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Pressure Project 1 – Generative Dark Patterns

Posted: January 30, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized |Leave a comment »

I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do for this project at first. We were tasked with creating something self-generating and almost unpredictable, which was daunting to me in a new software. I figured the best way to create something was to just begin though.

HOUR 1

Within my first hour I started playing around with some of the different actors in Isadora. I wanted to see what would happen if I plugged the wave generator into various parts of the shapes actor. I noticed that when I put a sine wave into both the horizontal and vertical positions my default square kind of bounced around the screen, but not in a way that I felt was interesting. When I changed the wave type to a triangle though I noticed that the square started to bounce in a very familiar way, almost like an old screensaver (I was specifically reminded of the screensaver on my old family Gateway computer, both the bouncing logo and the pipes). Moreover, if I added multiple shapes on top of each other and messed with the phase there was a nice additive effect when shapes crossed that I liked.

HOUR 2

I wanted to randomize the different shapes going around my space. After looking through a few tutorials and posts I happened across this post talking about using a counter being used to select different timecodes: https://community.troikatronix.com/topic/6399/answered-using-a-list-of-timecodes-to-trigger-events-in-this-case-lights-through-midi. This was interesting to me, and I figured I could do something similar to create a loop that would activate different shapes at once. After trying for a little bit, I couldn’t get my loop to work, however I got very close. My logic kept short-circuiting.

I figured I would give up on this and just manually make my randomized entrances. I still had no clue what I wanted to do though, and I was getting a bit worried. Had I squandered all this time? Was I going in the right direction?

EPIPHONY

I started musing on the part of this project about grabbing people’s attention. What was it about Conway’s Game of Life or bouncing screen savers that had people staring at them for hours? For Game of Life surely there are emerging patterns and self-generating complexity, something obviously compelling to me, but why was a bouncing logo just as enthralling? I remembered that I used to try and predict when that logo would get caught perfectly in a corner of the screen. It never would, but it got so close so many times, and that’s why I kept watching. There’s something about being so close to perfection that is strangely alluring.

While we were discussing the second reading by Hari and Thanassis, I had a thought. We got on the topic of dark patterns, specifically within games like Candy Crush, and I was reminded of those horrible mobile ads that I would get occasionally. The idea is that they would set up what looked like really easy gameplay but whoever was playing would purposefully play badly and fail to get you to download the game. It’s a very sneaky tactic that acts as a gateway into games with even more dark patterns. I was also reminded of several trends a year ago on TikTok and YouTube where content creators started putting gameplay from popular games into the bottom or corner of their videos (Subway Surfers particularly became a huge meme). The idea was that to keep people from scrolling off of an otherwise dull video, more lively footage was added to retain peoples’ attention, which would in turn increase revenue since watch time was inflating.

These emerging patterns intrigued me, as they were real evolving trends built on the foundation of retaining attention. They were just as unpredictable to me as Conway’s Game of Life, just as captivating, and just like one of those tiles, the trend disappeared, as do many. I wanted to make something that was a commentary on this, tying it all together with the earliest and simplest attention grabber I remembered, that being the bouncing screen saver.

HOUR 3

I spent the next hour collating and integrating several different clips of gameplay from various titles I saw used in the trends I talked about earlier, and I will link those sources below:

I took each video and trimmed them down to 1 minute in Adobe Premiere (for the footage of different mobile game ads, I selected a few ads that I felt were most emblematic of my own experiences). After that I created separate scenes for each clip that I would load in below my screen saver squares using Activate Scene and Deactivate Scene.

I also figured out that you have to multiply any randomized values by 1000 before inserting them into time-based inputs because of the way Isadora treats seconds versus normal floats.

HOUR 4

I created a user actor for each of my little bouncing shapes and for the instantiation of those shapes, as well as adding more randomized elements like the phase (which would affect where the shapes bounced), the color, and the timing at which they appeared.

HOUR 5

In the final hour I took time to polish and organize. I created some quick logic that would look at the vertical and horizontal positions of several shapes, compare them, and load/unload gameplay footage based on those values. I also took the time to add a piece of music that I felt captured the feel of my experience. The piece is called Cascades by Disasterpiece and it’s from one of my favorite games, Hyper Light Drifter: https://youtu.be/bKkl9iRB9-c?si=jy81Xwh1ZtegPbJJ.

SHOWTIME

People reacted differently from what I expected but I’m really glad they did. Everyone caught onto the fact that the experience was probably some critique or was representative of some trend, which I thought was great. Nathan immediately recognized the DVD screensaver-like bouncing of the shapes which I also appreciated, and Orlando said that the footage has YouTube tutorial vibes, which wasn’t a connection I drew at first but is incredibly apt. Nick made a comment about a moment where it appeared that the shapes filled in this black section of the screen and footage came up all around, which I thought was cool and pretty close to getting at how the footage is activated. There was a lot of talk about how the piece reflects on me as an artist which was great and people noted that music seemed like it wasn’t looping, which helped build anticipation because it made the cut harder to distinguish. There was also a question as to whether the music was diegetic or not, which is not something I considered at all, but I can’t stop thinking about it now.

Overall, I’m glad to have heard people’s reactions and what meanings they drew, as well as emotions. I’m also happy with what I got done in the amount of time I had. I was worried at first but once I figured out some intent behind what I wanted to do things went smoothly.

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