topic of alienation and anxiety triggered by the digital environment and attention economy. However, it doesn't have a good angle to further analyze the question from the view of biased algorithms and how technology plays a role in creating hierarchy and power concentration in the form of neofeudalism, as Dean says, 'Digital platforms are the new watermills, their billionaire owners the new lords, and their thousands of workers and billions of users the new peasants.' While these contents are designed to be the background of the game, in the process of exchanging attention for in-game currencies.

Further, the potential effect of the expression is high in the genre of games, but due to the limited time, the effect is not impressive in this game. The length of the script is around 2000 words and the total length of the code is around 230 rows. To simulate digital communities, there are a lot more steps to implement.

Thus, I've set up a development plan for the game. The to-do lists include upgrading the animation, and the dialogue system and adding new stories to the game.

Inspirations

Anyó-Narrative time in video games and films: From loop to travel in time. https://www.gamejournal.it/anyo_narrative_time/#:~:text=Two%20aspects%20of%20narrative%20time%20are%20relevant%20here.,story%20and%20at%20the%20level%20of%20the%20narrative. 

Dean- Neofeudalism: The end of capitalism? https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/neofeudalism-the-end-of-capitalism/ 

Kieft- Algorithms rule us all. Thought Maybe. https://thoughtmaybe.com/algorithms-rule-us-all/ 

The game also draws inspiration from the following games

Blomquist, Gabler, Gray, 2012, Little Inferno, https://tomorrowcorporation.com/littleinferno

Lantz, 2017, Universal Paperclips, https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/

Berock(Wertpol), 2014, Exoptable Money, https://gamejolt.com/games/menagerie1/36236

alienmelon, 2022, everything is going to be ok, https://alienmelon.itch.io/everything-is-going-to-be-ok

Ohisashiburi, Nyalra, Kotoko, Aiobahn, 2022, Needy Streamer Overload, https://whysoserious.jp/needy/en/