Trance was an experiment. Is it possible to adapt interactive fiction through short form video? Is it possible to tell a story by means of a recommendation algorithm?
If I’m being honest, when I set out, I suspected that the answer would be no. Even so, I wanted to try. In the worst case, I figured, I could still put together an interesting experience. And the best case could be incredibly engaging and novel.
While the challenges associated were substantial, I’m pleased to be able to say that I was wrong, and it is in fact possible to tell stories via recommendation algorithm and short form video, if in a somewhat different form and style than you would find elsewhere.
The final product is, much like the internet, emotionally stochastic. You can go from a silly meme about a frog army one moment to your brother’s obituary the next. Further, rather than being grouped into a traditional branching narrative, like with a text-based interactive fiction piece, Trance is grouped into topic clusters and story threads. When you react to content, the recommendation engine shows you more similar content, allowing you to explore that area more deeply. My current prototype has three main threads, along with some peripheral content: one thread about the alt-right pipeline and getting sucked down into hatred while hurt and alone, one meta-thread about the Trance platform itself and the ways that social media can exacerbate mental health crises among its users, and a final thread about the ways social media can be a conduit for genuine human connections that can rescue people from dark places.
The creation of this game was heavily influenced by another class I’m currently taking, Literature and the Internet. (I want to thank my instructor, Mitch Therieau, for not just giving me feedback on the concept but also being a great playtester). In his class, we are exploring how the medium of the internet warps our perceptions and shapes the messages on it. For me, this game was a great chance to explore those themes: how do the random recommendation algorithms that dominate the modern internet change our experience of narrative? I haven’t fully arrived at an answer, but I’m starting to think that it forces narratives to be either simple and bite-sized like a Today I Learned post or iconic and all-encompassing like a radical political ideology- in either case still recognizable when torn up and scattered across a For You page.
The game also draws influences from Flarf poetry, which is frequently-satirical and irreverent poetry created by smashing together short phrases from the internet found by random google searches on a theme. Much like Flarf, the final product took the strangest and most recognizable quirks of the internet and blew them up to comedic proportions. I wasn’t expecting my game about grief to contain so much humor, but I think it worked out.
Sometimes, faced with despair, all you can do is laugh.
