Hyperreality of Everyday Life

Personal Project

Undergraduate Yr 2 Project,

Bartlett School of Architecture

My Project investigates Behaviour Modification within Game Design by using spaces as a medium to alter existing behaviors. The game is a journey from the studio to my home - this ritual of travel is practiced daily. However, what would happen if the player experiences visual and audio interferences?

Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games

“The ultimate lesson of video games is not about gratification and reward. It is a lesson about the struggle for autonomy by the human player in a place where rules of instantiated code enter the material space via the human players' faculty of reason."

The following project explores behaviour modification of participants in a physical, augmented, and virtual world. The participant of the game is subject to the daily ritual of the game creator, namely the commute between the studio space and home. Much like reality, the player is given a choice: the player can explore the environment and attempt to fulfil the “winning conditions” of this daily ritual. However, unlike reality, the player is subject to the Oneirophrenic, if he/she strays away from the “winning conditions” of the game. As the player continues to play the game, all of his/her choices lead to specific outcomes based on their in-game behaviours. Some outcomes are reversible and the others are not. If the player ends up in an irreversible outcome, he/she has no choice but to restart the game and modify their in-game behaviours either for the better or for the worse.

The project reflects upon immersive technologies as systemic spaces driven by creator-defined parameters. Whereas reality is governed by the physical laws of nature, and human behaviour is a natural consequence of that, what if behaviours could be modified by game logic set out by game creators? To create an immersive virtual environment is to set/remove new/old parameters of the real world. In this game, the player is given a new ability: he/she can obey the creator or suffer the consequences of their actions. These so-called punishments are additional layers upon the visual senses of the player. Through the power of Semantic Image Synthesis driven by a generative adversarial network, this can induce confusion, motion sickness, or physical discomfort for the player.