Crypt vs Mausoleum

Posted on Nov 20, 2017

One of my favorite word games to play is to try to suss out the grey areas of meaning with seemingly well established words (e.g. what foot angle and distance of leaving the floor differentiates a ‘tap’ from a ‘step’, in what ways are the aesthetic associations of a crypt different from those of a mausoleum). Kind of a useless semiotics examing the edge case value of a word (how much mist on a misty morning differentiates a bog from a swamp).

Recently I’ve also had psychographics, Cambridge Analytica, and the ways in which social media and internet usage data are being used to group, differentiate, and make the global human population intelligible to various governmental and corporate actors.

Combining these ideas I’d like to make a game focalized through the perspective of a machine learning algorithm tasked with assigning personality and demographic profiles to users based on those users’ associated word choices (i.e. a user decides that a bog has 85% more mist than a swamp on a cold bracing morning in the early spring -> that user is open to trying new things and likely lives in a large cosmopolitan city within the Eurozone).

The game interface would be half personality quiz and half Clickhole-style-choose-your-own-adventure. The aesthetic I’m looking to create calls on clickclickclick.click and Human Resource Machine much more so than AI fearventures like I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream. My end goal, other than to create an amusing and engaging experience, is to make intelligible the ways in which machine learning is deployed to group and assign identities and to hint at methods of real world digital subversion.