The Future We Deserve: Trance

Overview

There is something deeply dystopian about TikTok, about the scattered, overstimulating frenzy of it, about the way it turns us into rats in a cage, pulling the cocaine lever over and over again. Moreover, I’ve seen family members turn to short-form video to block out the world while struggling with mental illness, and I think all of us have at some point picked up our phones to ward away unwanted thoughts. Trance attempts to capture these dystopias.

The world of Trance is much akin to our present word. The only difference is that, rather than being widely recognized as an unhealthy coping mechanism, using short-form video as anesthesia for negative emotion is not just endorsed but actively prescribed by the medical community.

I decided to use short-form video as my medium for this- I felt it would allow me to emulate the core experience of going on TikTok, and thereby critique it most effectively. Moreover, I thought it would be a fun challenge to try and embed a story in a medium otherwise fairly hostile to it, thereby exploring the ways that the proliferation of short-form content warps our experience of narrative.

Link to project

Video hosting is hard/expensive, so please bear with me in this respect. All you need to do is download my project from the GitHub link here: https://github.com/DubiousLlama/Trance

Then, assuming you have node.js installed, just open up a terminal in the resulting folder and run ‘npm install’ and then ‘npm run dev’. An IP address you can click on to experience the game at should pop up in your terminal.

History of Development

Experience Prototype

I wanted to represent the intrusion unwanted thoughts in my game and encourage my player to keep scrolling to ward them off. This became my first mechanism: when the player stopped scrolling or interacting for long enough, an obituary would slowly fade in across the screen.

My initial playtests of this went extremely well: though there was some initial confusion about the UI, my players described the core experience as both ‘eerie’ and ‘intriguing,’ and correctly intuited that this was a game about trying to avoid feelings of grief.

Story Prototype

Creating video is a lot more resource-intensive than creating text, so I knew jumping straight to video was a bad idea. Instead, I wrote down video descriptions on pieces of paper and played the role of algorithm myself.

The feedback on this playtest was mixed, but very valuable. In general, players were intrigued by the mysteries presented, but didn’t feel they knew who they were or feel like they had a lot of agency in the story. “I don’t feel like I really know who I am, and I don’t feel like the ‘Like’ button really gives me a chance to express myself either” said one playtester.

Full Game Playtest #1

As a result of the story prototype feedback, I implemented the following changes:

• Added a variety of different reaction emoji to express different sentiments about a video
• Created ‘fixed points’ in the narrative, where certain videos are guaranteed to appear.
• Added an intro screen creating context and setup for the story (also as a content warning)

By ensuring players hit the intriguing stuff early while also collecting a catalog of the most emblematic-of-the-internet short form videos, players were both fascinated and laughing. It was clear at this point I had hit on something worth pursuing.

In particular, the ad for the Trance service, Jake’s initial video addressed to the player, and the ‘AITA for telling my girlfriend her depression is a skill issue’ reliably produced strong player responses. Best of all, the overall message was still clear- one playtester remarked aloud “Nice try, I’m not going to think about my dead brother” while dismissing the overlay screen. Another said “I think Andy is avoidant” while scrolling past content about depression.

Full Game Playtest #2
Given that the full playtest went well, my second iteration of the full version focused on smoothing out the experience:

• Reducing the repetition of videos
• Normalizing volumes
• Adding proper ‘endings’ to the story
• Tweaking the algorithm to be more responsive.

Not a ton changed in the second iteration, so it is unsurprising that feedback was similar. Pulled down an alt-right rabbit hole, one player remarked “I feel the jaws closing in.”  In one case, a playtester never interacted with the “like” buttons and therefore had a bad time, causing me to add a small note to this effect to the opening page.

Reflection

Overall, I think this project benefited from the fact that short form video is extremely engaging in and of itself. Combined with my use of it as a novel gameplay medium, players were instantly sucked in. I was especially happy with the range of emotions players expressed: in a single 5-minute play session they often went from laughing to curious to contemplative back to laughing again.

Still, I have a lot more I’d like to add if I built on this project for P4. I’d like to further expand the ‘successful treatment’ narrative with more content that goes into the origins of and details about Trance. Further, I’d like to add at least one properly branching narrative to the game (as opposed to just story threads). For example, a line of videos that is triggered if you ‘Angry’ react to Jake’s 3^rd or 4^th videos. Finally, I’d like to add more content that reveals something about you, the protagonist, since players found this especially engaging.

I was quite worried about this project when I first took it on- it took a lot of technical effort, and I was worried the experience just wouldn’t be there. Now on the other side, I’m very glad to have taken that risk.